SubPrime Degrees, like Philosophy and Fill in the _______ Studies???Let’s put this into prospective.
First, Up until the 1950’s...if you went to college....you studied math, science, engineering, medicine, history, or philosophy. Today, you have the core subjects, but we’ve added around forty additional topics which are mostly worthless in nature. We aren’t even ashamed to admit that they are worthless in nature.
Second, no one in high school is educating kids on economics. If you went to a 16 year old kid and laid out the problems of assuming $60k of debt at age 21 (or for that matter....$100k of debt)...how would you pay this off over twenty years? The 16 year old kid would come back with his project, and be utterly shocked as to what he has to give up for twenty years....to pay off the debt. He’d likely agree that two years at a community college was more than sufficient to accomplish his goals in life.
Third, we have an entire generation of professors who are completely wasted and overpaid. If the college came up today, and laid Professor Watson off at age 55, with his background in diversity....he’d likely be working as a shift manager for McDonalds within two years. There just isn’t a real occupation for diversity....in life.
Fourth, no state legislature is willing to walk in and clean house. No one cares if tuition at the state-run college runs around $18k a year, and it’s killing the future of the state by creating a massive wave of debt within twenty years. Most state universities would forbid state legislatures from even opening their finance books.
Fifth, and final....if we were turning out one of every three students to be an engineer or scientist...the investment might be worth the effort. But we are lead to believe the vast number of folks with degrees coming out today....have no engineering or scientist value. Heck, there’s probably two thousand sports management kids graduating this summer, and hoping to get some job related to sports...after four years at a college.
There is something wrong here, but we just aren’t willing to fix it. And this balloon is likely starting to bust within a decade.
SubPrime Degrees, like Philosophy and Fill in the _______ Studies???In my parent’s generation, it was not uncommon for people to quit school to go to work and a high school education was worth far more than it is today. After WW2, a college education became a ticket to the middle class, helped along by the GI Bill. My Mom & Dad were the first in their families to get a college education and it served them both very well - all of us Boomer kids did the same. Everyone got a healthy dose of hard-core subjects like English, Math, Science. If you couldn’t pass College Algebra, you could forget about getting a degree.
Nowadays, my grandchildren major in stuff like “communications” (talking) and other useless junk which gets them a job as a telemarketer working in a boiler room with their peers. The Asian kids do well because they have a good work ethic and are not afraid to tackle the difficult subjects like Math, Physics, Chemistry, Biology & Computer Science, but any kid with ambition can do as well.
If I was just starting out again, I would not go to college: I would go to trade school like DeVry, pick up some basic computer skills and learn some plumbing, electrical, and welding skills and go right to work. Nowadays, chances are good you will not end up with the same kind of job you started with - things change so rapidly - so you want to stay flexible.
An artist friend of mine once told me, “If you want to make a living as an artist, it’s also a good idea to pick up a few janitorial skills to tide you over until you make the big time!” Good advice!
My uncle was one of the top executive recruiters for Texas Instruments for many years. His remarks to me back in the 60s on the value of a college education may be instructive.
He said, “Many college degrees aren’t worth a damn in terms of practical value in the job market, but you are damned if you don’t have one.”
The college degree, any degree, has become the easy way for HR people to separate and winnow out job applicants. The problem is that with the universal requirement to have a degree to get a ‘good’ job, eg, a white-collar job, the educational system has been forced to accept any and all students whatever their aptitude for higher education.
The result has been grade devaluation, dumbing down, and the proliferation of “______ studies” degrees whose primary educational value is feeling good about PC values.
The educational lobby of institutions of higher learning and teachers have gone along in the scam because more students equal more money to spread around, especially when the government steps up with loans despite the fact that the loans will saddle millions of graduates with crushing debt they will be unprepared to repay.
Therefore we see the graduation of millions of students who couldn’t have qualified for a degree in previous years sporting degrees.
As long as there are enough foreign students willing to fork over the escalating tuition costs the bubble will not burst in the near future. The greater danger will be the level of defaulted student loans born on the backs of (who else) the US taxpayers.
If you have time google Griggs vs. Duke Power Co.
As for us ‘Boomers’ our post-Depression era WW2 parents drilled into us the value and necessity of education mostly since they had it so rough. In general although College education helped we were still in that front wave of post WW2 economic expansion and America was still producing many products. We didn’t have an overabundance of third world immigrants nor outsourcing so many jobs nor so much claptrap class warfare carpola from Washington, DC.
Been making this point on all these college bubble threads. Anyone who understands mathematics knows that as you increase the participation rate, the average intelligence of college students decreases. This forces the schools to lower the difficulty level. All of you saying that all these kids should be going into science and engineering aren’t quite getting it. The people getting degrees in bitter lesbianism could not pass calculus.
So how does one make money on this? Who is holding the paper on these debts? Who to short?