<p>Article: The</a> Case For And Against College - The Market Ticker ®
In addition to being applicable to any student or parent, this article makes many different interesting points about college majors, debt, and future prospects with a degree.
I suggest you read the entire article, but here are a few of its main points:
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What do the four/five years cost you?
Ok. You start at 18 and "retire" at 65. This is 47 years.
If you go to school you have 42 years to accumulate surplus.
If we save $2,000 a year of an initial $20,000 annual income @ 4.5% interest(salary increase) for 47 years we will wind up with $307,345.27. If we do so for 42 years we wind up with $237,849.58.</p>
<p>This means that in future values that five years costs you about $70,000 down the road.
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Now, you say, but you will earn more with a college degree. This is likely true - but to a large degree it depends on exactly what field you decide to go into.
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If your field of study is in a "soft" science: Literature, arts, journalism, political science or similar then you can only justify your education if it can be completed in full without taking on one dollar of debt. That is, if you can self-finance it through employment, scholarship, gifts or savings. If not you are almost certainly wasting your money.</p>
<p>If your field of study is one where a degree is allegedly required, you may be wasting your money. "Allegedly" required areas are things such as computer programming and similar endeavors. The claim (oft-repeated in ads in the paper) that one cannot get a job in these fields without a college degree is false. I stand as personal testament to this. What is true is that if you suck, you won't be employed without a degree, but if you suck you shouldn't be employed anyway, and degree or no degree, you won't be employed for long.</p>
<p>If your field is one where the work can be offshored you will be competing with the wages of people in India but they will not have paid the price you did for your "education." Think about that one long and hard. Plenty of computer engineers and similar supposed professionals have discovered this the hard way. The rah-rah rage of the 90s where you could get a computer science degree and land a $100,000+ job have given way to employers sending those jobs to India - for $25,000/year. Guess what wage they offer you? Yep. Again, if you really enjoy the work that's fine, but not if you have to take debt to complete your education.</p>
<p>*If your field is capacity-controlled and, after careful study you are not concerned about a glut that could trash prices or government intervention (same), then and only then does the "chase the degree for high dollars" game make sense. * Good luck with that premise - but these are the only fields where taking any debt works. Lots of kids have tried this in the medical fields, for example, only to run smack-dab into Obama. Ditto in the legal fields. There are surprisingly few Cochrans who have ever lived (the famous one who defended OJ is of course dead) and a hell of a lot of lawyers who wind up pushing paper for mid-five-figures in some company. How's $200k worth of debt going to work for you if you go down that road and wind up in that dead end? You might want a pistol - for your mouth. Don't go there - avoid the pitfall rather than figuring it out after you make the mistake.</p>
<p>Be very, very aware that in a number of fields - especially things such as computer science or computer engineering - the college you are looking at may have horrific conflicts of interest. Specifically, a number of universities are effectively captive "employee mills" for certain employers in their region and state. Their programs are tailor-made for that particular employer or group of employers and what they want as graduates, effectively becoming their captive training enterprises. This is great if you want to work for "Company X." It sucks severely if you don't and discover post-graduation that your skillset has been "tailor made" and doesn't mesh well generally with the marketplace - but rather, is matched well only with one or two employers in a given region. This is a hell of a lot more common than you'd think, including among public university systems, and is NEVER, EVER disclosed up front.
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Because the college industry has managed to get laws passed that make their funding sources damn near immune to the problems that face most businesses when they go overboard and try to pump prices beyond value. </p>
<p>Specifically, your parents will be pressured to fill out and sign a "FAFSA" form, which is a federal government form that will then turn around and tell your parents what they're "expected" to contribute to your education. (Incidentally, the point of being 18 is that you can not only give your parents the finger should you so choose, they can give you the finger. It's called being an adult, and in the real world one does not have a right to "expect" things from one's biological parents beyond their 18th birthday. *This outright scam was promulgated by the universities themselves and written into law. * Family ties beyond 18 should be based on mutual respect, not government guns up your Mom and/or Dad. Chew on that a bit and consider how much you'd like being told to go to your room at 18... I think you'll figure it out.)
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Then there's entitlement, and there the blame is partly those of kids who have come before you. College dorms used to be cinderblock buildings with four walls and a shared shower and toilet between two rooms, each of which held (usually) two students. No cable TV jacks, no posh condo-style "dorms", etc. Yes, there was a pool and weight room and such - in the gym, halfway across campus. Food was, well, bad. Ask you Mom or Dad. Today so-called "Student Life" in these institutions is more like living in a luxury condo than a dormitory, and the price has matched it. Then there's the other signs of opulence, including massive building programs for facilities that are, quite frankly, nice but not necessary. Who pays? You do, whether you will ever use these facilities or not.</p>
<p>Add all this up and you have a college environment that was basically free to hike prices willy-nilly, and still is. They did it because they could effectively gyp you and your folks into funding it, never mentioning that if you defaulted on a student loan you were absolutely and completely screwed, as unlike any other sort of debt it can't be discharged.
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My argument is mostly about the fact that in virtually every case if you are unable to pay for your education either from contemporary earnings (that is, working while in school), scholarships, savings or voluntary gifts from family and relatives, the taking on of debt to do so is a bad idea, and that it has been an intentional and concerted effort by universities and the minions in industry that have driven costs so high - and then tried to argue that you "should" just suck it up and deal with it.
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<p>So what are your thoughts?</p>