David Leonhardt says the latest data demonstrate that a four-year college degree is worth the investment. In fact, it pays so well that it actually rewards those who get the degree. College graduates with a four-year degree definitely make more money than those who didn’t finish college or those with only a high school diploma.
He concludes that everyone should get a four-year degree.
“Not so many decades ago, high school was considered the frontier of education. Some people even argued that it was a waste to encourage Americans from humble backgrounds to spend four years of life attending high school. Today, obviously, the notion that everyone should attend 13 years of school is indisputable.
“But there is nothing magical about 13 years of education. As the economy becomes more technologically complex, the amount of education that people need will rise. At some point, 15 years or 17 years of education will make more sense as a universal goal.
“That point, in fact, has already arrived.”
Now, it is hard to argue against college for all. I personally believe that anyone who wants to go to college should do so. I also believe that every state should have free public universities so students can enroll and leave with no debt.
But what puzzles me is this: first, if everyone has a four-year degree, will there still be a big wage premium for everyone? Second, the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that most of the new jobs in the next decade won’t require a college degree. These will be jobs like “personal care aides,” home health aides, construction workers, retail salespersons. Will college graduates fill those jobs?
just wondering.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Leonhardt’s data shows that the income premium for college graduates has far more to do with the steep, inflation-adjusted decline in the incomes of high school grads, rather than income increases for those with a college degree.
For the overwhelming majority, incomes are stagnant or declining, debt is increasing, while the Overclass pushing so-called education reform, (which also involves the radical reconfiguration of post-secondary ed) has never had more power or wealth.
There you go, making sense. It’s the same thing as explaining why women’s incomes are closing in on men’s. It has nothing to do with women being paid more but with men being paid less.
High school grads, many of whom were unionized to make up for the lack of a higher education, have had their incomes hollowed out thanks to federal policies encouraging gutting unions and outsourcing of jobs.
Ed “reformers” want to limit or deny college access to anybody who isn’t already part of the elite economic class.
College certainly isn’t for everyone, and it isn’t worth going into tons of debt, which further enriches those at the top of the economic heap.
Michael Fiorillo & susannunes: unless I misunderstand what y’all wrote, this is another example of Simpson’s Paradox [please google].
It has come up in relation to the way numerical data is used & misused when trying to make sense about the ups and downs of standardized test scores (e.g., on the SAT and ACT).
Thank your for your comments.
😎
Why go to college when the message the “free market” sends is that entertainers (those that provide the least valuable [most optional] good or service) make the most money, with the least amount of education. Proathletes and Top-20 artists make more than doctors and engineers; how in the world does that happen?
The “free market” (or is it a fallen/depraved/sinful market, because it values things that have real little worth, and is based on excessive usury/interest and fallacious derivatives that create “wealth” out of nothing, or at best “speculative value”) rewards in a most capracious and lunatic manner.
Those that do the most important tasks (essential good and services that meet real and primary human needs) often make less money than those who do the least important good/services (those that only seek to fulfill some human want/lust, not need).
Farmers should be millionaires, while singers should make minimum wage (if reason dictates that the more important job deserved a better wage). Why go to college to learn how to farm and grow food, if one can learn that from parents or experience.
BTW, if projections are true (that many kids will not take over the family farm because of such minimum pay for such hard work [and most of that pay is from subsidies???], and they see better money to be made in less important work, we are on the path of major food shortages and social chaos. But then, maybe LeBron James will buy us all food with his ungodly, overpaid, salary.
What is valued in the market is a reflection of our collective choices. I find the fact that college athletes are not allowed to be paid much more disturbing than the payment that professional athletes receive.
College athletes should not get paid because most of them are on scholarship and in a sense are already being paid by having a reduced tuition. What mystifies me is that athletics provides no real good or service, except one to relax and waste their time (which could be better spent on thousands of other things), yet people get paid to do it????
Some athletes get paid a great deal because non-tablets want to watch them. Other tremendous athletes get paid little because few want to watch them. It is the collective desire to watch these folks perform that creates the high pay, and the collective desire not to watch that creates the low pay for other athletes.
The only benefit from athletics is the excercise one gets and the benefit to the body. Yet, when I excercise I do it for free (which has a benefit to me), but when I watch others do it at a stadium I have to pay, but my body gains no benefit. So, why do we pay athletes?
It sounds as if you don’t pay athletes. I pay athletes in some sports, but not other sports.
Rick – The reason why top athletes and entertainers earn so much is because technology can allow them to entertain an enormous number of people at the same time. A top athlete may be watched by millions of people in a few hours time.
But no surgeon, however good, can perform surgery on more than a few people per day.
In the nineteenth century an athlete or actor could only entertain on any occasion the much smaller number of people who were able to attend a live performance. So there probably wasn’t as much disproportion between their compensation and that of other occupations.
The flip side to that is that today only the very best athletes or entertainers can make much of a living at it. Whereas in the 19th century athletes or entertainers of not so great ability could eke out a living in vaudeville or minor league sports.
