Instapundit has an interesting look at it.
I think it’s probably true. The market of easy credit for student loans has resulted in a glut of people demanding to go to school and thus lowered the value of a college degree. I went to school for four years and in my heart of hearts I truly wish I’d never done it; not only did it contribute very directly to the destruction of my marriage, not only did it add tremendously to my stress levels and rob me of time from my children, but in the end, even graduating Summa Cum Laude, I have yet to find that it taught me anything valuable or raised my value significantly in the job marketplace–even though it’s supposedly a valued degree.
I honestly wish I’d never done it. It didn’t make me smarter. It didn’t leave me (much) better educated than I already was. All I got was debt I can’t currently pay, stress that hurt my relationship with my wife and children, and a seething resentment of the time wasted.
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My oldest is financing his education almost entirely with student loans. Now that the LEAF program has evaporated there is a very good chance he’ll be unable to return to school in the fall because all the other loan programs require the student to begin repayment immediately and we are unfortunately in no position to assist him in anything other than small ways.
I’ve suggested he join the Air National Guard.
J.A. Eddy’s last blog post..One Day At A Time
Dean, you are projecting in a major way. The link does not say there is a glut of students but that the increase in education costs was masked by easy credit (i.e., there wasn’t much resistance to cost increases).  I’ve long suspected that insurance has similary contributed to the decline in cost effective health care, and suspect that a government program to underwrite health costs will make it MUCH worse.
I don’t know your circumstances, don’t presume to judge, but I wish you wouldn’t bring your personal life up for comment. If you invest in ANYTHING and it doesn’t pay off, maybe it is your choice that was off kilter and not the institution. College is not so different from any other investment, caveat emptor. If it didn’t raise your value in the market place and that’s what you wanted/expected for your investment, then it was a bad choice for you in your circumstances at the time, not necessarily a valid condemnation of the University system in the U.S.
In general, I tend to follow the Biblical principle embedded in the parable of the talents and firmly believe if you can do something within you capabilities to improve then you ought to do it, including participating in higher education.Â
BTW: I spent time and money getting a Professional Engineer license, working in a field for a company where it is not required. After a few years, the cost benefit assocaited with maintaining it didn’t make sense, and I let it lapse. I didn’t expect a return, I did it for my own satisfaction, I don’t regret it.Â
Mike Mandel, the chief economist at BusinessWeek, pointed out a couple of years ago that college education in the US had long been paying above-market returns, and that this was unlikely to continue, for the same reasons that any investment that becomes well-known will not continue to pay above-market returns.
P Mike…your comment doesn’t make any sense to me. If we were discussing stock investments, and if someone described a bad experience with an investment that didn’t work out because the stock was overvalued and the company was ill-managed, would you think this was inappropriate? I don’t think Dean is whining: he is pointing out that higher ed may in many cases be a bad deal, or a least not as good a deal as advertised.
Wayne Dyer:
"All blame is a waste of time."
P Mike: I’ll bring up my personal life as an example any time it’s appropriate, and it’s utterly appropriate here. The truth is that going to college was a *major* waste of my time. It did not provide an enriching or rewarding experience. I learned very little over those four years even while graduating with the highest honors. I learned almost nothing. I was not spiritually, intellectually, or morally enriched in any but minor and superficial ways. There is nothing I learned in that four years that I could not compress into a few weeks at most. I had absolutely no need for it, and the reward I got for all that pointless effort was nothing but a big pile of debt I cannot pay and a divorce.
If you want to spend four years doing something you detest for no apparent purpose because you find it rewarding, bully for you. In the meantime, I got suckered into believing a degree would help me when it did not, and paid the price of lost time with my family and massive stress.
I thought before going to college that most people shouldn’t need to go to college. Now that I’ve graduated college, I feel even more strongly that most people shouldn’t need to go to college. I also feel that college is massively overpriced because of the cheap subsidized student loans, which causes tuitions to be terrifically high, and also results in a glut of people with degrees in the market, thus suppressing the value of a degree in the first place.
I don’t expect those who run the university system to agree that they need less tuition and fewer students, however. They are happy to have the extra money without having to prove that it provides substantial benefit.
I have a good friend who also got a college degree much later than is traditional and from talking to him he seems to feel it was a good investment. Before going, he found that there were some jobs for which not having a degree was an absolute disqualification. I don’t think he learned much that has actually made him better at his chosen field, because he’s almost entirely self-educated in that as it’s very cutting edge, but it did prevent his resume from being immediately discarded for some good opportunities.
