So that actually makes the numbers worse. If a good proportion of the debt is for grad/professional schools that are unlikely to default, it concentrates the defaults and increases the default rate for undergrad and the grad programs that don’t make bank.
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UCB, we have beat this horse to death on a bunch of other threads. You believe that employers have created credential creep- which leads to a pernicious cycle of kids needing to get degrees (or certifications) for things which do not require outside credentialing. I believe that credential creep results from a drift downwards on the skills that a HS graduate should have. You posit that it is harder- not easier- to graduate from HS today, and I point out that employers would LOVE that to be the case- it is cheaper, easier, more efficient to assume that Rando Urban HS churns out kids who can become pharm techs without killing a patient, vs. having to find community colleges which offer that pathway. And how much more so if a kid graduating from HS could competently function in a wide variety of other roles- again, cheaper and easier.
But it’s not. That is not the state of play for a large number of HS grads who come out unprepared for entry level jobs. So no, the BA isn’t going to teach a kid who is starting in Disney’s management training program any “content” per se, but it is a filter of sorts that the new grad can read, compute, summarize, analyze, synthesize…
And there we are. Do you think corporations want to make it HARDER to hire people? No.
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New thread for this topic: What college majors are worthy? Or what criteria determines the worthiness of a college major?
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are we really doing all of them a favor
You know what? This came off as pretty condescending. I had a longer and crankier response that I trimmed in the interest of civility.
In this country we generally try to keep doors open and preserve opportunities for people, and leave room for personal choices. In some cases we put up a few fences around the dangerous stuff, like the for-profit schools we pulled the rug from in the past few years. But mostly we let the market dictate what options make sense. There aren’t nearly as many Negro Studies or Feminist Theory programs as there were in the 70s because people stopped enrolling in them and schools changed what they offered. You can still find them of course, along with recreation studies, sports management and a circus of other nonsense, but overall offerings tend to change to keep up with the times. If folks can’t get jobs with Medieval Studies degrees then those depts will shrink until they match the needs of the incoming students. That’s why people have to wait until grad school to get a meaningful degree in many specialties instead of just getting a BA in Library Science, for example.
Stepping back, it’s not up to you or me to determine what constitutes a “better life” for someone else. They choose a path and have to pay the price in the short and long terms. As a nation we don’t offer a ton of assistance to kids trying to get through college so we shouldn’t insist on a lot of control over the options. But we can help ensure a better outcome for our investment by adding low cost guardrails to help those closest to the edge. UT showed some substantive and inexpensive ways to bulk counsel their incoming classes and shore up the places where those kids might encounter trouble. Schools could do similar outreach to families of FGLI kids to illustrate how college is not high school and how they can support their student.
There are a host of reasons kids are “not prepared” for college. But the fact remains that there are significantly better outcomes for the folks that make it through than those who don’t. As @blossom notes there are many places where it’s a concrete barrier to advancement whether you agree or not. (I’m in IT and one of my old managers was a first gen college grad who placed a huge value on navigating the academic journey to a BS and sticking it out to the end.) But it’s not just about jobs either, it’s about aspirations and achievement and pride and goals you can let your kids dream of. Folks on the outside need to know it’s possible to achieve this so that they don’t have to say “My family doesn’t go to college.”
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It actually is the case, from what I have seen. When I went to high school in the “good old days”, there was no way that most of the barely-graduating (with D grades) non-college-bound students would be those you would trust to learn and do the job of a pharm tech (or various other jobs) correctly, at least immediately after high school (it is possible that they matured later to become more suitable for more jobs or college starting at community college). Of course, in those “good old days”, most of the graduates of my high school were White, so perhaps there was more of an assumption of competence based on that.
Credential creep has advantages for employers, such as less on-the-job training costs (more of the needed training is done beforehand at the employee’s expense), and less labor flexibility (employee is less able to go into a different type of job because those other jobs require credentials that cost time and money).
I don’t follow. The huge numbers of students that fail out/drop out of college suggests that colleges are sticking to their requirements.
Not sure what you mean? Specifically, which majors have been created by reputable colleges to keep kids from failing out? You’ve repeated this so many times that you must have some particular examples in mind.
“1800+ majors” is another of Vin Scully’s “drunk leaning on a lamppost” statistics; offered for support, but not illumination.