This is an example of the fallacy of composition, that is inferring that all will earn more if they graduate from college because those that currently graduate from college earn more.
Well, and of course college is not just about what job you will have.
We need thinking individuals who have read Kant, not just read about Kant, for example.
You can get that without going to college, let alone going into tons of debt.
And we certainly don’t need more edu-privateers earning their livings by peddling cant.
Joanna, I agree with you 100%. College should not necessarily be a job-training program – unless a student (with guidance) has reached that conclusion. For others, a liberal arts education exposes students to different ways of thinking, different cultures, different experiences, and teaches how to write, how to formulate a position based on knowledge and fact and research, and then how to effectively express and defend that position. Technology in the workforce is great…but we need people who can think, work with others, and effectively communicate.
Have you read Kant?
Yes Jim I have.
I tried reading The Critique of Pure Reason but I couldn’t make head or tail of it.
That’s why it’s good to read it in college, under the tutelage of a professor who has studied it and with peers with whom you can discuss. It is a luxury to have that experience, I suppose, but a ,valuable one for leaders in our societies to have had. I believe, anyway.
How many present day world leaders, do you suppose, have read Kant?
Guess that shows what your alleged high IQ is worth, Jim.
College may be OK for the 25% of the US population with IQ’s above 110. But the idea that everybody in the US is suitable for a college education is ludicrous. Not to mention that attempting to greatly expand the number of college graduates will drive up the already burdensome cost of a college education while reducing the returns to each individual graduate.
And the education has been dumbed down to appeal to the masses.
That’s one way to increase the number of graduates. Eventually we’ll just mail everybody a college degree at birth.
Tell that to my students who were complaining just this weekend about how challenging my courses are. In more words than I would prefer to use, I have had to regularly remind some students that they are in college, because they expect school to be a breeze, but it still takes a lot of work to be successful in college.
I have taught undergraduates for the last three years after teaching high school for 18. I can tell you that “rigor” is alive and well at the collegiate level. I’m constantly amazed at the hell these students are put through all in the name of learning. What amazes me is that we’ve indoctrinated students into believing that going through this hell is giving them a “quality” education.
As for me? I’m working on a doctorate degree. The hell and the stress these professors put us through all in the name of “rigor” is counterintuitive to learning. They just want to market their program with high standards, and its not about what I’ve learned, its just an endurance test to the finish…a test of who can jump through the hoops placed in front of us without going crazy. There is no joy in it…there is no amazement at what we’re covering…there are no great ideas or light bulb moments…its just giving them what they want so we can get out of this hell and move on with our lives. Here’s some of the “rigor”:
I had to read a 350 page book just to answer one question on a test.
I have to read 11 books, ranging from 200-400pages for an 8-week summer class.
Writing 6 papers in one week, 4 weeks in a row, just for one course.
I’ve taken 4 essay exams that took 8 hours each to complete.
I sat working at my computer 10 hours everyday for three weeks to complete one assignment, ended up with carpal tunnel for the first time in my life, and irritated a tendon in my left hip from sitting so much, required two doctors visits.
I agree some colleges have dumb-downed their standards while others have raised theirs to insane heights.
I will earn this degree, but I will come out of it with a lower opinion of higher education, a lower opinion of graduate level professors, a lower opinion of this institution where I’m getting my degree (they will get none of my money after I’m done).
This is not teaching….this is not learning….this is a way to feed the egos of the professors who have complete control over me.
unheardofwriter – Why?
What is your fascination with IQ, Jim?
He’s a Eugenicist.
That’s the racist Jim.
On this:
“But what puzzles me is this: first, if everyone has a four-year degree, will there still be a big wage premium for everyone? Second, the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that most of the new jobs in the next decade won’t require a college degree. These will be jobs like “personal care aides,” home health aides, construction workers, retail salespersons. Will college graduates fill those jobs?
just wondering.”
For people of color and those who come from poor families we have all heard those things for many generations. Just when the call is heard about college for all then the doubts begin…
I remember in my graduate school days in Austin noticing how along frat row there were quite a few rich kids that seemed dumb as a rock but because they were ‘legacy’ students then they would get a few smart kids into the fraternity and tutors would be hired etc.
In Texas it’s just that thinking that has led to our now loosened graduation requirements and students will be given more ‘choices’ beyond the previously required 4×4. Those targeted for the less rigorous requirements will most certainly be students of color, economically disadvantaged and recent immigrant.
See my organization’s different point of view as illustrated by what is happening in the Pharr-San Juan-Alamo ISD in south Texas.
See College Bound and Determined – dynamic digital reader See College Bound and Determined – pdf – See more at: http://www.idra.org/College_Bound_and_Determined/#sthash.Emx66YCI.dpuf
All we have to do is look at South Korea for an answer:
A Washington Post piece reported that “More than 60% of Koreans ages 25 to 34 have higher educations, compared to about 40% in the United States, and the gap is growing. But Korean officials are alarmed that many graduates are not finding jobs — more than 40 percent last year, even though the Korean economy was doing pretty well.”
