<p>Oh, my. This thread has gotten a tad bit–ahem, passionate. First of all, IndianParent, several of us have posted how the choice of college was not about financial ROI based on cost vs future earnings potential but factors much more personal and intrinsic. Perhaps we didn’t use the same words as you (passion), but reading the intent behind the words, yes indeed, it is there. Next, the reason for the strong feelings expressed is resident in how personal the matter is–and it is all tied up in ethics, values, choices, opportunities, histories and worldview. We all have different ones. Ours are only right --or true or reality–for us. Yes we all live different lives. But apparently we all have college aged kids whom we care about or (presumably) we wouldn’t be here. And that is indeed a tie that binds us all commonly. Not some magazine article. Rant off.</p>
<p>Well said proudMomofS. Most of us have college aged kids, and thats what draws us to this site But apparently thats not true of all of us.</p>
<p>Many of us talk about “fit”. IMO, that is very important for a college experience, and is talked about quite frequently on CC. When fit and finances go together, thats ideal.</p>
<p>If financial ROI is important to you, this list suggests that, assuming full sticker prices for the typical student who won’t get a graduate degree, some public schools offer the best financial ROI, followed by Ivies, followed by some LACs. That is not a very surprising finding given those assumptions. However, your mileage may vary. In fact, your mileage almost certainly will vary (unless your profile closely fits the assumptions.)</p>
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<p>Ouch :-). As fate would have it one of my profs at Purdue was an expert in tapping, I kid you not… As in, finger tapping used in figuring out how the brain processes information by simple experiments… </p>
<p>About a month into the class I finally learned why the limit exists and why two fingers are faster than one… </p>
<p>Priceless.</p>
<p>I have never used the stuff since, but it’s fun to know.</p>
<p>The jobs that are being created by this economy are for the most part non exportable service and construction jobs, not jobs which require a college degree. During the years of 01 and 06, when times were still “good” and we hadn’t entered into a Depression, the information sector of the US economy lost 645,000 jobs or 17.4% Computer systems design and related lost 116,000 or 8.7% of its work force. During that period of time, Oracle moved 2k jobs to India, among others including WS firms which moved their back room tech and analysis work overseas as well. And this was during the time when this economy was booming.</p>
<p>Engineering jobs in general are also falling, due to that fact that manufacturing sectors that employ engineers are in decline. Again if you bothered to look at the period of time when things were “good” (01-06), the US lost 1.2 million jobs in the creation and building of machinery, computers, electronics, semiconductors, communication equipment, electrical equipment, motor vehicles and transportation equipment. The BLS payroll job numbers show a total of 70,000 jobs created in all fields of architecture and engineering, which also included clerical staff, for that period of time. So when we were booming and money and wealth was supposedly flowing, this economy created a mere 14,000 jobs per year in arch/engineering. The annual graduating classes for those majors is far in excess of that, and that before the FEDS allowed a minimum of 65,000 h-1B visas annually for skilled foreign workers as well as many more L-1 visas.</p>
<p>All of the occupations with largest project employment growth in terms of the number of jobs for the next decade are in nontradable domestic services, meaning for this “incredible job machine” otherwise known as the US economy, are retail sales, registered nurses, postsecondary teachers, customer service representatives, janitors and cleaners, waiters and waitresses, food preparation, home health aides, nursing aides, orderlies and attendants, general and operations managers. Few of these jobs require a college education.</p>
<p>People are propagating a myth that education is an axiomatic good, one that many students believe and that is leading to economic ruin. As a percentage of population, there are more people in college than at any time in the history of the republic, and precisely at a time when the economy is incapable of creating high wage, high skill careers which cannot be shipped off overseas, or are not being filled by foreign workers. To insist that college is somehow going to create the income when those jobs cannot begin to pay back high debt is plain ridiculous… </p>
<p>Colleges and universities should be taxed to hell for their outrageous tuitions that keep going up every year even when new grads continue to face declining wages and job prospects. ROI for a college education has been in rapid decline.</p>
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<p>2000-2003 was not a period of “good” economic times.</p>
<p>Even if you want to try to calculate return on investment from a college education, it seems to me that just looking at income at various years out is a very crude way of doing this, because when it comes to careers, there are many things that people value in addition to salary. These include job security, prestige, availability of leisure time, opportunities for travel, and more. Who is more “successful,” a tenured professor at Smith, or the chief financial officer of a mid-sized corporation in Ohio?</p>
<p>I suspect most of us want college to do a number of things for our kids: to broaden their horizons AND to prepare them for a fulfilling career. Some careers require more focus on the career preparation than others do (i.e., if you want to be a lawyer, you can use your undergrad years to broaden your horizons as much as you like–not quite so much if you want to be a doctor, and even less if you want to be an engineer).</p>
<p>Note: I just looked it up, and the average salary for a full professor at Smith is $130,000.</p>
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<p>A friend of mine was a tenured computer science professor at a non-flagship state university. She was lured away by a firm that offered her almost three times what she was making at the university. A year later, she was sorry she had done it - the money was nice, she said, but not enough to compensate for the 70-hour weeks, the lack of a three-month summer break, and the inability to pursue pure research. After a couple of years, she was able to find a tenure-track job at another college and snapped it right up, taking a significant pay cut. (This was in the 80s, when tenured positions were not as scarce.) She did say that the three-year venture into industry had been a valuable experience, but not one that she would ever want to repeat.</p>
<p>annasdad</p>
<p>I am sure most of us have similar stories. On the other hand, there are many academicians who made this same transition and never looked back. They valued the money, opportunities for travel and conferences, very different set of challenges, etc. I participated in a number of conferences where large companies questioned this strategy as it harmed the very universities that had to continue to supply talent.</p>
