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Mail Magazine 24
The Cost of Education
is More than Just Dollars
by Michael Becker
Full disclosure, I have an undergraduate degree in engineering, went to
a business graduate school and I’m currently working on a second
technical bachelors degree. I’ve spent a lot of time hanging around
higher education. And over my lifetime I’ve watched the value of
“college” drop in direct proportion to the increases in the cost of
college. The Washington Post’s Robert Samuelson more or less agrees
with me.
The college-for-all crusade has outlived its usefulness. Time to ditch
it. Like the crusade to make all Americans homeowners, it’s now doing
more harm than good. It looms as the largest mistake in educational
policy since World War II, even though higher education’s expansion
also ranks as one of America’s great postwar triumphs.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not opposed to college. There are many careers
that require significant education beyond high school.
The problem today is that employers are looking for a degree for entry
level jobs that any high school graduate with a decent work ethic is
probably overqualified for. I’m not going to review the reasons for
this, but suffice it to say that the biggest reason is that the federal
government has limited an employer’s ability to gather information
about a potential employee and a college degree is now simply a
screening exercise.
Here’s the problem, outlined by Samuelson, with respect to
“college-for-all”:
College became the ticket to the middle class, the be-all-and-end-all
of K-12 education. If you didn’t go to college, you’d failed. Improving
“access” - having more students go to college - drove public policy.
We overdid it. The obsessive faith in college has backfired.
For starters, we’ve dumbed down college. The easiest way to enroll and
retain more students is to lower requirements. Even so, dropout rates
are high; at four-year schools, fewer than 60 percent of freshmen
graduate within six years. Many others aren’t learning much. […]
Surveyed, one-third of [surveyed] students said that they studied alone
five or fewer hours a week; half said they had no course the prior
semester requiring 20 pages of writing.
I’ve never understood the idea that “everybody” needed to go to
college. I personally consider a plumber to be a “mission critical” job
if I have a leak at my house. I’m willing and able to do electrical
work and other kinds of trades-work, but frankly I’m not getting my
hands dirty doing plumbing and you don’t need 10 minutes of college to
be a plumber, you need to go to a trade/vocational school.
High schools used to teach trades because not everyone is interested in
sitting behind a desk. Vocational training in high school fell victim
to the politically correct crowd who really don’t give a tinkers dam
about allowing people to define their own dreams. As Samuelson notes:
The rap against employment-oriented schooling is that it traps the poor
and minorities in low-paying, dead-end jobs. Actually, an unrealistic
expectation of college often traps them into low-paying, dead-end jobs
- or no job.
If you’ve hired a plumber recently - or any other tradesman - you’ve
got a good idea that “low-paying, dead-end job” isn’t what you’re
paying for.
In fact, if you really want to meet young people who are trapped, to
the point of being about 23 or 24 and looking forward life as a debt
slave, go find somebody with a degree in “[pick any] Studies”. The only
thing that one of those “degrees” qualifies you for is the opportunity
to go to graduate school and hopefully teach the same crap to a new
batch of undergraduates. In the real world, those degrees are
worthless. But expensive. Plan on graduating with student loan debt in
the high five figure/six figure range with no ability to make enough
money to service the debt and no ability to discharge it in bankruptcy
so you can start over.
In a Forbes article on the 10 hardest jobs to fill - and hence, the 10
jobs you could most likely find gainful employment - guess what:
ManpowerGroup surveyed more than 1,300 U.S. employers in the first
quarter of 2012 to determine which employees rank among the
most-wanted. The most difficult positions to fill are those in skilled
trades, which includes carpenters, plumbers, electricians and other
tool-wielding professionals. Those workers, also known as craftsmen or
artisans, typically develop their skills through training as
apprentices. They top Manpower’s list for a third consecutive year. […]
According to the survey results, 55% of employers say they are having
trouble filling jobs because of a lack of applicants.
I would personally encourage anybody who wants to pursue a career that
REQUIRED higher education to attend college. I would also go out of my
way to DISCOURAGE someone who doesn’t know what they’d like to do from
going to college, other than a community college because they are the
most cost effective for students. The real world is a much better place
to search for your niche and grow up in the process so that if college
is in your future you’ll be motivated to actually accomplish a bigger
goal than drinking lots of beer and growing up.
And, if you need another good reason why Samuelson is right, we’ve got
over a trillion dollars in student loan debt outstanding right now.
That debt load - much of it for absolutely worthless programs that
won’t produce enough income to make the payments - is taking our young
generation out of the workforce and out of the picture as a consumer.
It’s going to have a serious long term negative impact on the economy
and, more importantly, the lives of a generation.
Schools need to get back to basics. Sooner rather than later, there’s
no reason to make another generation pay the price.
Source: LibertyNews
Read this and other articles at Mail Magazine 24
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