He wasn’t married and doesn’t have kids, and he attended a community college so it wasn’t too painfully expensive, and he generally enjoys school so he didn’t simply hate every minute of it, as I sort of got the feeling you did, Dean. Without those factors it wasn’t all that bad and he seems to think it was worth it. When I met him fifteen years ago he was delivering pizza and driving a cab; this week he’s in China presenting (not just attending) at WWW2008. The degree didn’t do that all by itself, but it was a step along the way.
Elizabeth: Yeah, that all makes sense. I think part of the problem is also that I’m in the worst job market in the country right now. But I have to admit, there are places that say they require a degree, and in a highly competitive market, that does seem to at least get me past the "toss that application in the trash can, he’s got no degree" test. It seems like a pretty low bar to pass for all I went through, though.
Taking a class or two at a time at a cheap local community college would have been better, I agree. In the meantime, I’ve got a bachelor of science degree with honors and am applying at places to deliver pizzas and drive cabs because I can’t find a better job. %-)
I had similar feelings of frustration in the couple years after I graduated college. But I can say that I no longer feel that way. At first, I was working crappy jobs that I did not care for so it was easy to think that I could have a crappy job I didn’t care about w/o a degree. Now I have a job that I like and I am constantly learning and I would never have had this opportunity without a degree.
Also, as Elizabeth said, do not overlook the fact that a degree prevents your resume from being thrown right in the garbage on an initial screening. My manager recently indicated to me that I should either get my CFA or MBA. He said he doesn’t require it for my current job, but just offered it as advice saying that it will show that I can accomplish something when I go for my next job. I think it is important to not underestimate that part of it.
Yeah, well, the cynic in me says that this is what I said all along when I was going through it: "the main point of all this, since learning obviously isn’t the main point at all, is to prove that you’ll jump through a massive number of stupid hoops just to get a decent job."
It seems there ought to be more efficient ways, like making you walk through fire or swallow goldfish. I would have found that at least as rewarding as my four years of misery in (high honors graduated) college. (And I keep mentioning those high honors so no one tries to pull the "you just didn’t like it because you were a lousy student with no discipline" B.S. on me, which I get a lot until I point out that no, I graduated with straight As. It sucked and was pointless because it sucked and was pointless, not because I was stupid or lazy.)
Dean, I understand your cynicism, but am a bit surprised at how little you liked it. It is actually even more impressive that you got such good grades doing something that you disliked so much.Â
In any case, re more efficient ways. That is exactly why I am opting for my CFA rather than MBA.  Most people that have done both tell me that CFA is significantly more challenging and in depth. There are 3 levels to pass and only a 40% pass rate at each level. But I cringed when I saw the annual prices for grad school. CFA costs about $1000 for each level and my company pays for it. Of course, there is no school or professors to help you out, just 20-30 hours each week of on your own studying. I have little doubt that it will be the most challenging (and probably most satisfying) thing I will have done in my life.
I don’t know much about certifications outside of my own industry, but am wondering if those options are increasingly available (and looked highly upon)Â in part because of the (now) poor cost/benefit trade off of traditional university?Â
Paul S
So Dean’s problem is that he needs even more education?
If from 1980 the cost of a gallon of milk kept pace with the rising costs of college, a gallon of milk would cost $15 today. The rate of tuition inflation has outpaced the national rate of inflation by over 2%.
If colleges want to keep raising the costs of tuition fine. In a free market I’d say go ahead. But let’s make it a real free market and remove all federal funding these halls of indoctrination receive.
Scott,
I’m not seeing where I said that. We were talking about more efficient educations, so just generally wondering about certifications that are much less expensive than college and perhaps just as highly thought of in various industries.Â
Dean,
Personally, I *loved* college, and not just the fun-and-games part of it. If I was able I could totally see myself going back for another degree just because it was fun. Even the stuff I later decided was nonsense like my art history classes, even the stuff I’ll never use like Latin. Okay, maybe not the course in analysis of algorithms which I never did manage to pass, and maybe not chemistry, but I basically enjoyed most of my courses.
I echo Paul in saying it’s pretty impressive indeed that you got such good grades under the circumstances, but I think you should be wary of overestimating how common it is for people to hate attending school as much as you did.