In addition, PBS Newshour reported: “The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the premier government source for information on jobs, shows that only 27 percent of jobs (percentage calculated from table 2) in the U.S. economy currently require a college degree (associate degree or higher). By comparison, the Current Population Survey, a monthly survey of 60,000 households conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau, shows that 47 percent of workers have an associate degree or higher.
“The BLS projections to 2022 are even more depressing. They suggest that the number of overqualified and underemployed college graduates will only get worse. According to BLS, the economy will create 50.6 million job openings by 2022 and only 27.1 percent will require college degrees. That’s a projected increase of only 2.1 percentage points since 1996.”
Of course, the PBS piece also quotes numbers crunchers who disagree with the BLS, but college is a business and profits are to be made by lenders from all that student debt so the more who go to college, the happier investors will be as parents sign their houses and retirement over as collateral for student loans. The Hedge Fund billionaires and Bill Gates will hate it if more kids go into the workforce after high school instead of college. No crofts to be made from kids who go to working contraction, etc.
The average IQ of the South Korean population is 108. The 40th percentile of hte South Korean population is about IQ 104 so they have probably pretty much maxed out on the proportion of the population college educated.
What does that have to do with creating jobs for college graduates, either here or in South Korea? Stick to the point, and ease off on your fetish with IQ scores.
Jim,
You seem obsessed with IQ. Let it go. It is relevant to any discussion here.
It is irrational (both in the US and in South Korea) to attempt to increase the number of college graduates. We don’t have that many more people with the cognitive level for college and even if we did we don’t have the economic need for them.
This comment is for Jim: You say, “We don’t have that many more people with the cognitive level for college …:
Back in the late 1980s or early 1990s, I attended a lecture by a journalism/author who wrote a memoir about raising his son who was considered severely retarded. He said, they, as parents, decided to best thing they could do for their son was to move the TV to the garage and substitute TV time for reading. They also had a daughter who didn’t have that “low” IQ or severe learning disabilities the son had. All the way through school k to 12, there was no TV in their house. They read as a family and ended each day with a family talk about what they read.
The son, with his so-called low cognitive levels, earned a perfect score on the SAT. The high school accused the boy of cheating—that no one with his low cognitive skills could have earned a score like that—and they had him take the SAT again, alone, with three administrators supervising, and the boy scored perfect again on the SAT.
He was accepted to Harvard and four years later graduated with a degree in engineering.
Then there’s James Bryan Ellison. Click on the link and read his autobiography on the high school site where he’s the art teacher. I taught at the high school. I knew Jim. We talked. He told me that half of his brain was removed and the cavity filled with fat. Read what he achieved with half of his brain gone.
http://www.nogaleshs.org/apps/pages/index.jsp?uREC_ID=160496&type=u
I think that motivation, discipline and persistence will trump a high cognitive level every time unless the person with the high cognitive level has the same level of discipline. persistence and literacy as the cognitive challenged. A high cognitive level who is also a couch potato who hated to read and prefers TV and video games won’t be able to compete.
Look, I’m getting so sick and tired of your petulent IQ argument to suggest how inferior people(Americans) are in general. What’s the point in making a comparion with a sample from a nation that the vast majority of people belong to middle to upper middle class-thanks to a relatively lower poverty rate and stable public system? Does higher IQ give students regardlss of nationality a promise for going to top schools? Maybe. If you only consider selected number of students of wealthy family who can afford to pay for elite schools. And if such parents can take responsibility for the risk of demoralizing students or infusing a warped sense of view toward others(elilist mentality) due to rigorous cramming.
Ken Watanabe – Actually the US average IQ of 100 is well above the world average of about 90 so the US is not “inferior”. Emotionalism doesn’t change any of the psychmetric data.
Just what does IQ measure, in that can it reliable correlate to one’s contribution to GDP (if you are making an argument for IQ and productivity)? Are you making an assertion to S Koreans are genetically superior because of their higher IQ (the fallacy of the Bell Curve, and the same erroneous idea used against blacks? Or, are IQ scores influenced by education, and therefore are more a measure of nurture, not nature, and are also more a measure of what one has learned, not some “raw cognitive potential”?
What good is IQ for a nation dying of debt, for a society that pays athletes more than doctors, and where farming and food production is treated like an optional industry (at least based on their incomes). Our nation needs more morality and ethics, and less sin, not higher IQs.
Rick – East Asians have generally led the world in economic and cultural development since the time of the Shang Dynasty. Of course there have been occasional periods such as that following the Mongol invasion of China in the 13th century when that has not been the case but over the long term of the last 4,000 years the cultural accomplishments of East Asian civilizations have been impressive.
No black culture has ever accomplished much of anything and they have lagged behind the rest of the world since the Mousterian 50,000 years ago.
Jim.
Last warning. No more comments about IQ or racial comparisons. If you add another one, you will be banned forever.
The fact that Western Europe was not directly affected by the Mongols is probably one of the most important facts about the history of Western Europe. Of course they did have to deal with the Vikings but nasty as the Vikings were they were nowhere near as destructive as the Mongols.
