Posted on 10/09/2007 9:22:37 AM PDT by SirLinksalot
Does it pay to go to college?
If you check www.collegeboard.com, you'll find a reassuring study showing that education really does pay.
Without considering the intangibles, the study shows that each additional level of education draws a higher lifetime income.
While the median high-school graduate age 25 and older earns about $26,000, the median college graduate age 25 and older earns about $42,000. That's annual income premium of about $16,000, or around 60 percent.
Not bad, particularly when you consider that the difference also allows you to escape doing heavy lifting.
Yes, the college grad will spend years paying off loans. But eventually the earnings net of loan payments will pull ahead of the high-school graduate's. So, case closed. It may hurt to write the checks, or borrow, but college pays.
Well, maybe not.
According to the College Board, it takes 14 long years before the college grad's income, net of loan payments, starts to beat what the high-school grad earns. During all those 14 years, college doesn't pay. High school pays.
The real question isn't which choice pays on an annual basis, but which choice pays on a lifetime basis? Which choice permits a higher lifetime living standard — a question the board conveniently doesn't ask or answer.
The answer depends on costs of borrowing and amount you need to cover. Today's student-loan rates are really high if you need to cover the full ride.
And the price tag for attending college is astronomical. The College Board approach to evaluating the economic value of college education may overstate the benefits. If you take a consumption-smoothing approach, which you can do with financial-planning software such as ESPlanner, you can see how cost of higher education interacts with factors such as lifetime taxes, Social Security benefits at retirement, loan repayments, etc.
(Excerpt) Read more at seattletimes.nwsource.com ...
I forgot to point out that I made $36K over 20 years ago.
Today, I think software engineers just out of college are typically making over $80K.
B average? please!
You could NOT go free on a B average. State schools have terribly low scholarship rates despite lower initial costs.
I think that accountants also do well out of college.
I think nursing, physical therapy, occupational therapy, and speech therapy are other areas that are great jobs. They are skills that are learned and are needed.
There are plenty of wasted degrees, but there are great degrees also.
Here’s a website about the Georgia program:
http://www.gacollege411.org/FinAid/ScholarshipsAndGrants/HOPEScholarship/default.asp
Georgia has a great scholarship program.
I think Oklahoma has a similar program.
If you had asked me nicely, I would have. Instead, you chose to hurl a gratuitous insult at me.
ESFOAD.
A state school in PA is still $17k per year for room, board, tuition for an in-state resident.
That’s about $76k over 4 years if you factor in 9% fee increases.
That’s still expensive.
Stuck to my guns, took the bad grades, but passed with a 3.87 GPA. Engineering degree machine design, and a minor in History with strengths in the Viking period - gee, wondy why my posts go in that direction - Hi Else Roesdahl, she’s a goddes in my book.
I went to college to be a teacher, and student teaching reinforced my desire. I did not care about low pay so long as I could live on what I was making, and I landed at one of the highest-paying districts in the state. I make 36K with full family health insurance fully paid by the district and “summers off” (not really off...I will be doing a lot of work over the summer getting ready for next year....if I stay).
Good benefits, but the job is very hard. I am not sure if I can stomach even another year. I believe this is what God called me to do, but heavens...it is just too much some days. Then, other days, everything is wonderful. No discipline issues at all.
Anyway, I love computers. Maybe I will go back to a cheap school and get a degree to work in computers. I just figured it would be very difficult to get a job in that field since everyone wants to go into it (I briefly considered going that route in high school before landing on teaching). If they are paying 80 grand, it must still be in very high demand.
Wow. I am astonished. I thought you had to be wrong. Wow.
That is simply amazing.
Really? We couldn't tell. ;^)
I agree with you. The oldest son (in his mid-20s) of a friend of mine grossed $150,000 last year working as an HVAC technician . . . and it would have a lot more than that if he was willing to work on weekends, too.
My word. Wow!
Hey, I ran spell check, knowing I was spelling it wrong.
Its true, despite being a ‘victim’ of the public schools, here I am just as I described up above...
What a country!
(chuckle)
I think college today is basically a deferred-adulthood program (I say this as someone who paid my way through school on my own).
My exception to that would be a scenario like I experienced. A Fortune 500 company I work for only recruited from certain schools. I didn't go to an Ivy League school by any means, but I did attend a fairly-well known university, which had a regular stream of top companies looking for candidates. As a result, I believe I got an offer significantly higher than I would have, if I attended a less-known, and smaller school.
I don't know to what extent companies recruit from "Mom & Pop Tech," or if starting salaries are comparable to larger universities. I think a lot of schools keep statistics on this data, but they may not always share them.
That’s exactly what I said when I heard that myself. LOL.
‘I think college today is basically a deferred-adulthood program (I say this as someone who paid my way through school on my own).’
Same here. There is a hard grain of truth to the old joke ‘my sophomore year of college was the best four years of my life’....(chuckle)
So to Dan Akryod’s character observing ‘You don’t know what its like out there (in the real world), they expect RESULTS!” from Ghostbusters.
I never met a teacher that I thought afterwards could make it in any line of work that didn’t require a Union or ‘tenure’.
Don’t bother with engineering. The corporations will dump you and outsource your job to India. Assuming you can now find a job here at the outset.
I never considered a degree (especially mine!) to be a meal ticket, and the very thought disturbs me.
I'm in a very technical field with a BA in liberal arts. Lots of people I know are the same way. Philosophy, history, foreign languages, etc.
What really matters is knowing and following your strengths and aptitudes, which are largely hereditary.
This $600 evaluation was easily as valuable as the $40K+ in college expenses:
Johnson O'Connor Research Foundation
"The Johnson O'Connor Research Foundation is a nonprofit scientific research and educational organization with two primary commitments: to study human abilities and to provide people with a knowledge of their aptitudes that will help them in making decisions about school and work. Since 1922, hundreds of thousands of people have used our aptitude testing service to learn more about themselves and to derive more satisfaction from their lives."
"In her column, Work & Family, published in The Wall Street Journal on August 9, 2007, Sue Shellenbarger mentions the Foundation as a resource for students making career choices."
Makes you want to change professions.
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