Maybe there should be a test a person could sit for like the GED that would be considered the equivalent of a college degree? Even if it cost $10,000 and took four weeks to take, that’d still be a hell of a lot cheaper and quicker than a four-year degree.
The Power of Attitude
I am one of those people–and I admit, we are rare, but we are very real–who learn *very* poorly in a traditional classroom environment, and who learn best by being left alone with books and research tools and someone available who can answer brief questions, or with a study partner to work with.
I’ve always been this type of person. This made college maddeningly painful.
The odd part is, I do work as a professional trainer, and I have no trouble whatsoever sitting in front of a room teaching people. But to sit in a classroom and listen to a teacher, even a "stimulating" one leading "interesting discussions?" *SHUDDER SHUDDER SHUDDER GET ME OUT OF HERE!!!!*
The funny part is that education researchers know full well that there is a significant segment of learners like this. People who get degrees in education actually study it, and know that they’re often some of the brightest people. Yet somehow, most professional educators actually act offended when they encounter such a person. Even though they’ve even been told there are learners like this, they’re angry when they encounter one anyway. There’s some disconnect between what they’ve been taught and what they put into practice; I can’t tell you how often I’ve had people actually be offended when I say I learn poorly in a traditional classroom and find it extremely difficult, but it’s true; I mostly got through college by ignoring the teachers and either spacing out or reading or doing my homework while they talked at the front of the room.
I do admit that college would have been easier if I’d been simply a student, and not trying to manage a career and a family at the same time. But that just made even less enjoyable something that I never enjoy in the first place.
I work in a Community College, and I see all my colleagues around me at work all the time whining about ‘man I hate this class or that class’ and talking about what a letdown it was to finally complete that Doctorate Degree, and it strikes me ‘why are you doing it then?’
I got a basic AS degree in computer engineering, and have 10 years of experience in the field. That generally accounts for more than ANYTHING except at the upper levels (management level, which I really have no interest in at all) of things.
I much more value real life, and as such have no interest in ‘going back to school’ to get a higher degree. I honestly don’t understand most people that do. Around here it gets you a 3% pay raise (whoopty!) and mostly nothing else. I’d rather spend time with family, build mandolins , play music, and generally have a life.
Work is a means to an end, not the end.
Dean’s problem is that there are piss-poor opportunities within easy reach of his children, and he’s determined to stay a close part of their lives.
Yeah, that’s a major factor.
I began studying in a public university when I was 18. Mostly because the University of Illinois Chicago Undergraduate Division was located on Navy Pier, which was easy elevated train ride away from home. But the Korea war and a bunch of interesting jobs (which I needed in order to afford paying for and repairing my sports car of those years), so I didn’t finish my bachelor’s degree — at the U of I’s Champaign-Urbana campus – until 10 years later, at 28.
That got me a job with United Press International at one of their midwestern state bureaus, and later, a job as a PR operative with a large Chicago corporation.
After I hooked up with Stefi, in autumn 1969, we planned to go on together for graduate studies, after her completion of a bachelor’s degree in anthropology, which she did at the U of I’s Chicago Circle Campus, which was where they moved the Navy Pier campus to in 1961.
We did a year of graduate studies together overseas. Israel, of all places. Why? Mostly because it sounded like a once-in-a-lifetime adventure and because we could easily arrange one-year study grants. She was in anthopology and archaeology. I was in city and regional planning during this trip.
After we milked the hell out of that grant, we came back to the USA, got offers to get into our respective departments at UCLA (where the head of my israeli department was one the faculty) and the University of Arizona in Tucson, where Stefi had an aunt and uncle living and where the planning department bought my line of shit about regional planning and invited us in.
But we opted for U of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana once again. About a two hour drive to my folks in south suburban Chicago, and our respective departments offered us teaching and research assistantships. Also, Champaign had a damned fine shop specializing in repairing old VW buses, which we were into in that era.
We both completed our master’s with fine grades. (I did straight A’s which got me me membership in the Phy Kappa Phi honor society, along with a nifty lapel pin that I still have.) Instead of final term papers, we opted to research and write theses, hers in prehistoric eastern woodland trade relationships; mine in a statewide California planning scheme for social services delivery.
We were thinking then of doctorates. She got invites from Cornell, University of Washington at Seattle, University of Wisconsin-Madison and University of Pennsylvania at Philadelphia. I got invites from UP-Philadephia and from UW-Madison, along with a couple of others I forgot about. So in order to stay together, our choice was Madison or Philadelphia.
