<p>Actually, we pay our electricians and plumbers very nicely. They do much better than $16-$19 hourly.</p>
<p>I was using that as an example that college is not necessarily a trade school. If a guaranteed job is the goal, forget being a Sociology major and taking on $90K of debt.</p>
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Not considering how hard they work and how union jobs ( that have benefits) are hard to find.
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<p>Come to NJ if the jobs are hard to find. I am friends with two established plumbing contractors who can't find enough qualified workers for all the contracts they have. Full benefits. Great salary. My neighbor's son graduated from a one year tech school three years ago as an auto technician. He's a 21 year old kid earning 6 figures doing what he loves. </p>
<p>Skilled blue collar jobs are booming. It's the unskilled jobs that are stagnating.</p>
<p>Actually, we pay our electricians and plumbers very nicely. They do much better than $16-$19 hourly.</p>
<p>I was using stats from the dept of labor</p>
<p>That is amazing that someone with a tech school education is earning 6 figures, my nephew who majored in aerospace engineering and was recruited by Duke isn't making that much.
I wonder how typical that is though.
I expect more typical is my husbands experience of being so highly skilled that he is the only person at his company doing his job ( although they finally got him some kids to train) but he is making about $20,000 more a year, than he did 20 years ago. ( which is low enough to put our EFC at below $14,000)
Obviously COL has gone up more than that
( his income was also hurt after 9/11 when his company laid off thousands, and in an effort to retain some workers- downgraded them to a lower pay scale- it was only this year that his pay went back up to what it was pre 9/11- 5 years ago)</p>
<p>I work in corporate HR and hire hundreds of people a year (my group hires thousands). It is disengenuous to say that employers don't like fluffy majors. Some do, some don't. I have internal clients here (division managers or EVP's) who dislike undergrad business majors, although that seems to be the flavor du jour. They much prefer an English major who has had a summer job or two working in a business. That way, they know (or believe) the kid can write, has had some exposure to the working world, but isn't going to have a lot of theoretical work on things like "management of organizations", most of which is obsolete or irrelevant to the real world.</p>
<p>I have other clients who love undergrad accouting majors-- even if the job doesn't require accounting. Why? Kids who choose accounting at age 19 tend to be detail oriented, somewhat anal, take direction well, don't mind a lot of mind-numbing analysis, and are good at math (at least the calculation part... not so much the creativity part).</p>
<p>We've got senior people who majored in Renaissance Studies as undergrads who do every bit as well as people who were engineers or something "practical". It is fallacious to assume that a practical degree guarantees you a job, just as it is to assume that a "fluffy degree" means you won't get one. There are hordes of software engineers in San Jose whose jobs were outsourced to Chennai-- their great IT degrees mean nothing. There were hordes of aerospace engineers who were displaced during the last recession. </p>
<p>Encourage your kid to find something they are passionate about and that teaches them to think critically, to write, to dig for answers regardless of the source. That is better job security than any single discipline or major can yield. Who remembers the brief wave of "e-commerce degrees" in the early '90's? I wonder what happened to those kids.....</p>
<p>Blossom, out of curiosity, are you seeing kids from top business programs such as Wharton or MIT applying for average corporate jobs?</p>
<p>Zagat, what's an average corporate job? As I understand it, most undergrads from Wharton and Sloan go off to Wall Street (I-Banks, Hedge Funds, Corporate Finance arms of big commercial banks or REIT's). If by corporate, you mean jobs in manufacturing or operations, Penn and MIT have lots of kids who do that.... but you don't need a business degree for that. Top kids from both schools are attractive to consulting firms, where they typically log two years before going back for an MBA.</p>
<p>Recognize, too, that graduates of these schools often have a geographic bias towards large cities on either coast. If you're running a manufacturing facility in Rochester or Toledo, you'll have an easier time hiring good talent from U Michigan (an exceptional source for midwest companies, or midwest operations of any company) than you will from Penn, all things being equal.</p>
<p>Blossom, I'm wondering if they all go to wall Street or consulting firms or if they come accross the desks of someone hiring for say a conglomerate where there are jobs in marketing, sales, strategic planning, intnl. opportunities etc.</p>
<p>A very high percentage of these kids don't "come across" the desk.... companies go on campus to recruit. You can access the recruiting calendar of virtually any company you are curious about.... go to the careers section of the corporations webpage, and they'll have a calendar which shows when they do the dog and pony at various colleges; they'll have a section for colleges where they may do a small event without the big presentation, etc. You'll get a good sense of who ends up in these companies based on where they recruit.</p>