Jim, Take your racist, eugenics remarks elsewhere.
Minor point, but — eugenics regarding IQ and racism are in a sense mutually exclusive. The true IQ eugenicist would advocate the selective breeding of those with high IQ only to others who have high IQ. This would necessitate the mixing of races in any given population.
For example, a true IQ eugenicist would advocate that a White man with an IQ above 150 would be better off having children with an IQ 150 Black woman than an IQ 100 White woman.
There may be things wrong with that, but racism isn’t one of them.
Of course there are a lot of faux eugenicists who claim the intellectual superiority of one race over the other. These people are not true eugenicists. They are racists.
For the record I have never actually said anything whatsoever about the subject of eugenics.
Diane – Crude threats will have no effect on me.
Jim,
You just sound like one of those western ‘apologists’ clustering around any trolling website in the US or overseas. You are about to join in that group.
Ken – You would be a lot more fun if you would occasionally say something intellectually interesting.
Lloyd –
“but college is a business and profits are to be made by lenders from all that student debt so the more who go to college, the happier investors will be…”
Interest on Federal student loans goes to Arne Duncan, to spend as he sees useful. I think Elizabeth Warren has it right – student loan interest should be the same as the LIBOR.
Diane is absolutely right in her doubts about college degrees producing good employment for grads. If the coll grad rate spikes upward as Obama seems to want, then a flood of college grads into the job market will swamp the limited number of good jobs available at that level. This already happened when I finished my phd 43 years ago(see ‘The Great Training Robbery’ and ‘The Overeducated American’ from that time, when phds drove taxis in NYC). Economists back then like Harvard’s Richard Freeman referred to this swamping of the job market “the cobwebbing effect” by which any field with a demand for labor provokes a rush of majors into that field and the eventual over-production of grads in that area 5 yrs later which collapses job prospects and salaries for those occupations. In the early 70s, “the father of career education,” Nixon’s Comm of Educ Sidney Marland and his boss Sec’y of HEW Elliot Richardson worried that the vast number of baby-boom kids graduating college would flood a job market unable to reward them with college-level employment; because this flood of coll grads came from the generation of the sixties, they feared radical political rebellions would threaten the status quo. Fed policy responded to the perceived and real threats. Public coll budgets were cut dramatically and a new testing offensive, “Literacy Crisis” and vocational campaign took off to stem the tide of coll grads(see Marland’s book ‘Career Ed’). What is now called “the college premium” in wages for coll grads compared to wages for non-grads is a bogus data point that depends on high dropout rates of coll students(up to 2/3 in comm coll’s, 50% in 4yr colleges). Other reports insist there is no shortage of coll grads and STEM personnel already looking for jobs, and that employers are actually slow to hire these job-ready applicants, because they can hire them in India for 20% of what they have to pay such grads in the US; or they can get the Feds to expand the H( visa program allowing them to import Indian STEM grads who work here for less and are far more vulnerable(that is, more compliant employees b/c of their visa situation). The unwillingness of corporate America to use its nearly $4 TRILLION cash on hand to hire new US employees, raise wages across the board, expand capacity to increase employment, or to pay taxes on their foreign and domestic profits, is causing a job and wage crisis for the 99%. Coll grads are not immune to these negative effects from corporate policies. The long-term trend of such policy is what’s sometimes called “the downward global harmonization of wages” by which is meant the cheapest labor areas abroad to which corporations outsource employment drag down wages and salaries in all labor markets. A small elite level of the job market is privileged and immune from this, a small labor stream for the limited number of grads from elite universities like Harvard and Stanford, and from a few protected fields like Law, Medicine, Dentistry, etc. This is why the elite level of universities are admitting smaller percentages of applicants each year–because more kids are applying to these life-lines as families go in over their heads to get their kids into the only higher education they can count on for their kids’ futures.
Wages are going in the opposite direction in China. Wages there increased by an estimated 14% in 2012.
India is the preferred outsourcing site for higher-end jobs b/c of the Indian Institutes of Management and Technology which graduate many high-level STEM. There are whole outsourced campuses of american corps. in places like Bangalore. India also has a legacy of widespread English-speaking natives especially as you go up the class ladder. China has been the low-wage factory-production place but massive labor unrest there has indeed been forcing higher wages, starting from a very low wage compared to West.
It is not labor unrest that has increased wages in China, it is having many job opportunities that allowed so many to escape deep poverty.
“… the downward global harmonization of wages…”
Harmonization? Wow, that’s a quite a euphemism for planetary class warfare.
After all, as none other than Warren Buffett, The Oracle of Omaha (a phrase revealing the heathen religious orthodoxy that actually-existing Capitalism demands), indiscreetly said in 2006, “There’s class warfare, all right, but it is my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”
He’s right, they are winning, more so now than when he uttered those words in 2006.
Schools are not only a place where class struggles of the past are studied; the schools themselves are now arenas of acute class conflict. Events in New Orleans, Newark, NYC and too many other places to list daily demonstrate the intense aggression the Overclass is directing toward public education and those who have traditionally provided it.
