Posted on 04/11/2014 8:46:47 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
This month, high school seniors across America are receiving college decision letters of acceptance and rejection. Many of these students, and their parents, will think that where they go to college will significantly affect their employment future.
They think wrong. Today, whether you go to college retains some importance in your employment options. But where you go to college is of almost no importance. Whether your degree, for example, is from UCLA or from less prestigious Sonoma State matters far less than your academic performance and the skills you can show employers.
Research on the impact of college selection has focused on comparing the earnings of graduates of different colleges. In 1999, economists Alan Krueger and Stacy Berg Dale published a widely-read study that compared the earnings of graduates of elite colleges with those of “moderately selective” schools. The latter group was composed of persons who had been admitted to an elite college but chose to attend another school.
The economists found that the earnings of the two groups 20 years after graduation differed little or not at all. In a larger follow up study, released in 2011 and covering 19,000 college graduates, the economists reached a similar conclusion: Whether you went to University of Penn or Penn State, Williams College or Miami University of Ohio, job outcomes were unaffected in terms of earnings.
(Excerpt) Read more at time.com ...
What matters more is that you actually have some reason for being there. Most kids don’t.
Maybe someone can explain the difference between causation and correlation to these college grads.
It won’t be long before all new jobs are government jobs. The degrees will all count the same.
I would return my degree and get my money back. My generation was brainwashed into thinking that a degree=success. I do fine financially as my career does not require a degree but when I tried to go further, when I needed it to take me further my BS/BM degree was useless. I would like to see people that run universities in front of Congress under oath to answer for price gouging.
BS/BM is exactly what I got.
In reality this is true ... but, when it comes to your resume, yes it does. Are you a Harvard grand in medicine or a medical grad form bofunk U. ...
Wife and I both had JC Associate of Arts degrees. Both retired prior to 65. Right choices. Strength in marriage. Living as much of the good life that we can help with, but may not be so readily obtainable for our respective grand-kids.
It turns out getting a degree from U.Virginia has the best return on investment at 17.6% per annum on your tuition dollars (the ones you or your parents pay or borrow -- they based the cost as typical actual cost after scholarship aid, not rack-rate tuition) the Ivies give a yield between 15.1% and 12.1%, while there are colleges at which one would be better off just working with the high school diploma and putting the tuition money in T-bills (places like Moorehead State College with a return on tuition of just 0.6% per annum, or even worse, UNC-Ashville with a return of -0.5% (yes, on average you lose money compared to just hittin the job market out of HS if you got there) or the nadir a tie between Fayetteville State University and Shaw University with a return on tuition investment of -10.6% per annum.
I think it’s the area of study that really matters.
If you don't have that kind of ambition, you'll get near or to the top of whatever endeavor you undertake.
Learn enough smattering to be interesting and you'll have a ton of friends and acquaintances
Decide first and foremost ... what do you expect of your life.
Well, my doctor of internal medicine is a graduate of SUNY Stony Brook School of Medicine.
I know for a fact that he makes over $450,000 a year. One of his colleagues is a graduate of the Ivy league, Columbia University School of Medicine.
Guess what? They make about the same...
I would guess that SUNY’s tuition are way below Columbia’s.
College is the new junior high school.
It means a lot about what you take. We don’t need more liberal arts / ethnic studies types. We do need hard science and, particularly, engineers. But then that’s hard and might hurt some student’s self esteem.
I noticed the same article in the Economist. In recent weeks, I think there’s been around two additional articles that really drove home the distant values of various colleges.
What I will also note...is that no one really viewing community colleges, and their value on graduates. The vast number of people out there in the first year of college...ought to really be at some community college...going for a simple two-year degree. They could live out of dad’s house, pay less than $10,000 a year on tuition, and make around the same amount of income as the four-year guy.
I admit....lawyers, scientists, and medical grad’s are in need. But just how many French art experts, ethnic studies gurus, and library science technicians do we really need in America? We are wasting money and time....on degrees with no real value.