Philadelphia was bigger and probably more interesting. But Madison was only a six hour drive from Champaign-Urbana, and we were able to move all our stuff in one day with a small trailer.
Bad choice. In Madison, her Department of Anthropology was for shit, and my Department of Urban and Regional Planning treated me like dog meat.
Also by then, we had bought our present house and Stefi got pregnant with the first of our four children.
So after two years of additional studies, we both packed up our budding academic careers, turned to raising a family and to the never-ending obligation to pay for it all, after the GI Bill tuition grants ran out.
Complaints from me about any of the above? Hell no. It’s been a grand adventure and I wouldn’t have skipped a day of it.
Well, on reconsideration, I sometimes wonder why the hell we didn’t opt for Tucson, where the weather at least is mostly warm and dry.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
I’m torn. I really believe in the value of education; but in my limited experience, universities are lousy at delivering that value.
I’m not as bad as Dean; I can learn and enjoy learning in a classroom setting, but only if the instructor cares enough to make me care, too. At the University of Michigan, I was disappointed that I could only find one such caring teacher per semester after my freshman year (when I had two). Then I transfered to a smaller school, and discovered that one was a luxury. Zero was the norm. The instructors were there to do a job, or there to support their own studies and research, or there to promote their politico-social philosophies. Damn few of them were there to teach for the sake of teaching. Twenty-five years later, those few still stick in my brain, and I often find myself quoting them today.
And now my nieces and nephews are in college or have passed through; and the stories I hear from them sound like everything I hated about college, only worse. The bureaucracy sounds bigger. The costs sound a lot bigger. The caring teachers sound fewer. It’s like everyone’s playing a game: "You pay us this money and jump through these hoops, and we’ll give you a piece of paper that says you’re qualified for a hoop-jumping job."
I’ve become convinced that the old truism is more true than I ever realized: learn by doing is the best way to learn. But it’s darned hard to structure that and measure that and certify that. The old days of apprenticeships had a lot going for them.
I’m like Dean too; I drifted through high school with a mid-C average – and an annoying tendency to get either A’s or low C’s, depending on whether the class was interesting or not. I did nail my SATs and got an odd talking-to by the school counselor as to why I wasn’t "applying myself".
For me, the thing that made me go to college was a summer job working on an interstate moving van with my uncle. Loading and unloading house after house of furniture in midsummer through the Deep South convinced me that the blue-collar world was so not for me!
So, I pulled myself together and nailed junior college, and transfered to UC Berkeley as a JC transfer. There, I ended up being a math major (I’d always hated math until I took advanced math, where they actually explained how math worked versus memorizing formulas), but took lots of computer classes to eat.Â
After school, I worked in private industry for awhile, before going back to UCB as a staff programmer. I ended up running the programming part of the research project. I did this as a sort of dryrun to see if I wanted to go to grad school, but decided that grad student life wasn’t for me.
But that experience shaped my career; I’m now one of a very few people in the world with deep skills in my odd discipline. There aren’t many jobs in it, but there are even fewer people, so it’s provided a good living for about 15 years.
foobarista’s last blog post..Are the super-rich who advocate taxes really altruistic?
The linked article talks about how easy credit allowed a lot of people to go to college, and now that creidit is harder to get a lot of people cannot finish. The linked article does not say college is a waste of time.Â
While college may be a waste of time for some, it does not follow that the institution is overvalued and/or badly managed; even if it was, the consequences get paid by the student (or parents thereof) and they should have enough sense to check it out before the investment. If I spent the money it takes to go to school on a stock investment, be assured I’d check it out thoroughly before the crap shoot.
It may have been a waste of time for Dean, that does not mean it is generally a waste of time and does not generally cause families to break up.  Having got that off my chest, I am not particularly enamored of a degree. I spent a lot more than 4 years getting to my current educational state, and I did not particulalry enjoy it.  I got married Thanksgiving break of my first semester in an engineering program, and am still. In some ways the pressure of college acutally helped bonding through shared experiences under stress (and by the way, we ate a lot of rice and beans — not much money).
However, (long long ago in a galaxy far far away…) after 6 years in the USN rising to the august level of petty officer 2nd class, I realized the difference between me (an enlisted man) and the typical officer was a degree (I dropped out of college to join). Initially I considered the degree not much more than a Union card. After my education, I am faced with the reality that there was a lot of technical information that I did not understand and a lot of hard-core engineering that I could not have performed (not sure the typical naval officer I came in contact with could either, that’s another story).