It is the great misfortune of public school students and teachers that there is near-unanimity within the Overclass, no matter the political brokerage firms they finance and work through, that public education is to be reconfigured in their desired image, Pre-K through graduate school.
So united and intent on this project are they, that even the leadership of the teacher’s unions has enlisted to facilitate the process and co-manage the workforce while public education devolves.
Anyway, the wages and power of working people are moving downward globally, but there’s nothing “harmonic” about it. In fact, it’s certain to lead to “cacophony” down the road.
Again, wages for the poorest in the world are increasing, not decreasing. About 700 million fewer people live in severe poverty today than in 1990. There has been accompanying increases in quality of life. There has Ben a 76% increase in the number of people with access to clean water, the percentage of the world’s population that is undernourished fell from about 23% to about 15%, the child mortality rate fell by 41%, and the maternal mortality rate fell by 47%
Leave it to an economist to be clueless when pointing out “facts.”
Wages in China increase, in absolute terms, while Labor’s share of national income, to say nothing of its political power, continues to decline.
Michael,
Are you saying that it is better to have a society where everyone is poor than a society where no one is poor but incomes are more unequal? Are you suggesting that the poor in China had more political power under Mao than they have today?
I’m not talking about the poor, I’m talking about Labor, and while there is overlap between the two, they are not the same.
In addition, I’m not going to fall into your trap of making a false choice and defending Mao.
The overlap between labor and the poor is very large in China. For countries with large numbers of extremely poor people I am generally more concerned with absolute deprivation Han relative deprivation.
Your original statement was the labors share of political power continues to decline. When did labor have more political power? Are you just speaking of the post Mao period?
For many people relative position within the status heirarchy is more important that absolute level. This is not surprising since reproductive success in the evolutionary history of primates is more tied to relative status in the group than it is to absolute level of material well-being.
Unfortunately status is a good whose supply is totaaly inelastic.
teachingeconomist – Is that increase adjusted for inflation?
I believe 14% is the nominal increase. The real increase would be something over 10%.
A 10% real iincrease n a year is amazing. Particularly for a huge country like China.
On the other hand nobody seems to believe official Chinese government statistics least of all the Chinese government.
There are enough outside observations of real wages in China to know that they have been going up rapidly.
Wages have been going up in China, because the CCP has been raising the minimum wage dramatically in recent years to raise the standard of living. In China, every worker belongs to a labor union, and in-line with the CCP’s long term goals to have a middle class of 600 million or more in the next few years, minimum wage has continued to rise regardless of the protests from leaders in private sector industry.
China’s goal is to transition from an economy that relies on exports to other countries and build a large, consumer middle class that will be the engine of its economy into the future.
To make sure this transition continues moving, when the growing private sector has one of its bubbles pop s they do in the U.S. on a regular basis, the CCP moves suddenly unemployed workers into infrastructure projects and/or state owned industries so they stay employed and keep money flowing into the growing consumer economy. In addition, older workers are retired early and sent back to the villages they are registered to live in where they sit around with the other retired workers and play Chinese chess or sing, play musical instruments and dance together in their sunset years.
There are two major economic zones in China divided by rural and urban. In urban China people may buy/lease property from the state and own it for more than seventy years before renewing the lease. In rural China, the land is owned by the government and the rural Chinese people. That property can’t be bought and sold and there is no rent or property tax. In urban China, there is a property tax one time when buying the lease from the CCP for the residence of the owner. Investment and rental properties have a annual property tax.
The CCP has ignored the flawed economic theories of the West and is inventing their own way to deal with these economic issues in an attempt to avoid the dramatic recessions and depressions we see in the U.S. too often, thanks to economists who don’t know what they are doing.
student loan debt is very difficult to have it follows you like an awful shadow and prevents you from following so many dreams
The very question I have asked. If everyone has a bachelor’s degree how does one stand out? Of course…a master’s degree; and then a doctorate etc. Perhaps the most lucrative job is college professor. And, I am sorry, shouldn’t increased techology decrease the level of education required to complete one’s job not increase it? After all the machine is doing most of the thinking. I think the college drive us manufactured and a way to indebt citizens to the state before they have even begun their lives. At the very least start with Community College and then transfer.
“Perhaps the most lucrative job is college professor.”
You must be thinking of the college presidents who rake in $1M salaries, because this is a fallacy in regard to US college professors.
“Tenure and tenure-track positions were once the majority at universities, but they now make up less than one quarter of college teaching positions.”
“Off the tenure track, part-time professors face low pay, negligible job security”
http://www.msnbc.com/melissa-harris-perry-1
Signalling doesn’t scale.
Just wondering how you reconcile your position that college is worth it with the following facts:
1. The $1 trillion present student loan situation gives those graduating from college the equivalent of a mortgage…without the house.
2. 50% of those graduating college are working at jobs that don’t require a college diploma.
3. A great deal of privatized “college” is a scam that does not teach employable skills.
4. The total capacity of all colleges and universities in the U.S. is somewhere between 30 and 40% of high school graduates- what is everybody else supposed to do?