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<p>Theoretically, the pre-law student have more opportunity to broaden his/her horizons as an undergraduate. In practice, it does appear that many pre-law students are so concerned about their GPAs for law school application (because a high GPA, as well as LSAT, is needed to get into a top 14 law school, and law jobs are very law school prestige conscious) that they avoid courses or majors that appear to be difficult or may result in a lower grade (“oh no, I should avoid that class because I might get only a B+ and I need to protect my GPA for law school application”).</p>
<p>The pre-meds and engineering students typically end up with a broader education than pre-law students in practice, because they typically take substantial science courses as well as humanities and social studies courses.</p>
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<p>The pre-meds taking any difficult courses at undergraduate will be a joke. They are more concerned with GPA than any one else at the campus. Did you wonder why there are so many unemployed pre-meds? They never tried to study anything valuable other than the pre-med requirement and the easiests A courses.</p>
<p>The pre-med concept is a joke because it has gone away from the original intent of the system. In Europe (UK) the admission to med-school is after the high school and the concept of US 4 + 4 BS-MD was to promote real breadth of knowledge among the practicing doctors.</p>
<p>The reason for 4+4 US concept is better only iff all the students who are interested in becoming practicing medicine are able to do so. Since now the competition have become cut throat for any medical school. The concept of 4+4 have lost it’s original intent.</p>
<p>Now no pre-med actually take any course of any value except the mandatory courses for pre-med. I think time has come to abolish this and move to direct medicine after high school. </p>
<p>Engineering graduates also at most Universities are also preoccupied to finish the degree becuase of more elaborate requirements for engineering majors except at the colleges where curriculumn forces extensive breadth. But indeed they have the freedom to pick and choose interesting classes for their concentration and minors without worrying about the GPA.</p>
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<p>Never claimed that this wasn’t true. However, the pre-med course requirements do effectively force them to be more well rounded than typical pre-law students, even if both groups aggressively seek easy A courses otherwise.</p>
<p>As far as pre-meds being unemployed if they don’t get into medical school, that is because a lot of them major in biology, which is greatly oversupplied with graduates (perhaps partly due to all of the pre-meds) relative to the number of (good) jobs.</p>
<p>Maybe things have changed, but in my day most pre-meds were not that well-rounded, especially those majoring in the sciences. They had so many requirements, including time-consuming labs, that they had only enough time in their schedules to meet the minimum distributional requirements. Those with a lot of AP credits had more flexibility, though.</p>
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<p>However, in comparison to most humanities, social studies, and business majors at most schools, they are relatively well rounded, since they take science courses along with humanities and social studies courses (although pre-meds as well as pre-laws have a tendency to seek “easy A” courses in the latter categories). At most schools, math and science breadth requirements are minimal (and often satisfied by easy non-majors’ courses) compared to humanities and social studies breadth requirements, so most humanities, social studies, and business majors typically gain very little in math and science competency in most universities.</p>
<p>In my day, humanities, social studies, and business majors (including the pre-laws who tended to be commonly found as political science and English majors) were rarely found in math and science courses other than courses like a physics course using a text Physics without Math or (at most) calculus for business majors.</p>
<p>Physics without Math</p>
<p>If an apple falls from a tree and strikes a man bathing in tub with a terminal velocity of 17 ft/sec, what is the name of the man in the tub?</p>
<p>^Nudist, because he took bath outside.</p>
<p>"The pre-meds and engineering students typically end up with a broader education than pre-law students in practice, because they typically take substantial science courses as well as humanities and social studies courses. "</p>
<p>-I am not sure what that means. Pre-med D. did not take single humanities and social studies class at college, because she did not care to waste her precious time on them, simply not in her area of interest. Pre-meds are not required to be any specific major, they are required to take some pre-reqs and are free to be any major their heart desires. Engineers are so limited with their time having hardest college major, I do not think that they are inclined to take some social study classes more so that these type of classes usually lack any kind of logic which would be very boring for engineers. </p>
<p>However, going back to original topic, getting to Med. School is the most important goal of pre-med. So, their measure of ROI would be getting accepted to Med. School, not compensation and then later on job security. Some of MD’s are not compensated that great at all, but I have not met unemployed MD yet, maybe it is coming with the new system, but so far it has been the most secure job, they do not get fired/laid off.</p>
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<p>Did her school have an “open curriculum” (i.e. no breadth requirements), or was it extremely generous in allowing AP credit to fulfill breadth requirements? I don’t recall in school any engineering majors or pre-meds who took zero humanities or social studies courses, since the school limited the use of AP credit on breadth requirements (for example, engineering required that the student take some upper division humanities or social studies courses). Of course, some of them did seek “easy A” courses… although a lot of students did seem to think that almost any humanities or social studies course was easier and/or less work than almost any science or engineering course (even though that was not necessarily true for every course, or every student).</p>
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<p>Or perhaps because they realize subconsciously they lack the intellectual equipment to deal with the ambiguities and shades of gray that a well-taught humanities or social science course would force them to grapple with. (Not all engineers, of course, but some that I know.)</p>
<p>Thats a pretty broad, unkind overgeneralization, annasdad. </p>
<p>Most schools with a required core will lighten it up a bit for the engineering majors because there simply isnt room in the schedule for all the core, distribution, elective and required engineering classes. I know many (well 2 I can personally vouch for 
) engineering majors that enjoy their humanities and social science classes. Not every engineer thinks in ones and zeroes.</p>