By Professor Doom
According
to a paper by Mr. Autor published Thursday in the journal Science, the true cost of
a college degree is about negative $500,000.
That’s right: Over the long run, college is cheaper than free. Not going to
college will cost you about half a million dollars.
--it seems like every mainstream report on the subject says something like this. But why did
the Occupy Wall Street movement have so many graduates holding signs, why are the default rates on the student loans
so high, and why do we have 17,000,000 college graduate
waiters/hairdressers/salespeople?
Time and again
I’ve quoted the Poo Bahs that run our institutions, saying how higher education
is worth it, no matter the cost. I’ve gotten into a few arguments with friends
when I try to point out that paying out huge sums of money for a degree, any
degree, fiscally makes no sense.
I don’t blame
people for arguing with me, I’m challenging beliefs ingrained when they were
children, after all. From childhood, we’re told how critically important it is
to get an education, and that always, more is better, that no price is too high
when it comes to education, that the only way to succeed in life is an
education, that oh-so-expensive college is the only way to get that education.
Even people that
leave their jobs, spend years of their lives getting some degree, then go back
to the exact same job they had before (plus debt, and being older), generally
won’t admit that, yeah, getting a degree was a mistake.
Don’t get me
wrong, legitimate education is valuable, but that’s not what education is
today, for most people. We were trained in public school that education is
primarily about showing up, that as long as you did the bare minimum to get by,
then a high school diploma would be yours. It’s little different in many colleges and
universities. Open admissions in higher education has forced standards to lower
to the point that, in many classes, all you need to do is show up, and you’ll
pass. Heck, data from one school I taught at indicated about 1/3 of classes you don’t even need to show up to get an
A.
Public school
trains us from a very young age that you get your education at large
institutions, provided by a “teacher.” It even trains us that all high school
diplomas are equal, that all diplomas are equal.
And so we have
this huge population of students in higher education that comes to campus, and
doesn’t even mind that classes typically don’t ask the students to do anything,
not even show up. The students don’t even mind that they’re going deep into
debt for the degree, because they’ve been trained for years that education
(education of the sort they’ve been exposed to) is worth it, no matter the
price.
Then these
students leave with their shiny degrees, a big monthly payment on their student
loan…and encounter the real world, which sees no reason to reward college
graduates who are indistinguishable from high school graduates in terms
of knowledge or capabilities.
This problem is
just beginning to snowball. Years ago, student loan default rates used to be in
the area of 10%. Despite a wide array of deferment programs (which didn’t exist
when default rates were much lower), default
rates are now 27%...this is not a trend that will reverse any time
soon.
Some people are
finally starting to figure it out, and their responses to the realization of
how they’ve been victimized by a higher education scam that truly begins in
kindergarten can border on comedy:
What a clever
idea! Since degrees no longer necessarily represent any actual skills or
knowledge, and are merely pieces of paper that represent a student went to
classes for four to six years, why can’t they be sold like anything else?
"I
thought this piece of paper [had] so much worth to so many people, but for
a theater major, it couldn’t mean less," Ritter told BuzzFeed,
according to the Daily Mail. "I’m doing the exact same things and probably
getting paid the exact same amount as people that dropped out halfway through
freshman year, except I’m still $40,000 in debt and they’re, well,
not."
--why did
admin approve a ridiculously expensive degree program in a field where degrees
are meaningless? More importantly, why can’t we throw these thieves in jail?
The enterprising graduate is
offering a bit more than just the diploma, she’ll provide some of the student
experience at FSU: a tour of where she spent her time, from visiting her drug
dealer, to the theatre, to where she was given speeding tickets going between
classes (does anyone else think universities need to be so large that you can
drive from one class to the next?), as well as access to photos of when she was
a student.
Now, here’s the
thing: she did get an education, and it is worth something. She would have
gotten an education (probably a better one, and certainly a cheaper one) if
she’d just gone down to the library and read for four years, as opposed to
doing what she was told to do as a small child: go to a large institution and
pay endless sums of money to have teachers talk at you while you sit at a desk.
She set a minimum bid
of $50,000 for this degree, but, alas, no buyers. Hey, why didn’t any of the Poo
Bahs of higher education step up to buy this? They’re paid so much that $50,000
would’ve only been a minor dent in their monthly expenses. Not a one did, of
course, because they all know they’re
lying when they say an education (as the Poo Bahs define it) is worth any
price.
Someday, I hope
everyone will know what’s going on in higher education, and I hope they learn
it before they’re deep in debt with a useless degree.
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