5. Over 50% of students at many LAUSD schools drop out. Even those that “graduate” do so with bogus diplomas that in no way reflect the fact that these students are leaving high school without basic foundational skills in language arts and math. They clog the junior college system, where schools like Los Angeles City College have as many as 70% of their arriving freshmen unable to take college level course. The normal pattern is they take remedial course for several years, become frustrated, and drop out.
6. There are presently many jobs in California that go wanting because of inadequately educated applicants that played college students at private, for profit colleges, that gave them no actual skill set with which they could be employed.
7. Good high paying jobs like welding go wanting because the misguided rhetoric of large inner city school districts like LAUSD spout the slogans that “everybody is going to college,” which they use to close down a vital and viable industrial arts programs that could give their students either high paying trades or the means to pay for an exorbitantly prices college education.
8. Under Governor Edmund G. “Pat” Brown, present Governor Jerry Brown’s father, the state of California subsidized a vibrant state college and university system with the knowledge that by so doing, it would create the highly skilled workforce that would make California the choice of computer, electronic, aerospace, and other nascent industries of the time that more than compensated for the initial state investment. With cuts to education and inadequate recent additions to the public education budget and what the money is actually spent on- IPads?- the state has made vendors of goods and services more important that a pragmatically driven public education that prepares k-12 students for college or other careers.
The idea that college is “worth it” isn’t Diane’s position – it comes from the quoted article. Diane’s position is in the last three paragraphs and includes the idea that public universities should be free
What happened is that Pat Brown’s wisdom provided what Robert Reich recently called the “crown jewels” of the American education system: the full funding of community colleges. This was also a time when the very rich Americans were expected to reinvest upwards of 40% of their income back into their state and country.
As wealth disparity has grown and income taxes for the very rich have shrunk (to 8% in many cases), you see a crippling of what these schools (4-years included) can offer the average middle class 18 yo. A life time of debt and few job prospects or a running jump into a better situation, intellectually and economically speaking. The fiscally conservative mantra of “over-spending” for public services (including education) is poisonous thinking, in that it averts the gaze from the very rich TAKERS (sorry, NOT job makers) who are not interested in being complicit in creating a more self-aware, educated middle class that could pose as a threat to their market-hold and sometimes questionable labor policies.
Technological advancement and the demagogue status of tech industries needs to reevaluated.
Look at the way that it is being integrated into the classroom. Giving students tablets to fiddle with is not giving them a leg up in eventually working in the technological job sector. The most that is happening is that they are being taken for a free market-analysis test drive by Apple to inoculate them as future customers. The technological training, except in well-funded school districts, is not present. Or is it?
Look at the ways that the modern tech. industries’ financial gains are being reinvested in its workers and its homeland economies. Are they doing their fair share in creating marketable skills or market growth for the vast majority of students, shareholders, and citizens? I think this is a bigger issue that schools not preparing its students for a technological world or career.
In the US, scandals in the tech industry are cropping up weekly: Silicon Valley’s back-room dealings to prevent workers from seeking a better situation across the street to keeping the door barely open for women and minorities.
In Korea (as someone posted earlier), where Samsung’s GDP percentage is around 20% and the economy is strong, how is it that they have an unemployable group of young intellegensia? This may be indicative of the monolithic technology companies — that we bow to and exempt from ethical scrutiny — not redistributing the wealth to their countries in a way that reflects the assets of knowledge and skills of their citizens.
Business is king and if you are not to its manor born, good luck.
Besides what is the point of educating yourself out of your station if there is someone in SE Asia with a PhD who is willing to do your highly skilled tech job for $4.00 an hour?
Perhaps people should give more consideration to hands-on jobs like plumbers or auto mechanics that are not so easily outsourced.
Under-employment for college graduates is already an issue here, not something on the distant horizon or just in Asian countries:
“The Growth of College Grads in Dead-End Jobs (in 2 Graphs)”
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/01/the-growth-of-college-grads-in-dead-end-jobs-in-2-graphs/283137/
Much of the value of college is signaling. As more people graduate from college the sgnaling value of a college education decreases.
FYI, Thomas Frank wrote a couple of articles on college education in Salon last month. He hits it nail on the head.
http://www.salon.com/2014/05/18/congratulations_class_of_2014_youre_totally_screwed/
http://www.salon.com/2014/05/25/the_1_percents_college_scam/
Story of my life –which is actually rather similar to the elderly homeless adjunct who died. But when I become homeless, I’m probably not going to be able to live in my car, because it’s too old and unreliable. That’s likely to be very soon, too, if I can’t get more teaching jobs at additional schools ASAP. I feel like a cat who is running out of lives.
Certainly young people should be very cautious about incuuring much student debt in relation to a realistic appraisal of their probable future income.
