In many cases, it is. I’m glad I made it through without any student loans, though I was paid fairly well upon graduation as an engineer in the early eighties. But it’s really crazy to spend as much money as a degree costs when the degree has no marketable value.
I think that overrated higher education is the next government-financed bubble to pop.
[Update mid afternoon]
Derb has some more reader emails:
I made the same mistake myself: a BS in Geography is worth nothing on the job market. If I had it to do over again, I’d have taken shop classes in high school (assuming that they existed) and gotten a 2-year blue-collar technical degree. Other than engineering and business degrees, most college BSs and BAs are worthless.
and this:
Higher education is the biggest scam going. I don’t think that’s news to you (or Charles Murray). What’s really disheartening is that the business world plays along — demanding four-year degrees for positions that shouldn’t require them. It’s just a lazy way for them to make their “first cut.”
That is the problem. As Derb says, an aptitude test would do a better job, but it might not provide enough “diversity,” so the degree has become a poor surrogate. And it reminds me of NASA’s astronaut selection policy. It likes to select PhDs, or at least grad degrees, not because they are necessary for the job, but because they have so many more applicants than positions, it makes a handy filter.
But if I were a businessman, and I was just looking for a degree as evidence that the holder at least had the stick-to-it-iveness to get a degree, I’d be just as happy, and perhaps happier, with a technical associates degree than a bachelor’s in French Lit. Or even English.
It’s more important to have marketable job skills than a degree. There are a lot of college graduates who have little or no job skills and who have an essentially worthless degree. In the old days, we used to joke that high school graduates needed to learn how to say “Would you like fries with that?” College graduates with worthless degrees need to learn how to say, “Would you like a muffin with your latte?”
Conversely, it’s a sad fact that a high school diploma is worth very little any more. A BA degree is probably worth about the same as a high school diploma was 20-30 years ago. Many employers are using a college degree as a filter even when the job doesn’t require a degree.
College is definitively not for suckers in a lot of areas. Of course, if you are stupid enough to enroll in a degree that the market has little need for, expecting a job handed to you in a plate once you are out, you get what you deserve.
The diagnosis is spot on, first of all. College as an investment pays a lower and lower rate of return, sometimes a zero or negative rate. But it’s important to note that this is the average rate of return, and I think reflects mostly the fact that the number of people going to college has exploded. For the people going to college now who would have gone to college in 1955, too, I think college remains an equally good investment. The problem is with people who go to college now who would not have gone in 1955. Most of them probably should not go under any circumstances, even if it’s free. It’s a waste of their time.
Secondarily, there is the general decline in the quality of college education. It focusses far too much on processes, far too little on outcomes, far too much on analysis, far too little on skills and data mastery. Too many college students can present the currently fashionable argument for why Reconstruction did not raise the economic status of ex-slaves, but are clueless about whether the invention of the typewriter came before or after Reconstruction, or what log10(1000) is, or why it’s impossible to fuel a car with water, or know how to safely determine whether an electrical socket has a voltage on it.
But that could just be a reflection of the fact that college education has been in such high demand. As the quality of Microsoft products demonstrates, when you are in the position of enormous demand for your products, with almost no competition, you tend to produce crap, stuff it’s easy to manufacture. It’s easy to teach a class in “analysis,” much harder to teach concrete skills and facts. Colleges don’t want to work any harder for their money than they have to, and lately, they haven’t had to work very hard at all. There’s very little feedback pressure from students or parents or any other bill-payer to teach stuff with strong practical utility.
Want to know what will change that? Online education. That market is growing like crazy. There’s a strong demand for products that actually teach you useful stuff, without your having to go live on campus, sink full years of your life, pay gigantic fees, take “general ed” courses you find tiresome or pointless. Want to know how to fix computers, how to calculate a pH and get into nursing school, how to learn CG skills to get into filmmaking? There’s an online course that’ll teach you, and you can do it on your own time, without leaving home or quitting your job, and for pennies on the dollar and hours on the month compared to sitting in a class.
This has got a lot of colleges scared, by the way, and they’re investing in it the way BP invests in solar power or Chevron in wind power, and for the same reasons. Whether they’ll succeed in dominating the new tech is still unknown. The worst outcome, and one not outside the realm of possibility, is that they take it over and extract from a willing government accomplice some kind of “regulation” or “certification” process that preserves their role as gatekeeper, and keeps the price nice and high.
I wish there was some way to break up the higher ed carteil, say if De Vry and Phoenix were somehow recognized as proper universities. I wonder if anyone tried to hire their graduates, how well it went.
“a BS in Geography is worth nothing on the job market.”
I’ve hired Geography students to design GIS systems. It was decent money.
