Is College Worth The Time & Money?

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

I've done it all, college, tech schools, apprenticeship, correspondence courses, hands-on/on the job training. If it was up to me I'd limit college to MDs, engineers, and hardcore scientists.

 

[SuperTramp1]

Waste of money, owning your own business is the key to success. I own 4 snappy tomato pizza restaurants.

 

[Liar]

Pre College, I had less time and less money. Post College I have more time and more money.

I'm not saying there's a casuality link. But it's stort of eerie.

 

[garbage can]

I've done it all, college, tech schools, apprenticeship, correspondence courses, hands-on/on the job training. If it was up to me I'd limit college to MDs, engineers, and hardcore scientists.

Agreed, one can go to a two year trade school, learn a trade and make a good living.

50K a year for an elite university is outrageous, especially if one gets a degree in romantic languages or cultures of the East Indians.

 

[Riles]

Agreed, one can go to a two year trade school, learn a trade and make a good living.

50K a year for an elite university is outrageous, especially if one gets a degree in romantic languages or cultures of the East Indians.

I recall a friend telling me that's what they paid a year for private schools. I would hate to think what post secondary is costing them.

 

[Anjasa]

University is a waste of money if people are doing it to try to get a job without knowing what type of job they want. Teachers, Doctors, etc. have a set goal in mind.

People who go to University to get a general studies B.A. after 4 years will not be likely to find a job.

I'm not saying it has no value, but having value and getting you a job aren't always the same thing.

I did College (which is trade school in the US I think?) and did 16 months there, got $10k in debt and found a job right away.

 

[Sean]

An education is about more than your job prospects, you fucking barbarians.

 

[Anjasa]

An education is about more than your job prospects, you fucking barbarians.

Unfortunately most young people who go to post secondary are doing so because they feel it well eventually land them a job, and end up in massive debt to do so.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

An education is about more than your job prospects, you fucking barbarians.

An 'education' is all about good paying jobs for perfessers who would starve if they offered their wares in a real market. WANT SOME FRIES WITH YOUR GAY STUDIES COURSES?

 

[Sean]

An 'education' is all about good paying jobs for perfessers who would starve if they offered their wares in a real market. WANT SOME FRIES WITH YOUR GAY STUDIES COURSES?

Shut up, Nazi. Or why don't you make up some more shit to back up whatever moronic point you're trying to argue this week?

 

[Honey123]

An education is about more than your job prospects, you fucking barbarians.

Exactly. My son is a sophomore in High School and we are sitting down with him every other night just trying to explain just that to him.

I have known many people who have graduated from college with a degree that the thought would get them to THAT ONE PERFECT JOB....and then landed somewhere totally different.

 

[CHNOPS]

An education is about more than your job prospects, you fucking barbarians.

Not here. We believe in everything to the left of the decimal point. The rest is cute and meaningless.

 

[Wife of Bath]

My secondary education has little to no practical application to my chosen career, but I don't regret having it.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

Exactly. My son is a sophomore in High School and we are sitting down with him every other night just trying to explain just that to him.

I have known many people who have graduated from college with a degree that the thought would get them to THAT ONE PERFECT JOB....and then landed somewhere totally different.

Unfortunately he'll change his mind 6 times after he gets a diploma.

 

[Honey123]

I know...so far he has run the gamete on Doctor...lawyer...baseball star...and mechanic..oh..and a police officer. AND THAT was in a one hour discussion just the other day.

 

[CHNOPS]

I know...so far he has run the gamete on Doctor...lawyer...baseball star...and mechanic..oh..and a police officer. AND THAT was in a one hour discussion just the other day.

If he's running gametes already, maybe he should look into geneticist.

 

[Honey123]

If he's running gametes already, maybe he should look into geneticist.

LMAO..whoops. Mah bad

 

[SgtSpiderMan]

I've done it all, college, tech schools, apprenticeship, correspondence courses, hands-on/on the job training. If it was up to me I'd limit college to MDs, engineers, and hardcore scientists.

Good thing it isn't up to you, our economy would be non-existent.

There's so much empirical data out there that answers this question there was no point in you asking.

 

[Mike_Yates]

I've done it all, college, tech schools, apprenticeship, correspondence courses, hands-on/on the job training. If it was up to me I'd limit college to MDs, engineers, and hardcore scientists.

