<p>In one respect it is a great time to go to college. The wages forgone by attending college for 4 years are at a minimum. The liklihood of a decent paying job is low.</p>
<p>The phrase “a job you don’t need a degree for” is misleading. There are many jobs where the intrinsic nature of the work doesn’t require a degree. The problem is the employer has to cull candidates in some manner. Requiring a degree means that the applicant started something and finished something and was able to follow rules and work within a system for their time at school. Requiring a degree is a reasonable method narrowing the choices.</p>
<p>The real rub, IMO, is the value of an expensive degree. I don’t know that the value is there except for certain career fields.</p>
<p>I agree 100%! I think that any kid currently in college should be encouraged to stay there. It’s hard to go back when you’re an adult and working (maybe with a family to support) and make up those credits. Also, if you have a BA or BS, it’s relatively easy to get a master’s degree in something more useful than the undergrad major.</p>
<p>I do admire folks who go back to college after they’ve been out a while, raising their family l& doing other things. For many, once they leave college, that’s the end of their formal education because there are so many competing demands for resources & time. We hope that S may consider going to grad school, at least part time to get a masters or JD, if it works out for him; his employer offers to help defray expenses.</p>
<p>My mom went back when the baby started kindergarten & got her masters in special ed & started teaching to help defray college costs for all us kids. She was an inspiration & got straight As–was older than most of her profs & peers.</p>
<p>To me, the goal of going to school is to acquire the tool for continued learning. Most future jobs do not exist today. Who would even thought of doing web design back in 1986? Just just touched an IBM main frame at that time. Without going to school, it would be very difficult to acquire the knowledge to learn new stuff. The world is evolving and knowlege obsolete as an alarming rate. Going to school is the best way to acquire the tools for continued learning.</p>
<p>I do not believe that one needs to go to college to get educated. Education is a pursuit that last whole life. The greatedst minds did not get educated at college, they got educated pursuing their passions. Others might have a different opinion, which is fine.</p>
<p>Rethinking the wisdom of sending my kids to college? Lord, no. </p>
<p>What the “new reality” should have taught people is that you can’t live off of credit forever. Debt is bad not college. Getting an education is still the single greatest way on earth to improve oneself. Paying for it without consideration is the cost of the evil here. </p>
<p>The employment market is adjusting to the excesses created by the years of easy credit which was created by an obscure housing law passed, with good intentions, under the Clinton administration. The law was designed to increase the percentage of people that owned a home but it had unintended consequences. </p>
<p>This shock to the system comes about a decade after the tech bubble crash which resized the markets and 9/11. </p>
<p>All of these events are man-made disasters but they do not take away from the real story that is going on world wide about increasing standards of living and so forth. </p>
<p>The bottom line is if you take a long term view there is nothing wrong with the global economy that can’t be fixed. Things are getting back to normal it is just taking time. The global economy will boom if an alternative energy source, like algie, or something, is developed. I may be getting off topic here but as far as rethinking getting an education … lord no.</p>
<p>A. My DD has career interests that do involve college - she wants to be an architect (and at least until recently, her second choice if not Arch was Civil E)</p>
<p>B. The best fields in terms of employment and income for non college grads seem to be a few skilled trades - welding, plumbing, electrician. I really don’t see my nerdy, Jewish daughter fitting in terribly well as any of those.</p>
<p>C. My DD has strong intellectual interests - I think the intellectual growth at college will be of great value to her.</p>
<p>The issue is not whether a college degree is needed for a particular job. </p>
<p>Without a college degree 95% of all high paying jobs are out of reach. A college degree has become a signaling mechanism for employers and the better known the college, the stronger the signal. </p>