The list to which you refer (from mymajors.com) includes not only majors leading to a four-year baccalaureate degree, it also includes two year Associate programs as well certificate programs offered at vocational training centers.
For example, the list includes “dental assisting” even though “dental assisting” is a certificate program lasting less than two years and often available at vocational centers like the Butte County Occupational Center.
Further, because there is no standardized nomenclature for such things, and because the list includes every iteration of every post high school “instruction program,” there is a tremendous about of double counting and overlap.
For example the website lists 16 categories of “majors” in Engineering Technologies and Engineering-Related Fields (some of which aren’t four year degrees), and another 38 categories of Engineering majors. And many of these categories contain multiple majors within the category. For example Civil Engineering contains five different “majors.”
Whatever the actual number of majors for baccalaureate degrees at reputable four year institutions, it is a heck of a lot less than 1800+. More importantly, you still haven’t provided any examples of worthless majors, nor have you provided your criteria for so deciding what is worthless and what is not.
What, specifically are these supposedly “pseudo ‘academic’ fields” of study that should be eliminated from the offerings at reputable four year institutions?
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The truth is that there’re more than just the for-profit colleges which would be more than happy to offer any major that someone, or some entity, would pay for it, especially when such majors cost the schools far less than more traditional majors. These students didn’t choose because they didn’t really have other options. This isn’t a market.
That hasn’t been my experience. I’ve watched many traditional colleges consolidating majors, re-branding, forming consortiums, etc… because there aren’t enough students enrolling in certain majors.
I agree with @StPaulDad that if the market place isn’t supporting certain majors, they will start dying away. Few schools have deep enough pockets to maintain majors that aren’t attracting a good number of students.
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Yes, a major will start dying away eventually if there isn’t a demand for it. But what if there’s an artificially generated “demand”?
Oh, you mean majors like Biology? There’s not a great job market to support biology grads. Do you think there’s artificially generated “demand” for biology? I actually don’t have an answer myself to this question, so I’m not trying to do a “gotcha” or anything.
Probably best to send this discussion over to the new tangent thread…
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No, of course not. As I’ve stated, I judge a major by its academic potential, not its earning potential.
Actually, pure sciences don’t really rely on markets. No one, other than the government, would pay for the research to look into the origin of the universe, for example.
Which of the over 125 majors offered by UCLA are unworthy?
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I would apply for the atmospheric and oceanic studies/mathematics B.S. I was a huge Jacques-Yves Cousteau fan when I was a kid.
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There’s a whole other thread that somebody started earlier today about the topic of worthy vs unworthy college majors.
Timely article in the NYT. Some Colleges Don’t Produce Big Earners. Are They Worth It? - The New York Times
Highlights:
" Three years ago, in an examination that should have received a lot more attention, the center-left think tank Third Way put all available data for all higher education institutions together. It found that at 52 percent of the schools, more than half of the enrollees were not earning more than the typical high school graduate six years after they began their studies. After 10 years, the figure was still 29 percent."
The study referenced. Higher Ed’s Broken Bridge to the Middle Class – Third Way
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Very interesting study with an eye-catching top-line, but upon closer examination I’m not sure it is quite as compelling as it seems initially.
- Over a thousand of the institutions covered by the study are "for-profit” institutions and the results are heavily skewed by their inclusion. I think most here would agree that oftentimes the business model of “for profit” schools involves preying on vulnerable segments of society in order to harvest their financial aid and other resources. (While the study breaks down this info for short term results, it doesn’t do so for longer term results, which are arguably much more pertinent.)
- The study also includes non-baccalauriate programs including certificate programs and vocational training. For example, it includes results from students who attended institutions such as the “New Beginnings College of Cosmetology” in Albertville, Alabama. I don’t think that this is the type of type of institution we are referring to when we speak of the relative value of a college education.
- The study also includes data from students who drop out, even if those students drop out almost immediately. While drop-outs are obviously a huge issue and worth further exploration, I’m not sure it is enlightening in this context to compare the income of a person who only completed high school with the income of a person who enrolled college and dropped out shortly thereafter.