Most employers demand that you have a minimum of a bachelors degree for virtually all of their positions. They also pay close attention to what kind of college you went to, as well as your grades/test scores. They will hire a Harvard graduate over someone who went to a state college.

Also, graduate degrees are becoming the bare minimum prerequisite for a job. Job requirements have become so astronomically stringent and unfairly competitive, it's no wonder why there are so many poor people being forced to work shitty jobs because they don't have 6-8 years of college under their belt. There are people with PhD's plus 30 years of work experience being turned down for jobs within their field because their snob elitist employer thinks they aren't good enough.

That exact same PhD could quickly and easily have gotten a job 20-30 years ago.

In today's society/job market, you're dead in the water unless you have a college degree.

College no longer has anything to do with learning/knowledge acquisition, it has become nothing more than a silly corporatist litmus test for employers. More times than not, what people learn in college has absolutely nothing to do with their job. Going to college today basically means that you're paying tens/hundreds of thousands of dollars for a job, and not an education.

The OP is absolutely right, the only people who truly benefit from college are doctors, lawyers, engineers, and hardcore scientists. Anything else doesn't guarantee anything other than mountains of debt and probably no job. A BA is practically worthless because literally every other person has one.

There are managers of McDonald's who make $100K per year as opposed to a college graduate stuck in a cubicle/office building for the next 35 years of his/her life making well under 100K.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

I know...so far he has run the gamete on Doctor...lawyer...baseball star...and mechanic..oh..and a police officer. AND THAT was in a one hour discussion just the other day.

What I witnessed was legions of kids doing shit work cuz there was no demand for their diplomas. And its no different with vocational training. If you train to shoe horses or repair AM radios, youre gonna starve or bag groceries.

I tell my grandchildren, UNLESS YOURE OBSESSED AND FANATICAL ABOUT GAY STUDIES, DONT GO THERE. Ditto for political science and liberal arts and history and dance et al.

 

[RainingKisses]

College rarely trains a person for a profession but that little paper gets you hired and helps you get promoted. But somehow I expect you already knew this and I am not sure why you even asked.

 

[Interested_Girl]

It's worth it. If only to keep learning about subjects that you didn't already undersand or know.

 

[Mike_Yates]

College rarely trains a person for a profession but that little paper gets you hired and helps you get promoted. But somehow I expect you already knew this and I am not sure why you even asked.

What do you have to do to get promoted to CEO of a corporation?

 

[trysail]

It's become a giant ripoff.

I keep track because I want to know what the fuckers are charging these days. It's mind-boggling. No wonder people lie, cheat and steal; they think they have to in order to pay the damn tuitions to send their kids to schools where the kids are taught not to lie, cheat and steal.



Kindergarten & Elementary School
High School
College
Graduate School

	Tuition		        Tuition	        Actual
Year	in $s	    Inflation   in today's	Tuition
Ending	of the day  Factor	 $s @ CPI 	today (2011)
                                 inflation
					
[COLOR="Blue"]19__	$500	       7.86	 $3,932 	$10,700 
19__	 500	       7.73	  3,866		 20,100
19__	 500	       7.63	  3,816		 20,100
19__	 500	       7.53	  3,767		 20,100
19__	 500	       7.48	  3,741		 20,100
19__	 500	       7.39	  3,696		 20,100
19__	 500	       7.27	  3,637		 20,100
19__	 500	       7.20	  3,598		 21,400[/COLOR]
[COLOR="Red"]19__	2,000	       7.07	 14,134		 24,340
19__	2,000	       6.85	 13,690		 24,340
19__	2,000	       6.63	 13,260		 24,340
19__	2,000	       6.32	 12,640		 24,340
19__	2,000	       5.98	 11,953		 24,340
19__	2,000	       5.66	 11,326		 24,340[/COLOR]
[COLOR="DarkGreen"]19__	2,500	       5.49	 13,726		 54,273
19__	2,500	       5.32	 13,308		 54,273
19__	2,500	       4.88	 12,204		 54,273
19__	2,500	       4.35	 10,885		 54,273[/COLOR]
19__					
19__					
[COLOR="Magenta"]19__	7,000	       3.63	 25,444		 73,500
19__	7,000	       3.34	 23,355		 73,500[/COLOR]


[B]Total	$40,000		       $205,977	       $662,832[/B]

 

[RightField]

Good topic. I found this article about education interesting. Education is a value for some, not for others. It's not a guarantee of interesting and rewarding work, but it does help through teaching critical thinking and organizing and presenting ideas clearly and concisely.