The monetization of college degrees – whereas the only justification for college education is analysis in terms of its economic benefits misses key issues at several levels. But the college experience is not just about increasing your income potential. The most important benefits to the person and to society come from the core effects a great college education has on existential, cultural literacy, knowledge acquisition and thinking skills. A great LAS education liberates people, gives them a better sense of meaning and purpose, allows them to have have access and appreciate great culture and art, provides the thinking skills to make better decisions in all aspects of their lives, strengthen the capacity for an active citizenship….and we could go on and on. It doesn’t matter if the degree has an effect on income. A more educated population creates a better world and a better individual life – regardless of the level of income. I for one aspire to live in a world where good conversation, critical dialogue, an active democracy, high levels of appreciation for the arts and the sciences are the norm. I want to be in a community where I am surrounded by people who are cultured, and who are caring and who are capable of meaningfully contributing to enriching my life. Clearly for large numbers of students high school education doesn’t accomplish that, although maybe it should.
We need to have a chance for kids to explore our culture and their interests. The problem is, the requirements for high school graduation and all of this “college and career readiness” stuff makes it very hard for high school kids to do it. Some of the exploration has moved to the middle schools, but a lot has just gone.
I loved that exploration part of my college experience, but I had a full-tuition scholarship, so I could afford it. Plus, it was 20 years ago, when tuition was far more reasonable. Most of today’s kids, even with scholarships, can’t afford to do as much of that exploration without incurring a mountain of debt that will take decades to pay off.
At my institution the majority of our graduates have no debt, so it is still very possible to go to school without incurring large amount of debt.
Yes. Additionally, where does the more educated PARENT fit in who chooses to stay home and though not directly increasing its country’s GDP with as being in a paid position, increases the well being and health of his/her family and immediate community?
Vandana Shiva has written about this in the context of land stewardship and right [to] livelihood. In the context of homemaking and a life-serving economy, Radical Homemakers by Shannon Hayes is a good resource.
Maybe purchasing a car leads to greater earnings, compared to the group that doesn’t purchase a car. We need to increase vehicle ownership!
This study seems to simplistic to draw to many conclusions.
Is College Worth the Cost? Is the whole college business just a way to further sort students–which the blog below implies? Does it actually sort them on the basis that we want it to? Is the amount of money you earn the mark of a good education? Or is it just a mark of having sufficient funds and support systems and background networks to get through college and get to a well-paying job.
Maybe it’s good for the college industry, but who else? f we keep creating more obstacles (degrees needed) to even apply for a decent paying job the ranking order won’t change but may, in the end, favor the already well-favorzed more than anyone else. That’s the logic of the “new order” of things. The more things change the more the stay the same when it comes to the value of already having high socio-economic status.
If the public schools can’t educate kids in 13 years and college can in 4 years, something is obviously wrong with education. My 7th grader just took a math final – if you have 7 red birds and 6 blue birds, how many birds do you have? I can’t believe this garbage – its one level below prealgebra because she missed the math score by 2 points. Required brain washing summer reading dumbs them down even more.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx This article’s type of analysis is exactly where I would have expected the culture of the post-late-’60’s [the blowback– the yuppies] to lead us. The pop anti-war culture of the late ’60’s was anti-establishment. Getting a college degree to make tons of bucks– or at least plenty more than your tradesman brothers? Heresy.
Many went into law “to change the world” (cough cough). Women went into law/ finance/ et al professions to break through the old boys’ barrier. They were allowed to make the big bucks to pave the way for younger sisters– though the more honorable paths were Legal Aid & medical clinics for the poor.
The most honored paths were teaching in the inner city, social work among rural poor/ inner city, learning to work “with one’s hands” off the land while crafting jewelry to sell at local markets, etc. Leave the tiniest carbon footprint possible. Teach corporations how to disinvest in South Africa.
And there are still plenty of those folks around. They went to college in the day when one could do so as a middle class kid, without going into hock. Look for them among city teachers, & in tiny businesses in your town– those that haven’t yet been replaced by Walmart.
I was delighted a few days ago to chat w/the former owner of our defunct local music store. When his building burned, crowdsource locals drummed up enough $ for him & his wife to take some time to regroup [they hiked the Appalachian Trail]. He now “has time for music” because he works lawn maintenance, which he described as the best job ever: great money, & you’re outdoors all the time.
Back in the 1960s though, the minimum wage was adjusted for inflation. With that measurement, the minimum wage today should be over $20, so it wasn’t just idealism, it was also economics. They could buy property for the commune, buy a used vehicle free and clear (or hitch a ride safely), find a job around each turn to finance their stay in some town somewhere on the open road. Credit cards and the Mad Ave. push to live beyond your means wasn’t as prevalent.
You could argue, though, that the establishment of social tradition and religion was stronger then.
Today, it is refreshing to find young adults whose definition of success is the luxury to pursue their talents and interests within a close community (and one with a sustainable view of their physical resources). It is other-worldly to be around people who believe you can create Eden on earth, with, as you say, your own two hands.
Everyone should begin their independent lives thousands of dollars in debt to a bank, EVERYONE.
A little over half of the graduates from my institution graduate with no student debt.
Then the banks will be having a word with your institution’s leaders soon.
That is not the way it works.
Oh, of course not! Not up front.
Not up front or behind or on the left or right or above or below.
