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Authored by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk.com,Financially Hobbled for Life Unable to discharge debts in bankruptcy, students with useless degrees, especially master's degrees are Financially Hobbled for Life. Recent film program graduates of Columbia University who took out federal student loans had a median debt of $181,000. Yet two years after earning their master’s degrees, half of the borrowers were making less than $30,000 a year.The university is among the world’s most prestigious schools, and its $11.3 billion endowment ranks it the nation’s eighth wealthiest private school.Lured by the aura of degrees from top-flight institutions, many master’s students at universities across...

BALTIMORE (WJZ) — As more states legalize cannabis for medical use, the University of Maryland School of Pharmacy is launching the nation’s first master’s program to train students about the science and policies of medical marijuana. The two-year program, based at the Universities at Shady Grove in Rockville, is designed for health care practitioners, scientists, regulators, dispensary owners and industry professionals. Classes will be primarily held online, with an in-person symposium held each semester.

There has been mounting evidence that the financial payoff from the traditional bachelor’s degree is declining, particularly for men. For example, the Census Bureau data suggest that from 2005 to 2016, the average earnings differential for male workers holding bachelor’s degrees compared with those holding high school diplomas fell from $39,440 to $37,653 (in 2016 dollars)—at a time when college costs were rising. Other evidence from the New York Federal Reserve Bank confirms that a large portion of college graduates are underemployed, working jobs traditionally held by high school graduates. There are two interpretations of this data, one by the...

Fidel Castro once boasted that in Cuba even the prostitutes had university degrees. That was probably true. Communist countries had made a habit of running diploma mill educational systems in which much of the population, even the illiterate, would have some kind of degree. Cuban education is actually pretty terrible. Its med school grads don’t even qualify in other Latin American countries. And we’re headed the same way with education being treated as a social program and schools that act like diploma mills with graduation quotas.We’re spending insane amounts of money on overeducation that has no actual use. Instead more...

The Georgia Institute of Technology rocked the higher education world when it announced plans to offer a fully online master’s degree in computer science for roughly one-seventh the price of its on-campus equivalent – less than $7,000. The project is powered by a joint venture with Udacity, an online higher-education course provider that stands to earn 40 percent of the tuition revenues. The AT&T Corporation, which is providing two-thirds of the estimated ramp-up costs, expects to funnel existing employees through the program and recruit new ones at the back-end of it. Reaction to the news has been mixed. Online education...