Being someone who went to college and was about 5 classes short of graduation with a BS, I found I have an interesting perspective. Once I discovered that I was more than capable of being hired and working on my own merit and intelligence, the desire to go back to school to get my bachelors degree faded quickly.

I also discovered the long held truth that college education is not about getting a job. It is about becoming an educated person. It is about teaching you how to learn. Colleges have been selling their product as a solution to success and that you get a degree and then the world is an open book. What was left out was the massive amount of hard work and sacrifice to get you there. Even more to the point, was college simply made your starting point a bit higher on the scale but you still had to prove yourself like everyone else.

We long blew past the return on investment being positive for most college degrees. With $60,000+ in debt, there is no way to settle that deficit in less than a decade. Meanwhile, you could have been working for 4 years and had more experience and a career than a college graduate. I know a couple friends of mine who graduated with computer masters degrees and couldn’t find work. They were too expensive and didn’t have enough experience to justify the cost.

This article lays out this long sob story about these girls and tries to sell it as being difficulty with getting through college. However, the article is littered with one bad decision after another which lead to their bitter conclusion.

We are treating college education as a trade school. If you want to go to school to learn skills to get a job, go to trade school. There are HUGE job opportunities in various trades that could earn you a lot of money at a very young age.

The education bubble is close to bursting and no doubt the taxpayer will have to clean up just like the housing market.

Likely reasons include soaring incomes at the top and changes in family structure, which have left fewer low-income students with the support of two-parent homes. Neighborhoods have grown more segregated by class, leaving lower-income students increasingly concentrated in lower-quality schools. And even after accounting for financial aid, the costs of attending a public university have risen 60 percent in the past two decades. Many low-income students, feeling the need to help out at home, are deterred by the thought of years of lost wages and piles of debt…

Just say “liberal policies,” it’s quicker.

You should hear what they teach in macro economics.

Timin203 on December 24, 2012 at 6:38 PM

I just finished a semester of macro, oh brother, I wouldn’t have believed how bad it was unless I heard it with my own ears! Even my husband’s anti-Keynsian rankings didn’t due justice to how ridiculous AD and As curves are. My professor is waiting for the return of the Phillips curve as well. I can’t hear about GDP without rolling my eyes now that I know how they calculate that number. No wonder the world is falling apart.

What we’re talking about is a threat to the American dream.”

An ever-increasing government is what is threatening the American Dream.

Get government’s nose out of higher education and watch tuition drop like a rock.

Start taxing those endowments. Put the same constraints on a university’s ability to make a “profit” the same an the insurance companies. Give students a “refund” if the college has too much money at the end of the fiscal year.

Nothing I learned in college is applicable to my current job, and a decent amount of the required classes were just leftist propaganda. You should hear what they teach in macro economics.

Oh I know. I’m a college boy who earns his living in a skilled trade that learned in the school of hard knocks.

Four years later, their story seems less like a tribute to upward mobility than a study of obstacles in an age of soaring economic inequality. Not one of them has a four-year degree. Only one is still studying full time, and two have crushing debts. Angelica, who left Emory owing more than $60,000, is a clerk in a Galveston furniture store.

“Crushing debt” How, exactly, did they acquire this debt? At what point did the lender discover none of them was going to be able to re-pay the loan? And, what are the reasons they don’t have their degrees yet?

Why, the answer is right here….

Each showed the ability to do college work, even excel at it. But the need to earn money brought one set of strains, campus alienation brought others, and ties to boyfriends not in school added complications. With little guidance from family or school officials, college became a leap that they braved without a safety net.

The need to earn money and campus alienation is not a unique element for minorities. Boyfriends? You mean, I have to pay for these loans because of “boyfriends”? Really? In what bizarre world is this a valid reason for anything?

We need to take the emphasis off of college and start encouraging vocational education as well.

single stack on December 24, 2012 at 6:34 PM

Honestly, 90% of majors in college are useless anyways. People are better off saving their money and just going right in to the work force… If companies would stop using “college degree” as an equivalent of “not an idiot” (I know a LOT of idiots with degrees). Nothing I learned in college is applicable to my current job, and a decent amount of the required classes were just leftist propaganda. You should hear what they teach in macro economics.