Is college worth it?: Too many degrees are a waste of money.

WHEN LaTisha Styles graduated from Kennesaw State University in Georgia in 2006 she had $35,000 of student debt. This obligation would have been easy to discharge if her Spanish degree had helped her land a well-paid job. But there is no shortage of Spanish-speakers in a nation that borders Latin America. So Ms Styles found herself working in a clothes shop and a fast-food restaurant for no more than $11 an hour.

Frustrated, she took the gutsy decision to go back to the same college and study something more pragmatic. She majored in finance, and now has a good job at an investment consulting firm. Her debt has swollen to $65,000, but she will have little trouble paying it off.

As Ms Styles’s story shows, there is no simple answer to the question “Is college worth it?” Some degrees pay for themselves; others don’t. American schoolkids pondering whether to take on huge student loans are constantly told that college is the gateway to the middle class. The truth is more nuanced, as Barack Obama hinted when he said in January that “folks can make a lot more” by learning a trade “than they might with an art history degree”. An angry art history professor forced him to apologise, but he was right.

There is a another factor. How easily can the skill you have be outsourced? A lot of people with technical degrees and skill find they cannot get decent work. Why? Because there are literally millions of people out there with the exact same skill who are willing to work for less and whose work can be transmitted over the internet.

Unless your job absolutely requires that you physically be there, you’re at risk ... no matter how good you are.

Increasingly even jobs that require you physically be there are at risk, such as doctors, because of medical tourism.

Jobs such as diagnostic analysis in medicine have been greatly outsourced to places like India.

Colleges do not explain to students that they are going to be competing with millions of people all over the world when they get out ... not just with the other degree holders in this country.

A trade that requires physical presence to do the work is a more stable bet.

Dear Betty Jane,

I don't think the chart's numbers are too low for Harvard. Over 60% of folks at Harvard get Harvard grants for financial aid, and there are other scholarship and aid programs that bring the total up to as much as 70% or even a little more.

Harvard financial aid phases out, with one student in college, as one’s family's household income approaches about $250,000. At Harvard, median household income is somewhere around $200,000, and thus, that's why, even with the fairly generous financial aid limits, you still have 30% or so of students without any grant assistance or scholarships.

I don't know how these folks calculated the four-year cost of these schools, but it may be that they're normalizing the data to median income levels in the entire population, rather than just looking at the Harvard population in isolation.

My own son's experience was that the best deal came from our state flagship, where he was offered everything but the kitchen sink. No, wait, I think they offered that, too.

But after that full scholarship, full room and board, books, educational stipend, + spending money deal, Harvard's offer was best. Johns Hopkins, my son's first choice, was worst. And it was a pretty substantial difference. And included loans in the package (Harvard doesn't use loans in their financial aid packages).

For top students applying to the top schools, it's usually the better the school, the better the offer.

sitetest

My ex was considering a sociology degree when she asked what that would qualify her for. I told her she would be qualified to pursue a masters degree in sociology.

Then, she asked what a masters would qualify her for. And, I answered that she could then work on her PhD in sociology.

She asked what could she do with a PhD and I explained that her PhD in sociology would qualify her to teach sociology courses.

Dear Betty Jane,

It's true that admission to top-tier schools is difficult. Stanford, I think, had an overall admissions rate of 5.1%. That may have been just about the lowest in the country of the top schools. Harvard's regular decision (factoring out the early action kids) was a record-low 3.1%. University of Chicago is now sub-10%. But there are still a number of top-tier, or near top-tier schools with admissions rates of 15% - 25%, or even higher. Duke admits 14%. Notre Dame admits 23%. Boston College admits 29%. Boston University is at 49%. In the USNWR ratings, Duke's top-10, Notre Dame is top-20, and BU is top-50.

So, for top kids, there's a wide range of really good schools that give pretty good to great financial aid that, if you apply to more than one or two (or three or five), you should get in somewhere.

Each student's needs and desires are different, but neither of my sons applied to any of the schools around the country that sent them unsolicited offers of full scholarships. With the exception of our state flagship, they pretty much only selected schools from around the top 50 in the US.

For both my sons (the younger one is on the cusp of finishing the process as he is a high school senior this year), that was the "backup" plan - state flagship + a wide selection of top schools.

Both were admitted to our state flagship with substantial scholarship offers. Both were admitted to multiple other top-50 schools with offers of aid ranging from affordable to very affordable.

Interestingly, there seems to be an incipient move away from loans in the top schools, at least to some degree. Several of the schools that accepted my younger son came back with no-loan financial aid packages. The use of loans in my older son's financial aid package from Hopkins was probably the deal-breaker for us. That was two years ago. My younger son's offer this month came with a scholarship specifically designated to replace the normal Hopkins loan package of about $20K. The scholarship program is funded by ex-NY mayor Michael Bloomberg (JHU, '64).

We're all chucking that Mike Bloomberg’s money may help to send a right-wing crazy conservative pro-life, pro-traditional marriage, anti-statist Catholic kid to college.

sitetest

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