In a recession, is college worth it? Fear of debt changes plans

http://www.usatoday.com/money/perfi/college/2009-08-30-college-costs-recession_N.htm?loc=interstitialskip

by edw519 • 17 years ago

15 30 17 years ago

I think that the value of a college education has been waning for years as more and more people acquire college degrees. The recession just made it so that if you get a degree that cannot directly lead you to a job it will probably not pay off for you. A coworker of mine is paying 50k a year to send his daughter to college to study social work. I cannot imagine allowing my daughter to throw away that kind of money chasing a job that you can get with a degree from a community college and will likely burn out from in a few years. I think many people just assume that if it's college then it's a good thing.

College has many merits but one of them isn't really the promised good job, good career, good life that many people believe it to be. I think many companies just use a college degree as a sign that you were capable of sitting through something for awhile without giving up on it. I'm not sure a degree in journalism says much more than that to most companies (outside of that field of course).

I feel bad for the people who have tons of debt and virtually nothing to show for it. I just hope their guide their children in another direction when they get to that age.

edw519• 17 years ago

A coworker of mine is paying 50k a year to send his daughter to college to study social work.

My nephew just decided to switch from engineering to political science. So my brother decided to send him to community college for that instead of university. Same education for 1/10th the price, he says.

donw• 17 years ago

$200k for four years of education, for a job that pays $25k/year. So, eight years after she graduates, she will have gross income equalling the cost of four years in school.

Given living costs versus her income, it will take that girl somewhere around twenty years to save up $200k in cash, and that's if she scrimps and saves.

Staggering.

I worked and saved, and went to a 'safety school' to save on costs. Even with a $30k personal disaster (2008 was not a fun year) layered on top of the cost of university, a year of work later and I'm back to the point where I could not work for a year without too much discomfort. My total college education cost less than a semester for your coworker's daughter.

If I ever have kids, I'll put aside enough to put them through college (yay, EIRA), and then tell them that whatever is left over at the end is theirs to keep as a graduation present, and likewise, if they use all of it before they finish, they can get a job to pay for the rest.

mikeryan2• 17 years ago

"College has many merits but one of them isn't really the promised good job, good career, good life that many people believe it to be."

I think its true that a degree will not get you a job.

But unless you can prove to be a complete superstar in your field you will severely narrow your choices for getting a job without one. Having a BA/BS even from a minor college is still a bar set by most HR groups. (the relevance of the degree aside). Note the BA, an AA which you get at community colleges generally aren't worth too much.

But in regards to your friend paying 50K a year for a social work degree. Sure your friends daughter may not end up with a job where she can ever payback the 200K they're going to pay. But she sounds like someone who is going to try to make a difference in the world. Perhaps that means more then the amount she'll make in salary post-graduation.

antonovka5• 17 years ago

I've found that because the applicant market is so incredibly saturated with applicants who have a degree, it's ceased to be an indicator of anything, and HR departments (and hiring managers) have stopped caring.

You'll find quite a few job posts now days that explicitly say "... or equivalent experience" in the education section, and many others that will happily ignore the stated requirements.

Kirby• 17 years ago

Well, in a very real way, delaying your entry to the job market by four years right now is a very safe bet. It's brutal out there for people without in-demand skills.

But what this article dances around, but doesn't quite realize, is that college no longer confers in-demand skills a priori. A journalism major that made six figures as a recruiter? That's a combination of personality and luck, and very little element of 'college training'.

If you want to consider college an investment (which is not crazy), you can't just think of it as a checkbox. College, done, now give me a job that pays well! Not realistic. You need an actual skill that people want to pay for. Science and engineering degrees always work well for this. Practical business skills (like accounting), medicine and law, these are the things that pay off.

You know, the ones with _hard_ classes. :)

I don't want to dump on humanities - if you love it, do it. If you're one of the best in your field, and if you're smart and passionate you should end up there, you'll do okay. Some even more than that.

But if you aren't the kind of person whose eyes light up when someone else at a party wants to talk about French Poets, don't study French Poetry and complain about the job market. Passion is fantastic, following it is great - and most people aged 18-22 don't have one. And if you don't, it's idiotic to take classes in a low-job field where you'll get trounced by those that do honestly care about the material above and beyond the grade.

If you aren't following your bliss (and that's okay), go into a hard field that you don't absolutely hate. And you might not love your job until you figure things out, but at least you won't be miserable _and_ broke. But for the love of god, don't major in Philosophy and complain that you didn't get your money's worth. (And I loved my philosophy classes in college.)

uihbvciwu• 17 years ago

So you would take a bet on a science/engineering degree? And hope that after 4years of a degree, and another 3-5years to get the professional certification your job won't just be off-shore?

Better to do the easiest humantities course and get that middle manager job so you can earn the bonuses for cutting the number of engineers.

Or better still - skip college, learn to be a plumber. Invest the $40k tuition in a van an some tools. get jobs, buy more vans, hire other plumbers - build empire. It's like a startup except most of them make money.

mmt3• 17 years ago

So you would take a bet on a science/engineering degree? And hope that after 4years of a degree, and another 3-5years to get the professional certification your job won't just be off-shore?

Yes, because the material is useful for something other than working for someone else.

Or better still - skip college, learn to be a plumber.

No argument at all. I've always thought learning a trade to be a far more respectable route than an impractical degree.

nradov• 17 years ago

A BA in humanities isn't going to get someone hired for middle management. There aren't many companies hiring entry-level management trainees any more.

steveplace4• 17 years ago

Or better still - skip college, learn to be a plumber.