<p>D1 is graduating this spring from MIT and planning to go on to med school. Had she not been accepted to med school she had several offers in consulting and banking with very good salaries even though her training was strictly in neuroscience and she had never taken a single business or finance class. It did not seem to matter to the employers that she had no business training. That is something they felt they could provide. They essentially viewed her MIT degree as an indication that she could handle complex problem solving tasks. Nearly half of the students in her class who are not going on right away to graduate or professional school are taking high paying jobs outside of their area of undergraduate specialization. Their specific training does not matter as much as the fact they are seen as smart students who can work hard under pressure and solve problems.</p>
Well, if they don’t go right now, when should they go? Later, when it’s more expensive and they have greater personal responsibilities? No thank you. We want our kids to attend college while they’re still in a study frame of mind and eligible for scholarships. </p>
<p>If a kid doesn’t know what he wants to be, then college is a very constructive way to consider the options. There are a lot more ideas to be found learning on a college campus than working a typical 18 - 22 yo job.</p>
<p>Nope. What would they be doing otherwise? If they were the sort who had some other ideas about what to do, it would have been considered. But none of them wanted to do good works, have another interest, or come up with anything that was a better use of their time. Any one of them could have taken a gap year but they had no interest in it.</p>
<p>Yes. I think with globalization and the sputtering economy people are going to finally wake up to the brutal reality that college is not and should not be looked at as an investment. In other words, the days where you pay a bunch of money to go to college and party for four years expecting a comfy middle class wage right afterward are long gone.</p>
<p>My husband argues that the world needs tradesmen and people to do all the jobs that keep our economy working at the most basic level. Would I push a kid who clearly was not interested in college–I’ll never know. However, to the previous poster, I think a nerdy, Jewish female plumber would be pretty successful. Especially to all of us tired of seeing the plumber butt phenomenon!!</p>
<p>D1 did select the large public U for her undergrad work, rather than going to the pricey and individual-based education #1 LAC. I can’t remotely imagine how she could have been any more successful than she has been these past 4 years. We still laugh that MIT made a stupid mistake 4 years ago–their loss for rejecting her. She’s headed for Cambridge for her Ph.D., but not to MIT.</p>
Are you saying the middle class is long gone?
Or are you saying that college as path to middle class is gone?
And, if college as a path is gone, then how does one improved the chances of attaining a “comfy middle class wage?”</p>
<p>Because I work full time at a community college, it offers free tuition for my children. For child #2, it is an appealing option because he just doesn’t seem to get that his education is for him. We keep waiting for him to connect the dots and hope that by the time he goes to college a year from this fall he will have figured out that he actually needs to put something in to get something out.</p>
<p>Being full pay anywhere else, the idea of paying a huge bill for a kid who does not want to contribute to the equation with effort is scary.</p>
<p>College is a good place for the young intellectual generalist who has not yet decided where to focus in terms of study. I really question, however, whether it is a good place for the unfocused kid who is indifferent to study or intellectual pursuit. For this young person, a job, any job, is more useful. College faculty often do not know how to guide students toward life careers outside the academy because they only know their own fields and experiences as academics. Professors generally aren’t able to tell students who aren’t planning on graduate school what they should do when they leave the academic bubble.</p>
<p>One of my nephews is a bright kid but ended flunking out of a SUNY because he played video games and did not go to class. He did not like to read, and he did not like to discuss ideas. He had no interest in academics per se. He was interested in cars and tinkering with their systems. He started working in a garage. He decided that he wanted to be an electrical engineer because he liked cars. That’s what motivated him to return to school and get a degree. It was the job, not college, that helped him focus on a plan. I think there are a lot of kids like that who need to figure out why they are going to college first in order for it to be worthwhile.</p>
<p>I would never sent my kid to college for “intellectual growth and education”. Way too expensive fun (even in case of full tuition Merit scholarships). It is 4 years (opportunity cost) and paying for living expences at least. I went to college on emplyer’s dime for “education”. But others might have unlimited resources and consiquently different opinion. That is absolutely fine. I am sure everybody is doing cost / benefit analysis taking family resources into consideration, so there is a difference in opinion.</p>
not to MIT.</p>