This article is pointing to the fact that growing spending in education isn't producing results, in fact, our levels of achievement decades ago was much better than now despite the huge increase in real terms of the cost and resources dedicated towards it.



Op/Ed|2/15/2012 @ 3:22PM
Forbes
Louis Woodhill

Solyndras In the Classroom: How We Vastly Overrate Education

Barack Obama hardly ever gives a speech without mentioning the need to “invest more in education”. Many so-called “Conservatives” voice agreement with this notion. The unstated assumption on both sides of the aisle is that “investment in education” produces an attractive return. But is this true?

No, it’s not. The numbers strongly suggest that, at least in economic terms, America has gotten nothing for the enormous increase in educational “investment” that we have made over the past 60 years.

Before going any farther, it is important to realize that what Obama (and even most Conservatives) think of as “investment in education” is really “government spending on education”. Much, perhaps most, of the learning vital to the functioning of the economy occurs on the job. None of this “education” is reflected in the numbers that the politicians look at.

Accordingly, the “investment in education” that Obama wants more (and more, and more) of is actually “federal-government-directed investment in education”. When considering whether we really want more of this, it is important to remember that it was “federal-government-directed investment in energy” that gave us Solyndra, Ener1, and Beacon Power, and that it was “federal-government-directed investment in housing” that has cost taxpayers more than $150 billion in losses (thus far) at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

So, how would we know if increased government “investment” in education was producing a return? We would see a steady rise in the ratio of GDP to “nonresidential produced assets” over time. Our GDP is produced by a combination of physical capital and human capital. Accordingly, if the economic value of our human capital were rising, the impact would show up in the numbers as increasing productivity of physical capital.

Now, here is the bad news. While total real ($2010) government spending on education increased almost 13-fold from 1951 to 2009, the measured GDP return on physical capital actually declined slightly, from 47.7% to 44.1%. This could not have happened if we were getting an appreciable economic return on our huge “investment” in education.

What follows is a “first approximation analysis”. The numbers could be done with more precision, but they are good enough to give us an idea of what the nation has been getting (actually, not getting) for its massive “investments” in education.

Assuming that about 25% of our total population is in school at any one time, average real (2010 dollars) government spending per student rose from $1,763 in 1951 to $12,209 in 2009. This is an increase of about 7 times. Assuming an average of 13 years of education per student (some go to college, some drop out of high school), this means that during this 58-year time period, we increased our real “investment” in the human capital represented by each student from $22,913 to $158,717.

Meanwhile, we have also been investing more in physical capital. Real nonresidential produced assets per worker increased from $79,278 in 1951 to $206,717 in 2009. So, each worker in 2009 had $127,439 more in physical capital and $135,804 more in educational “capital” to work with than he did in 1951.

Unfortunately, it is clear from the numbers that GDP tracks only physical assets, and not the sum of physical assets and educational “assets”. Excluding the GDP produced by the housing stock, the ratio of GDP to nonresidential produced assets has been essentially constant over the 59 years 1951–2009 (it has oscillated with the business cycle around a midpoint of 48.2%).

So, it appears that our massive “investments” in education have produced no measurable economic return. Should we be surprised by this? No. Average scores on standardized tests have not risen, despite the fact that we are “investing” seven times as much in real terms in each student than we did six decades ago. So, even by the measures used by the educational establishment, it is clear that the higher spending has not created any additional human capital.

The nation and its people would be much better off today if most of the additional “investment” in education that we have made over the past six decades had been used to create more nonresidential produced assets. GDP, real wages, and our standard of living would all be considerably higher.

Also, imagine if, instead of being given a 2009 education for $158,717, an average student were given a 1967-style education for about $58,000, and $100,000 in capital with which to start his working life. This would be sufficient to start any number of small businesses. Alternatively, if put in an IRA earning a real return of 6%, the $100,000 would grow to about $1.8 million over 50 years.

The huge government “investments” made in education over the past 50 years have produced little more than “Solyndras in the classroom”. They have enriched teachers unions and other rent-seekers, but have added little or nothing to the economic prospects of students. America does not need more such “investment”.