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A college degree is a lousy investment

Publicized tuition of the top ranked universities:

Princeton: $56,010
Columbia: $63,530
Harvard: $55,587
MIT: $55,878
Yale: $59,950
Stanford: $56,169

Very narrow band of tuition costs, sure doesn't look like a free market.
 
The Debt Trap, An NPR Best Book of 2021, available on Amazon:

From acclaimed Wall Street Journal reporter Josh Mitchell, the “devastating account” (The Wall Street Journal) of student debt in America.

In 1981, a new executive at Sallie Mae took home the company’s financial documents to review. “You’ve got to be shitting me,” he later told the company’s CEO. “This place is a gold mine.”

Over the next four decades, the student loan industry that Sallie Mae and Congress created blew up into a crisis that would submerge a generation of Americans into $1.5 trillion in student debt. In The Debt Trap, Wall Street Journal reporter Josh Mitchell tells the “vivid and compelling” ( Chicago Tribune) untold story of the scandals, scams, predatory actors, and government malpractice that have created the behemoth that one of its original architects called a “monster.”

As he charts the “jaw-dropping” (Jeffrey Selingo, New York Times bestselling author of Who Gets in and Why) seventy-year history of student debt in America, Mitchell never loses sight of the countless student victims ensnared by an exploitative system that depends on their debt. Mitchell also draws alarming parallels to the housing crisis in the late 2000s, showing the catastrophic consequences student debt has had on families and the nation’s future. Mitchell’s character-driven narrative is “necessary reading” ( The New York Times) for anyone wanting to understand the central economic issue of our day.
 
Yet people think it’s unreasonable to release people from the trap.
 
Washington Post weighs in on this topic. STEM degrees worth it.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2021/11/01/college-degree-value-major/

Just would like to add that the pay scale for certain fields and careers doesn’t reflect their value or necessity to society. Capitalism rewards those professional fields that *create* wealth. It’s very unwise for a society to discourage people from choosing career fields based on that single criteria.

People who take the mindset that college education is a privilege reserved for people who can independently pay for are not considering the consequences of segregation. Consider all these fields of study that our society doesn’t financially reward, is it acceptable that only the wealthy should have access to them?
 
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Washington Post weighs in on this topic. STEM degrees worth it.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2021/11/01/college-degree-value-major/
Gotta include the fine print, my dude
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Using earnings two years later eliminates a lot of career paths.

It’s also a weird way to demonize being young and doing what you want to do before settling into a career.

In terms of majors, it’s ridiculous to look at today’s earnings and industries to decide what someone should major in now to start their career that will last until the 2070s.
 
Just to reaffirm what phdeac wrote above: it often takes humanities majors five to ten years or more to find their niche, but studies show that after that period their job satisfaction and quality of life are routinely higher and, at least among English majors, their salaries are competitive with even majors which pay the most right out of school
 
Gotta include the fine print, my dude
54da1fc237c5c9450168befbd2b86401.jpg

I thought the fact that the WaPo had the article in its electronic edition was of interest and relevant. Having an entity like the Post report on a topic like this gives it more gravitas than if the article was from somebody's Twitter feed or Facebook page.

The report is based on limited data, as acknowledged within the report.

As others noted, there is societal value to many fields of knowledge. However, salaries are not always commensurate with that value. The gain is to society. Costs fall on the individual, at least initially. That is a good argument for more "work in this field and have your loans forgiven" programs.
 
Because knowing how to read and write various styles is important and people actually pay good money for that skill.
 
Cross posted from chat thread:

Au Pair wants to take a couple classes while she's here in the states. I'm sitting in UNC-G's admissions office. This experience is traumatic. No wonder our schools cost an arm and a leg. The administrative bloat is off the charts. This is Big Gay.

I can't overstate how WAAAAAY too serious fucking UNC-G takes itself.
 
Man surprised international students have paperwork.
 
Man surprised international students have paperwork.

Dude, fucking $7,000++ for two classes as a visiting student. Get the fuck outta here, Harvard 2.0.

I can't get over how pissed off I am. UNCG is a step down in rigor from some of the local community colleges. While it may be a step up in terms of environment, fuck me for $7,000.
 
You should tell her college is a lousy investment.
 
You should tell her college is a lousy investment.

I'm not fucking kidding you, pH. Sitting down with that admissions counselor felt way more like a fucking pyramid scheme than it did admission into a institution of higher education. I'm so glad that I had this experience. I've got kids that are about 9 years out on going to school, I'm going to reevaluate again whether that's a wise call
 
Administration at the college level is largely off the chart ignorant of everything going on.
On the flip side, with the lack of jobs in higher ed, the level of instruction at schools ranging from the lowest tier to the Ivy Leagues is largely the same. The only thing that differs is the name on the degree and, perhaps, the type of opportunities (but lower tier schools many times have their own opportunities since they have more personalized instruction many times). I don't and won't have kids, but, if I did, I'd tell them to go to the cheapest private school they could go to no matter the name. Then they will get high quality professors that they will actually know because of small class sizes.
 
I'm not fucking kidding you, pH. Sitting down with that admissions counselor felt way more like a fucking pyramid scheme than it did admission into a institution of higher education. I'm so glad that I had this experience. I've got kids that are about 9 years out on going to school, I'm going to reevaluate again whether that's a wise call

In high school I wanted to take a photography class at the local community college and they wouldn’t let me do it unless I passed a writing skills assessment. It was essentially a spelling and grammar test.

Woman was super condescending about it and how they couldn’t know whether or not I was qualified to take courses at their institution.

Ended up getting 100 and she said I was welcome to enroll.
 
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