You speak of private practice physicians, I speak major hospital recruitment. Different beast. Sorry I didn’t make that clear.
1. “The Phallus”
Occidental College. A seminar in critical theory and social justice, this class examines Sigmund Freud, phallologocentrism and the lesbian phallus.
2. “Queer Musicology”
UCLA. This course welcomes students from all disciplines to study what it calls an “unruly discourse” on the subject, understood through the works of Cole Porter, Pussy Tourette and John Cage.
3. “Taking Marx Seriously”
Amherst College. This advanced seminar for 15 students examines whether Karl Marx still matters despite the countless interpretations and applications of his ideas, or whether the world has entered a post-Marxist era.
4. “Adultery Novel”
University of Pennsylvania. Falling in the newly named “gender, culture and society” major, this course examines novels and films of adultery such as “Madame Bovary” and “The Graduate” through Marxist, Freudian and feminist lenses.
5. “Blackness”
Occidental College. Critical race theory and the idea of “post-blackness” are among the topics covered in this seminar course examining racial identity. A course on whiteness is a prerequisite.
6. “Border Crossings, Borderlands: Transnational Feminist Perspectives on Immigration”
University of Washington. This women studies department offering takes a new look at recent immigration debates in the U.S., integrating questions of race and gender while also looking at the role of the war on terror.
7. “Whiteness: The Other Side of Racism”
Mount Holyoke College. The educational studies department offers this first-year, writing-intensive seminar asking whether whiteness is “an identity, an ideology, a racialized social system,” and how it relates to racism.
8. “Native American Feminisms”
University of Michigan. The women’s studies and American culture departments offer this course on contemporary Native American feminism, including its development and its relation to struggles for land.
9. “’Mail Order Brides?’ Understanding the Philippines in Southeast Asian Context”
Johns Hopkins University. This history course — cross-listed with anthropology, political science and studies of women, gender and sexuality — is limited to 35 students and asks for an anthropology course as a prerequisite.
10. “Cyberfeminism”
Cornell University. Cornell’s art history department offers this seminar looking at art produced under the influence of feminism, post-feminism and the Internet.
11. “American Dreams/American Realities”
Duke University. Part of Duke’s Hart Leadership Program that prepares students for public service, this history course looks at American myths, from “city on the hill” to “foreign devil,” in shaping American history.
12. “Nonviolent Responses to Terrorism”
Swarthmore College. Swarthmore’s “peace and conflict studies” program offers this course that “will deconstruct ‘terrorism’ “ and “study the dynamics of cultural marginalization” while seeking alternatives to violence.
Time.com commits a fallacy in its headline. What does that tell us about going to college?
cum hoc ergo propter hoc? I think it might be.
I don’t know....if you go to Harvard you’re expected to get away with being an A-hole.
“Speak and write coherently in English and you’ll own your own company if you have the ambition.”
Good point, and you can even make some money by writing papers for business and engineering majors while you are in college. English is the language of MONEY, and if you can write it and say it, you can MAKE it. I just committed a vague pronoun reference, but at least I know that!
There are probably lots of great ideas out lying around, inert, because the progenitor is incapable of communicating the idea. What was once a true education is now “arts and crafts” because liberal idiots were allowed to take over the humanities. Logic, literature, rhetoric, philosophy; all dead. Why would a business leader need those? Gee, I can’t imagine. Oh, and to be able to communicate them with precision? Why, he might have to read something by a good writer to learn that skill!
Sorry, I’m working on terms and conditions for a website, and I can’t believe I’m being paid for something this elementary. Education is dead.
That’s a lie. If you want a high powered career in law, finance, government, academia or journalism, you better go to an Ivy or a handful of other elite schools. Only Harvard, Yale and Princeton are at the top echelon. Not having a degree from one of those three schools places one at a massive handicap for elite career tracks.
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