- The study eschews the use of the median income for those who studied beyond high school, but then uses the median income for the high school only group, even though the potential drawbacks of using the median apply equally to both groups. For example, one reason for not using the median with the former group is because of potential "earnings disparities that exist in more rural areas of the country and for women and students of color.” But if such disparities exist for students of a particular school, then will almost certainly also exist for the the broader communities from which these students come. For example, in certain areas and for certain demographics, $28,000 dollars may be well above the "typical earnings” of a person with only a high school education. So it is not a like-to-like comparison.
- Also, I am not sure that using the income 6 years after starting is all that useful. For those pursuing a baccalaureate degree, they may have just finished up 6 years after starting, and may not yet have transitioned into longer term employment. The study does provide some info for the longer period, and the numbers are much better, but the study does not provide longer term numbers broken down by public/ non-profit/ for profit. In other words, the study doesn’t tell us how those who attend public and private non-profit schools fared 10 years after starting school, which may only be 3 or four years after graduating.
There is more, but bottom line is I am not sure that this study tells us much about the value of a pursuing a baccalaureate degree from a reputable (not for-profit) institution.
To further contextualize the study, here is the nationwide comparison of the median incomes by education level.
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cba/annual-earnings
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In Third Way , it looks like much of the described problem occurs heavily at the certificate or associates degree level, since 80.2% of certificate granting institutions, 72.1% of associates degree granting institutions, and 17.8% of bachelor’s degree granting institutions fail the “50% of graduates earn more than a typical high school graduate six years after enrollment” test.
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“Credential creep has advantages for employers, such as less on-the-job training costs (more of the needed training is done beforehand at the employee’s expense), and less labor flexibility (employee is less able to go into a different type of job because those other jobs require credentials that cost time and money).”
Your second point is empirically false. Employers need more labor flexibility not less. Less flexibility means more costs for less productivity. There are high costs and financial penalties associated with having a labor force which cannot be flexed or moved to meet demand or changes in business conditions…
Sure, there is a huge problem with the certificate and and associate degree institutions (imo many/most of these diploma mills should be shut down for fraud or at least denied access to federal loans), but for close to 18% of bachelor degree granting schools to fail the 50% test is not an insignificant number. It means for kids entering these 18% (almost 1 in 5) of bachelor granting schools, they have as a group greater than a 50/50 chance of coming out making less than the median high school grad. This is not even accounting for the saved/earned money spent, debt incurred or time invested.
But this goes to the original question of this thread. Are we sending students who are ill-prepared for college to college at a waste of time and money (theirs and often the taxpayers). But yes, a segmentation of just graduates only would give us a better idea of the relative value of a bachelors degree vs high school degree as your chart shows. I think there is no debate that overall having a bachelors degree enhances your economic opportunities. The question is if that is true for a subset of certain students, certain institutions and certain majors, especially if we factor in costs and time.
I think the methodology is valid for what is being measured. The study is not trying to find the gap in median value between having a degree and no degree. It is asking what percent of students who go into higher education ended up with an income outcome less than that of the median HS grad. That number is alarmingly high without even going into the cost side.
What I got out of the study and something that I have always advocated, is that there needs to be greater standard transparency of outcomes by institution and more standards for institutions to meet to obtain federal subsidized funding. From the study:
“Providing information on post-enrollment employment outcomes to students and families is critical, as it can help them determine whether an institution is providing a return on investment for students who enroll… As prospective students consider which institutions will serve them well, it’s critical that they factor in this minimum baseline of economic success as they weigh their postsecondary options. And as Congress works toward a rewrite of the Higher Education Act , it’s essential that policymakers put more effective guardrails in place that assure students will be financially better off after they attend a federally funded institution, ensuring taxpayers get a return on their massive annual investment in higher education institutions across the United States. If not, millions of students may end up worse off than if they hadn’t enrolled in the first place, and low-performing schools will continue to cash in taxpayer subsidies while failing on the promise to prepare students for success in the 21st century economy.”
No different than standard consumer disclosure for many higher ticket items, there should be standard disclosure in standard format and methodology on at least graduation rate (overall and by major), % employed and % in grad programs by major 1 year after college, and median starting income by major. Students and parents should not be forced to be internet detectives on these critical considerations.
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Yes, but what makes up those 18%? Are they mostly dodgy diploma mills or specialty schools in fields associated with low pay (e.g. arts or religion)? Or do they include many academically reputable general schools?