<p>We're happy to get unsolicited resumes from colleges where we don't have an ongoing effort. It's harder to get an interview, however, since we have a good understanding of the colleges where we recruit, but potentially out-dated knowledge about places where we don't. I imagine it's similar at most companies.</p>
<p>You can also go to the career development section of any college website you're curious about, and see where the students have gone over the last few years. Most colleges track industries and functions... you probably won't be able to see the actual jobs that kids got, but you'll get a pretty good idea. Keep in mind that the data is not updated in real time-- so a high percentage may show up as working in banking, for example, even if the majority of kids don't end up in banking. The banks tend to make offers early in the cycle; the offers "explode" early on, so students make those commitments early senior year. Kids who end up teaching in a prep school or working as a researcher in a museum may be in the "undecided" category, since those job offers come late in the year or post graduation, hence they don't get tracked with the corporate offers.</p>
<p>Blossom, schools like Indiana, what do you see out there? Publications rate the Kelley business school highly. Do businesses rate the kids coming out of Indiana highly?</p>
<p>Do employers really look at an app and say, "Oh he/she graduated from Kelley, or Fisher (OSU), or Smeal (Penn State) or Stern (NYU) or Maryland or fill in the blank", and then give that person an extra look?</p>
<p>Or are these rankings just a way to sell magazines?</p>
<p>Kelley and every major public B school has a detailed placement report online. They will tell you which companies actually hired and how many in what fields. And the salary and other inducements.</p>
<p>I can speak as a former consultant involved in hiring MBAs. It's not that we looked at resumes and said yes or no by school, it's that resumes that were not from select schools never got to us. We had a list of schools from which we would hire. As I remember, UVA and UCLA were the only state schools on it, UVA in NY, UCLA in CA. The vast majority hired came from among the usual suspects.</p>
<p>Since there are so few undergrad business programs, it may well be different at that level, but these firms seem to stick to their handful of old boy schools.</p>
<p>Aris: "I never said that you had to double your savings - that's absurd. You can at least look at education as a six or seven or eight year expense and figure out how to make the money stretch for that time."</p>
<p>I totally agree. </p>
<p>And I also think that we can't look back at our own college experience & major choices because college costs were proportionally lower then. Parents weren't taking out ridiculous loans, dipping deeply into savings, or jeopardizing their retirements back them. If college costs were proportionally the same during our college days as they are now, many of our parents might have felt the need to give parameters to our major choices.</p>
<p>Parents weren't taking out ridiculous loans, dipping deeply into savings, or jeopardizing their retirements back them. If college costs were proportionally the same during our college days as they are now, many of our parents might have felt the need to give parameters to our major choices.</p>
<p>I agree Jlauer. I didn't go to college, but I am thinking that the parents who haven't been through the process lately/or aren't aware of resources like CC, assume that there are "scholarships".
For example one friend of my daughters, very bright, has been working academically very hard with I assume her parents supporting her, was just told by her parents that they are not going to help at all with her college costs, that she could get "scholarships", because they just incurred a huge remodel that they have to pay for.
I hope she can get some scholarships, but if they aren't going to help at all, she may have to considerably downsize her expectations and even then I think it would be hard to find something she could afford by herself.</p>
<p>Zagat, I want to worry about undergrad first. :)</p>
<p>I would encourage my kids to major in something they like a lot and are good at. In my experience that first job out of college is determined more by GPA and a personal connection with the interviewer than a specific major. If you major in something you don't really like, your GPA is bound to suffer, so you cut yourself off from graduate programs, even years down the road, when undergrad GPA is a factor. </p>
<p>I work in tech; my colleagues are a diverse lot. I work with a few state school MBAs, a guy who dropped out of college most of the way through an engineering program, a couple of people with undergrad biz majors, a Wharton MBA (who does absolutely no work and infuriates us because he sits around reading industry stuff on the internet and emailing articles to senior management and they all think he's a genius-LOL), one person with a compsci degree, and several people who majored in foreign languages: one guy who studied Italian, one French, one Russian. </p>
<p>Most of us are 5-20 years out of school so the degree is less relevant than the native intelligence and drive, and that is revealed more by GPA than by specific major.</p>
<p>maybe he is a genious because he gets away with doing no work :)</p>
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Neither one of my kids will be going to med school. Law school--if they were to choose a high paying specialty, no problem. If one of them wanted to do public interest law, then either the merit route at lower tiered schools, or the loan forgiveness route at higher tiered. Or they do something else.