You'd be surprised the amount of money a master plumber can take home.

rdtsc• 17 years ago

It depends on the field. Some fields prefer 4 year degrees, some prefer portfolios, some prefer graduate degrees. Computer science is probably more of a 4 year + portfolio. Yeah, MS degrees are nice, but unless it was in the topic a company is interested in, it is probably better to have some code examples.

In general, it seems college education has been over-inflated and over-hyped. It is the next bubble to burst probably. The more Uncle Sam was willing shell out money for student loans, the more collages started increasing their tuition. And one cannot just declare bancruptcy and wash away these loans.

My college, at least, increased the tuition every year since 2000 then started building bigger stadiums, shopping malls, and recreation halls.

At the same time crusty old professors stuck in the 70s didn't teach anything relevent to today world, while at the same time boasting how easy they personally have it, how stable their job is, encouraging students to become professors, so they can also get tenure and stop working and become a new generation of crusty old professors ... Somehow I got a feel my college was not unique in this respect.

hamidp• 17 years ago

I'm surprised that no one has mentioned college and education in the context of signaling: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_(economics)

A degree from a Tier-1 school and high GPA is a signal to potential employers that you are a hard worker and smart. This appears to hold well for "easy" majors who don't really use anything learned in college at work (except thinking and writing creatively) and less so for "hard" majors who do actually need to know stuff about biology, math, whatever to do well.

antonovka5• 17 years ago

A degree from a Tier-1 school and high GPA is a signal to potential employers that you are a hard worker and smart.

The only things it signals to me is that you have:

- Considerable financial support from your parents and/or considerable student loan debt.

- A strong ability to pass tests.

What it doesn't tell me is whether you'll actually be able to do the job, and do it well.

steveplace4• 17 years ago

But you're probably not a potential employer at a Fortune 500 company.

makecheck• 17 years ago

It's hard to imagine recruiters giving up on the safety net of "minimum degree in X, Y or Z", unfortunately. Even at companies where engineers may be willing to dig deeper, résumés still have to clear these basic filters.

Of course, I would prefer if a person's actual experience and education were assessed more carefully. These days, it's conceivable that someone has spent a lot of time on OpenCourseWare, or been self-taught programming through experience with open-source projects; there are a lot of ways to be accomplished without a degree. It is becoming harder to do simple filtering of applicants.

randallsquared• 17 years ago

For technical work, contract jobs can let you avoid the filters, and end up hired full-time in a position that has such a minimum degree filter. I did this to get into my current position, and I have "some college" rather than any degree.

For this, of course, you have to be good enough that they really want to hire you at the end of your contract.

antonovka5• 17 years ago

When every applicant, qualified or not, has a degree, many recruiters stop caring whether an applicant has one or not.

cschick2317• 17 years ago

College is worth it. I think the real question is "Is spending 30-50K a year on your education instead of 10K a year worth it?". I think your average person could do quite well for themselves if they go to a state school or some other less expensive college. Most people aren't gunning to be the best in their field. If there is any difference in education between "cheap" and "expensive" schools I don't think it would make much of a difference to the average person.

I majored in computer science at a state school and spent around 40K on my education (room and board for 4 years). I feel I got a very solid education and was able to easily find a well paying job after graduation even without the shiny degree from Harvard (or some other fancy school).

Tamerlin• 17 years ago

This is the most sensible argument yet.

One thing we should be considering rather than questioning the value of an education is that we should be concerned about what ours are costing us. In most other first world nations, a college education is there for anyone willing to put in the effort to earn it... here, it's available to anyone who's willing to pay for it.

The quality of our education is decreasing, while its cost is rising. Hence the return on investment is decreasing, hardly a challenging leap of logic.

Why should one spend $50k per year on an education in any field? Will that get you a better education? Having obtained a degree from a pretty prestigious institution (Johns Hopkins), I would say no -- it gets you a school with a bigger athletic club and more stipends for brainless athletes (I have nothing against athletic scholarships -- provided that the athletes who get them are there for the education; IMO being an athlete is a valid way to pay for an education, but too often the sport is the goal, rather than the education).

jfoutz• 17 years ago

Yes! best time ever. Earning potential is capped by the crappy market. If you think things will get better someday you can pay off your loan with boom dollars, which are a lot easier to come by than our current bust dollars.

mmt3• 17 years ago

This is generally true for all fixed rate loans and highly variable inflation.

One would expect the market to react by moving toward variable rate from fixed, which has already been reported for student loans.

TFrancis• 17 years ago

What if higher education were free?

mmt3• 17 years ago

TANSTAAFL, even if the price is opportunity cost.

Kadin• 17 years ago

> "…graduating in 2005 with a double major in journalism and anthropology…"

I think I see her problem right there.

steveplace4• 17 years ago

I wrote a post about this subject ~2wks ago about how college (as an asset class) could be in a bubble, and I showed the similarities between a college degree and housing. The point made is that it would be much less feasible to have so many college students if tuition were not financed and subsidized by the US federal gov't.

http://www.investingwithoptions.com/2009/08/college-is-a-bub...

Soon I will be analyzing the data behind income differences and overall opportunity cost of various degrees as well as total amount financed over time.

radley• 17 years ago

Sorry, I think the problem has more to do with USA Today readers than fear of debt.

When the first bubble burst, a lot of people went back to school to finish their degree or get an upgrade. In essence they made money when there was a lot of it around and went back to school when there wasn't.

In a recession, is college worth it? Fear of debt changes plans

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