Before the EU, various European countries had a kind of formal apprentice program for engineers as an alternative to college (maybe they still do, I don’t know), and for a fresh high school grad it takes something like that to make sure the practioner knows what he/she needs to know to do the job. In the U.S., a degree is a prerequisite for most professional jobs, period.
Dean I can’t tell you how much I empathize with you. I went back to school at age 38 to receive a masters in architecture. It was the single worst mistake of my life.
I expected a vocational training in the profession of architecture. What I got was four years of esoteric nonesense from bitter, arrogant, untalented hacks. We were repeatedly told what a privilege it was to be attending a university as if it were free and we were hand picked by the grace of God.
The university system has no checks and balances. It is accountable to no one. Have you ever tried to voice a complaint or concern? You get no where fast. It cloaks itself as an altruistic organization when it is really nothing more than a business. A business that enjoys the luxury of non accountability to its clients (students), and like any other business it’s only concerned about it’s bottom line. They will tell you whatever you want to hear but have no real interest in ‘educating’ you. The university system is first and foremost about the university ’system’. Next in line are the instructors and their personal interests. The student’s education and self revelations of are no interest to them. Where there are no checks and balances complacency and corruption will prevail.
Trade schools and apprenticeships provide a much better education less expensively and more quickly than a university can but the accreditation is not there. Hopefully this will change as the price of a university education continues to increase beyond what people are willing or able to pay.
John, I agree with every damned word of that, but this is the sentence that most needs underlining: "Where there are no checks and balances complacency and coruption will prevail."
Preach it, brother. And that’s true absolutely everywhere: government, the corporate world, education, research, medicine, even religion.
A lotta great, personal stories above!
John H.,
You have perfectly described current life in academia. The university system is first and foremost about the university ’system’. Next in line are the instructors and their personal interests.
Knowing this, though, one can still benefit from college. Go to a school with good weather, read the books you want, if you’re not going to grad school, don’t worry too much about grades. Drink some and have fun. Do some interesting internships and extra-curriculars. Make some good contacts.
College is a young man’s game. Going to school later in life, when you have familial and financial obligations is real, real tough.
HB
I think the value of an education depends on what you are studying. I think people who are good at business do so because of natural ability and instinct. I don’t think a business degree will help most people who are already capable.
I think the same can be said in communications, art, and music, just to name a few. Now, don’t get me wrong, a person still needs to study the subject, but much of the capability is already there.
Some areas are different. I have a B.S. in mechanical engineering from Texas A&M. I don’t see how I could have learned the information on my own. I also think that, so far, the degree has been worth it. I went back to school at age 31 and graduated in 2005. Prior to that, my highest paying year ever was $25,000. My first job after graduation was $48,000 per year with bonuses and vacation time usable immediately. The downside was that I had to commute 65 miles one way to Dallas. Now, I am making over $60,000 per year a mere ten minutes from home.
Having said that, some companies require a degree to "move up the ladder" and many require it to get "in the door". Just to show how unimportant the education is in some cases, the area of study doesn’t matter, just that you "have a degree". At one point, I thought I would have to go into retail management to get closer to home. In many cases, I think I was turned away because I was "too educated". I had this engineering degree and couldn’t get interviews for management positions.
At our local Sam’s Club, the store manager makes about $75-80,000 per year base plus a bonus. Last year, the bonus was about $125,000 (that was for hitting 85% of projected sales). I know this because I have a friend who works there in management. That store manager has no degree; he came up through the ranks and, to top it off, he is only 35.
Sometimes I think I would have been better off if I had gone to work at Sam’s in 2001, but I wouldn’t trade my time at Texas A&M for anything…
Dean and all, I am still trying to cram four years of college into 30+. Finshed HS with a high C average, took about two years at the JC level, mostly computer classes and have been paying the bills ever since. I think about going back to school, but three years full time starting at age 50 just does not seem worth it. Our daughters are hitting their teens. I love their mom, my wife of 20 years and the kids. The thought of seeing them only a few hours a week after Paying Job and college would just stink to high heaven.
I am a reader and try to work on self-education. While he may be an extreme exception, Dave Thomas of Wendy’s fame obtained his GED when he was in his 60s.
Dave
There is a very concise definition of universities and their employees.
Charlatan:
1 :Â quack 2 2 :Â one making usually showy pretenses to knowledge or ability :Â fraud, faker
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