Dad throws $200,000 toward a degree, and another $60,000 in incidental costs over four years. At the end....what does Johnny Junior or daughter Wanda do for the money spent?
A decade ago, they got into a foundation for a year....clearing $70,000 a year and then dad’s connection got them into a Fortune 500 company at $90,000 a year. The Fortune 500 company basically worked this angle of liberal arts-welfare. They’d load up a thousand gifted liberal arts degree onto the payroll and just grin as profits came in.
2008 came, and reality sat in. Purge the liberal arts freaks and prepare for a long ‘winter’.
The liberal arts freaks are sitting there now....pulling in $70,000 at some government agency and hoping that this isn’t their permanent job in life. The problem is that they got the jobs early on, and there’s mostly nothing left at either the government or the Fortune 500 companies.
Would Wal-Mart hire them? No. How about Barnes and Noble? Full already. The local TV channel new team? If they’d accept a salary of $35,000 a year? Yes, but that’s just not acceptable.
So dad is asking stupid questions at the admissions office, and tasking them to show where these beefy jobs will be found. Fake enthusiasm is all they have right now, with a grin, and a promise that’s mostly empty.
My advice....a $10,000 a year community college degree in nursing would be a better investment than the $45,000 year liberal arts degree. In five years, we will have hundreds of thousands of dimwits with costly but worthless degrees and no free ride. Then what?
Start laying off professors?
First, you are correct.
Second, from the source article, it appears that the overwhelming majority of Carlton College grads in the past went to graduate or professional school, e.g., Law, Medicine, MBA; so that their u/g education was not the end of their education.
Third, the most popular u/g degree at elite privates is economics. The u/g degree in economics is a very good degree for Law or an MBA. An u/g degree in mathematics is a very good degree for any number of career paths (applied math) as well as a solid foundation to pursue graduate studies in the social sciences. An u/g degree in science is a solid foundation to pursue the MD.
Fourth, engineering is a very good bachelors degree. So is accounting. But, you won’t find those programs at a liberal arts school like Carleton.
Fifth, if I were running a corporate business, and had to hire from among college grads whom I had to train in management training programs, I’d be inclined to hire students who were involved in team competitive sports, or who actually mastered a skill such as a conservatory student, than a student who took introspective, navel-gazing courses such as ethnic studies