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Choose a high-paying job? As the cost of law school goes up, the competition is getting fierce. Even kids from Top 10 schools are not guaranteed high-paying jobs. I have several posts on the law school forum about problems with debt, even in the high-paying careers. Many of the others agree with me. Many current lawyers do as well. </p>
<p>I frankly think that you are making the honest mistake of underestimating grad school costs. As tuition rises for grad school, do stipends rise as well? Your blaise attitude is, to be honest, something between shocking in its innocence and quite disturbing. Please, before you go off on me (about things of which you are unaware, not being in grad school nor having a kid there), do your research.</p>
<p>You forgot to quote the part where I described the six figure loans my husband left med school with, in the 1980s. Which we were able to pay back, despite him choosing a primary care specialty in a low-income area.
That was the start of my research. </p>
<p>I do know what law school costs. I don't actually expect, if either of my kids did go to it, for them to be looking for high end type jobs. tht's up to them, of course.</p>
<p>There are quite a few law schools in the NY/NJ area which offer merit scholarships for top students, starting with our state law school, which offers great programs in the areas they might be interested in. The more high end schools offer loan forgiveness for public interest law.</p>
<p>Plenty of students go to law school without their moms and dads paying for them. I am concerned that you think that this is a moral dereliction on my part that I will not be able to do so, and instead squandered my resources on their undergraduate college. To me, that's the best base I can give them--I can't know what they will do afterward; I only expected and hoped they'd have great undergrad experiences. Which they have. </p>
<p>I guess time will tell if that's so shockingly blaise.</p>
<p>You can go to a lower tier law school and do quite well. My H went to one of them, paid his dues, and it all worked out. H paid for law school himself, with a little bit of assistance from his parents. He worked, and took out loans. The amount of the loans were not what they would need to be today! Paying back the loans were tough for us, but still managable! He attended in the late 70's. I also had student loans to pay back, but they were half of the amount that my H had for law school.</p>
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"I am concerned that you think that this is a moral dereliction on my part that I will not be able to do so, and instead squandered my resources on their undergraduate college."
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<p>LOL! garland, I am convinced that you & your H have 10 times more discipline than me (and probably most posters here.) I'd never wish 6 figure loans on a pediatrician in the managed care days. I don't know how you did it.</p>
<p>Our pediatricain was an idealistic, Ivy league educated teacher who went to med school & eventually set up clinics in the slums of Newark, NJ . The "poverty pimps," as he called them, chipped away at his idealism. Luckily for us, we have benefitted from this great guy running a private practice. He still takes on lots of Medicaid patients.</p>
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You can go to a lower tier law school and do quite well.
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<p>Very true. You can go to a lower tier school for undergrad, too, and soar.</p>
<p>I think much of the anxiety over which school to choose boils down to disposition. State school grads such as me have encountered many dim-witted Ivy grads in our lifetime. Sometimes that Ivy reputation carries them far beyond their true abilities. I can shug it off. Afterall, don't taller people & beautiful people have advantages that have no connection to their abilities? That's life. But many can't get past this. The inequity really eats away at some people, and class envy can spread through one's psyche like kudzu. Thus the willingness to shoulder crushing debt for a dream school diploma. </p>
<p>Full ride to a state school can be a beautiful thing. Both H & I, who got out of school in the Carter recession years, could never had paid off college debt while facing 25% interest rates on car loans and double digit mortgatge rates. Continuing our education courtesy of the company was another great deal. </p>
<p>Now, with kids approaching college age we can offer them choices that never would have been available to us. Isn't that the American dream, afterall? But being raised by Depression-era parents, I'll really have a hard time shelling out $180,000+. State schools have never held us back. I won't force them on my kids, but I'll need convincing that the elite school is the only place where bright minds come together. So yes, I can definitely see myself in a scenario where I'd tell my kids that I'd pay for this school, but not that school.</p>
<p>side note: My d became aware of Pepperdine because of a local kid heading out that way. Also, I think it's the setting for some teen tv show. Absolutely beautiful campus, merit aid she'd surely qualify for, arts opportunities, etc. But when I realized the United Church of Christ affiliation I said take it off your list. The nasty, anti-Catholic commercials the UCC was running earlier this year soured me forever on PU. As the college search continues, I'm sure many such deal breakers will arise.</p>