The use of a collge degree for “filtering” job applicants also reflects the decline in the value of a high school diploma. With the economic bad times ahead, especially inflation which always follows government increasing the money supply, many will look back and wonder why all they were taught was about “self esteem” instead of skills they can use in the real world. Hint to educators – to have any value, self esteem must be earned by accomplishment over time. It cannot be given to someone. Teach them to skills to accomplish things and self esteem will follow.
You hired them to “design systems?” I rather suspect they must have had other skills besides a geography degree.
The basic idea of the university, as conceived centuries ago, was to provide students with the fundamental philosophical knowledge to lead civilized society and to help design its future. In this day and age where that knowledge has been kicked to the curb in favor of post-modern claptrap, the university not only no longer serves its intended function, but has been turned to the opposite purpose.
Most of the online courses are as expensive as brick & mortar schools, so apart from convenience I see no real savings there. Plus the curriculum is still similar with all the stuff that adds no real value.
I think certification programs will take off once the higher ed bubble pops as it will become more important what you know than where or how you learned it.
My son is starting a 2 year automotive technology degree next year, and I’m all for it, though my wife is still having troubles with the concept as she is still operating in the old paradigm with her two degrees.
Boy, is this relevant to my own career. I’ve been obsessed with airplanes and rockets since about age 5. So naturally I earned a B.A. in English.
Why the $&%! would someone do that? Well, I listened to know-nothing peers instead of professionals when it counted most. “Get your degree, doesn’t matter in what, 2.0 and go, you’ll get a military commission and flight school.”
So, ask me how that worked out…I graduated without having a freakin’ clue what would happen next. It took twenty-some years of working my way up the hard way in the aviation biz to finally get to a level I should’ve achieved in my thirties. And I’ve gotten a more useful education (and satisfaction) pursuing an A.S. in Physics than a B.A.
But as an English major, they at least taught us how to write a 1500-word essay on the meaning of “would you like fries with that”…
Since I had to pay my own way through six of the seven years I was in undergrad I graduated with a grand total of $500 in credit card debt left over from a trip to Luxembourg for a Model EU my last semester. Since I’d analyzed the situation, once I got focused on a field it was International Business & Economics. The AS and BA degrees have definitely paid off and then some. The Banking for Professionals certificate served me well also. My Master in Space Studies not so much, although from an adventure perspective it is providing a superior ongoing rate of return. For my 40s the targeted degree is a law degree, but that’s more from a perspective of being able to deal with the overabundance of lawyers in the business field on a level playing field, so it’ll probably be focused in something like international commercial law, with perhaps a diversionary minor in space law. The doctorate in my 50s – who knows? My dream PhD would be in Lunar Studies, but I’m not sure there are really any institutions around truly qualified to grant one.
As much of an intellectually elitist punk as I was back in high school, I’ve come to appreciate that vocational education is a truly important thing, and we’re doing a grave disservice to the citizenry if we expect everyone to get a four-year liberal arts degree. Also, I think college has gotten stupidly expensive (with annual above-inflationary increases going back to the 80s when I was in college), so it’s certainly much harder to justify. It’s almost as if the colleges are trying to reap as much of the future value of your education for themselves as they can. I always counsel folks to save their money and get an Associates first, and use that to figure out in what to get a Bachelors degree. Way more cost effective, and less likely to tie you up in stupid debt.
“I’ve hired Geography students to design GIS systems.
You hired them to “design systems?” I rather suspect they must have had other skills besides a geography degree.”
Most of the knowledge was how to spec out useful information, manage
conversion of data from “Meets and Bounds” to ” North American Datum 99″
segregation of layer data, a little bit about speccing the workstations,
mostly selecting big monitors and graphics cards capable of handling the data, QC’ing the scans, trying to fix obvious glitches, and making the best of the 1970’s data sheets.
Now these weren’t fresh out kids, but, they had some software tools experience and a bit of real world experience at handling the data.
I think certification programs will take off once the higher ed bubble pops as it will become more important what you know than where or how you learned it.
Alas, I suspect that as the federal government takes over more and more of what used to be the private sector, what will really count will be who you know and whether you have an irrelevant, but required, paper qualification.
But as an English major, they at least taught us how to write a 1500-word essay on the meaning of “would you like fries with that”…
Ah, but that was decades ago! Now you would learn how to write a 15,000-word paper on the semiotics of “would you like fries with that” …
I suspect a big reason that a college degree is used as a filter, is that you’re not allowed to use anything else. The lawyers and judges who croak you for applying “irrelevant” criteria to hiring have lots of degrees. Coincidentally, they don’t mind you using irrelevant degrees to make hiring decisions.