Taller men earn more than shorter men! Time to S-T-R-E-T-C-H those kids! Pediatricians should be evaluated based on how quickly their patients grow — Pearson is already standing by with new “height added” metrics!
But the shorter the man the greater the life exprctancy. This effect holds accross the whole range of height. Shorter men may have their problems but they will bury the rest of us.
Life expectancy, quality of life, and other fluff are all irrelevant. The only relevant bit of data is earnings. Enough with the excuses — “height added” metrics are needed NOW!
My non-profit advocacy group, “Children First”, fights for the right of every child to be of above average height. The excuses of the status quo cannot be tolerated any longer. Every child can grow!
We could give every child Human Growth Hormone (somatropin). But some would still be below average. Also HGH seems to increase the liklihood of diabetes and with 60 million pre-diabetics in the country already maybe that’s not the way to go.
But probably almost any thing done to increase average height will decrease life expectancy. But maybe given our entitlement problems that would be a good thing.
It’s been suggested that cigarette smoking is economically a good thing in that savings in retirement expense may exceed the extra cost of treating smoking relarted diseases.
The over emphasis on college degrees is unrealistic and ridiculous. It is undermining the freedom for young people to make appropriate choices for themselves. It is causing them to follow the predetermined choice that someone else made for them. The obsession with “college & career ready” that starts in kindergarten is just another example of the linear thinking of people who have little flexibility, but think everyone should follow the same path. A person’s future success will depend more on their healthy social and emotional development and diverse cumulative life experiences than a piece of paper showing they passed tests and jumped through all the necessary hoops in a rigid college program.
Too many young people are now indoctrinated to think letters after their name, especially PhD, causes them to be smarter or more capable. Actually, some would have benefitted more from using the money invested in college to start a business, or to go abroad and experience life.
My son spent 6 years working two jobs and taking out college loans to graduate with a business degree from a state university in GA. He had a 3.6 GPA from all work and no play. After graduation, the best job he could find was working for a rental car company in a coastal city. He is now assistant manager and works about 60-70 hours a week with pay less than his friends who did not go to college. One of his friends did an apprenticeship with a stone mason, and has now started a business doing stone patios and landscaping. He takes off time to go skiing in winter and traveling in summer. Another friend attended a two year fire academy for a certification and now works for a city that pays him twice the salary of my son. A third friend took a year off and went to work on a sheep ranch in Australia, and decided to stay. He now works for a rancher who is paying for his pilot’s training so he can make deliveries to a station in the Outback. All three of these friends entered their careers debt free, while my son is now saddled with college debt and a mediocre job that requires him to be a workaholic.
What a travesty for schools to promote the illusion (or delusion) that college is necessary for everyone’s future success. It causes false hope and unfulfilled promises. I feel betrayed by those high school advisors who made decisions for him, and coerced me into getting him to go to college, I think he probably does too.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx This article says, “get that degree & you’ll make bucks (or maybe not, as the middle class is going into the toilet.” …Maybe we should admit we’re breeding a new breed of cat– have been doing so, in fact, for a decade or more.
Here’s the landscape from a posh NJ suburb, where all parents ensure their kids get that degree one way or another.
Family A: Mom a dr, Dad once a grocery owner until felled by a box store– 3 kids: 1 will make big bucks in DC policy circles, the other 2 make ends meet as counselors in survival camps.
Family B: Mom a nurse, Dad an engr felled pre-retirement by MS– 4 kids: 1 engr making big bucks, 1 teacher, 1 rehab counselor, 1 survival-camp counselor.
Family C: Dad retired diamond trader, now repairing guitars, Mom pt teacher, 1 kid teaching ESL in Viet Nam.
Famiy D: Dad engr, Mom pt teacher– 2 kids: 1 audio engr at local night club w/band- record-producing on the side, all under the table; 1 just grad’d same field, probably same.
Family E: Dad produce mgr (recently deceased), widow exec-asst-type– 2 kids, just started their own computer-repair biz.
Family E: Dad lawyer, Mom deceased– 2 kids: 1 teacher, 1 Comm. Coll. AS, local retail (in band-album & gigs), saving up for BA.
I could go on, but the view is pretty much the same, & it boils down to college-grad professional parents w/ 3 or 4 offspring, one of whom is on the professional track, the other 2 or 3 pursuing low-paid but interesting socio-humano-arts paths.
Shall we conclude that college is the only way to make big bucks? No. But it paves the way for the unconventional career paths of the future. And those who want more than h.s. but can’t afford it are making their way via community college & by working & saving to pay for a BA one course at a time.
I believe many responders are confusing “education” with the “degree”. Just because a student can jump through all the hoops to get on that stage and walk away with the sheepskin doesn’t mean the student has received an education. It has been my experience that many students get the grades, get the paper, but remain ignorant about the world. What that piece of paper CAN do for a student is get the student a beginning leg up, at a higher pay scale than a Whopper-Flopper, and provides the OPPORTUNITY to continue moving up the food chain in whatever field of employment the student has chosen. No sheepskin, ever, has obliterated ignorance.