Posted on 05/07/2013 7:08:26 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
The U.S. is home to some of the greatest colleges and universities in the world. But with the student debt load at more than $1 trillion and youth unemployment elevated, when assessing the value of a college education, that’s only one part of the story.
Former Secretary of Education William Bennett, author of Is College Worth It, sat down with The Daily Ticker on the sidelines of the Milken Institute's 2013 Global Conference to talk about whether college is worth it.
“We have about 21 million people in higher education, and about half the people who start four year colleges don’t finish,” Bennett tells The Daily Ticker. “Those who do finish, who graduated in 2011 - half were either unemployed or radically underemployed and in debt.”
That average student loan balance for a 25-year-old is $20,326, according to the Federal Reserve of New York. Student debt is second largest source of U.S. household debt, after only mortgages.
Bennett assessed the “return on investment” for the 3500 colleges and universities in the country. He found that returns were positive for only 150 institutions.
He found college is “worth it” if you get into a top tier university like Stanford, or study an in-demand field like nuclear engineering at even a lower tier school.
(Excerpt) Read more at finance.yahoo.com ...
We’ll talk again on October 5th. :)
I know this form experience, I studied Electrical Engineering and stopped working for a semester, my life was so much better and my grades went from B's to A's. Alas I could only afford that for 1 semester.
This study creates a bias toward technical schools because they have a larger % of technical degrees than regular schools (MIT, GA Tech, CO School of Mines, etc)
I'll be honest, I've accomplished very little as far as "professional life" goes; I don't expect that to change.
Spot-on FRiend.
That’s my take as a hiring manager.
If you can’t invest in yourself why should I?
I just read the list and did not see my Alma Mater, Oregon Institute of Technology, which is an ABET accredited engineering school with he main campus in Klamath Falls, Oregon.
Talk about ROI, when I graduated in 2002 with my B.S. Civil Engineering, my total cost of tuition and books was less than $10,000. I transferred in my JR year, owned my home, was married, paid child support to an ex, and worked 30+ hours a week.
The average first year salary for the Civil Program was $54,000/year. Here we are 11 years later and I have been making double that for the last 8 years.
Great school, small class sizes (13-18 student per class), and personal time with professors for times when you needed help. You couldn’t flunk here unless you were really just a LPOS.
I would recommend that all parents and those wanting to go back to school check it out.
One last thing, there were more trucks in the parking lot with shotguns and rifles in them then you could count!
HIgher education needs to be reformed and made more efficient, but it won’t happen as long as the govt is giving away govt guaranteed loans. The schools will take as much money as they can get to continue in the old way.
The physical plants are eating up billions and inflated salaries for professors who are non-productive takes the rest. We need research, but we don’t need profs who don’t really teach and don’t really produce research.
A college degree is an accomplishment.........and that is all, with exception to science,engineering,medical,etc. It has very little bearing whether a potential employee will work out.
Typically the only people who think college degrees are important are the people that have them.
I don’t disagree with you however I’m not offering someone a $100K a year job who can’t make it through a 4 year program.
“Harvard and Yale have such huge endowments that they could easily exist for generations without charging ANY tuition”
FYI, Harvard, Yale and Stanford charge zero tuition for any student whose parents make less than 100k. They provide free room and board if the parents make less than 60k. There is a sliding scale formula for points in between with all aid ceasing at 220k.
Whatever you say cowboy.
It took this poor boy 8 years to finish a 4 year degree. The GI Bill was my ticket however I was also relentlessly deployed and had to repeatedly drop classes thus doubling the time.
If I can do it, other people can do it.
Even the technical sides are of dubious quality. Let's take Computer Science, my field, a lot of schools are pushing OOP-philosophies w/o instilling a proper understanding of what they're for and where they're useful, this to the point where many new field-entrants (graduates/new job seekers) cannot see the value in something like Ada's subtypes, which focuses on excluding values rather than including [new] values. This is particularly disturbing given that any CS course should expose a student to enough math that they instinctively see the value of excluding values. (Excluding values is used all the time in mathematical proof; e.g. "for all positive integers..." excludes negative integers as well as all non-integrals & zero.)
Another indictment is the popularity of C-like languages in the professional field, to the point that many non-C-style languages are dismissed out of hand by hiring companies because "we can't find programmers for language X". {For example, LISP was used for Yahoo's stores but then recoded in C++ & Perl} -- if the universities were doing their jobs then new graduates would be able to see why C-like languages are terrible for production code (some companies have even developed their own version of the C++ Standard Template Library [STL] to address some of these deficiencies: link.)
Even the syntax is geared against humans who are prone to miss '=' vs '==' when typing (or reading) fast and, combined with another misfeature (allowing integers [and pointers] to directly control if-statements), means that if (x = 32) ... will perform the assignment and execute the TRUE portion of the conditional, creating a particularly irksome bug; and then there's many, many "implementation defined" things (like the sizes of int & long int, they could even be the same) at the base level that render code very unportable.
I hate to tell you this, but 90% of Stanford students (and presumably the Ivies as well) come from wonderful families with wonderful values. and it really shows in the kids.
Try visiting Stanford sometime and talk to the kids. Yes bright, articulate and confident, but also very aware of their own smallness in the big picture. They are very eager to help, respectful of each other of their parents and established values. Stanford is a non smoking zone by choice and mostly zero drugs.
Yes I went there and in my freshmen dorm there were zero cigarette smokers if that tells you anything and maybe 1-2 percent smoked campus wide. Ok, lots of drinking, some pot and limited experimentation with other drugs but drug abuse ran at about 2-3 percent.
You are an accomplished individual............and your degree has almost no bearing on your professional life and success you might enjoy in your working life.
Nice to know.
I completely agree with you. There is a certain tradeoff for debt vs. degree. An education degree is not worth the tradeoff though. For just under $22K (I did receive a partial athletic scholarship) I graduated from U of Akron with the same education degree my brother-in-law has. His Hiram degree set him and my in-laws back thousands. He still owes money on his bachelor’s degree and he graduated (I think) in 1997. I graduated debt free.
I’d go to MIT for an engineer, rather than to the SAT scores, but I agree with you for a lot of jobs. Many car rental companies only hire college graduates not just for accounting but even for taking reservations and working the rental counter. I find it amazing that someone is spending $200k for four years at a private college, and their dream is to take that Elizabethan Literature degree or Gender Studies sheepskin to the Enterprise rental counter? I also find it amazing that my local car rental company would rather have someone with those degrees than someone motivated and ready to do productive work right out of high school.
I probably need to add some clarity. Was your college degree worth it as an investment of time and money?
The 30 year return on investment makes no sense: An engineer will start somewhere between 50,000.00 and 70,000.00 (a good one between 65,000.00 and 80,000.00. Should be over 100,000.00 within 15 years, over 120,000.00 at 30 years. If engineering management, ought to be well over 150,000.00 to 200,000.00 per year.
So where did they get only 1,000,000 over 30 years as a return? What, are they assuming 50,000.00 for 20 years?
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