The College Scam

Parents Forum
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<p>That’s an uncommonly silly argument. Heck, I drove a cab for a few months between grad school and college. By the logic of this argument my undergraduate education was wasted. Except that I ended up with graduate degrees from Ivy League universities and am now a tenured professor at a major research university. The author of this quote picks out some of highest-turnover, short-term occupations—jobs that are often open to college grads while they get their act together for graduate or professional school, or work on their writing, acting, dancing, art, or music careers, or are available as moonlighting or short-term bridge employment if they suffer career reversals—and just assumes all these people are stuck in dead-end careers. Poppycock.</p>

<p>Many of our most respected writers, artists, musicians, and actors have worked in low-wage, low-skill day jobs before they hit it big. In New York City alone there are probably tens of thousands more who aspire to careers as writers, artists, musicians, and actors, who continue to occupy those low-wage day jobs. Some will make it, most won’t, but who would deny them the opportunity to chase after their dreams? And the availability of low-wage, low-skill day jobs is an essential part of that opportunity.</p>

<p>Here are just a few writers (mostly U.S., some not) who worked at “menial” jobs in their youth:</p>

<p>Louisa Mae Alcott was a governess, seamstress, and domestic servant
Michael Blake, author of “Dances with Wolves,” was a dishwasher at a Chinese restaurant
Charlotte Bronte was a nanny
James Fenimore Cooper was a sailor on a merchant ship
Charles Dickens packed and labeled shoe polish
John Dos Passos was an ambulance driver
Nathaniel Hawthorne weighed and gauged items for export and import at the Boston Customs House
Joseph Heller was a blacksmith’s apprentice and messenger boy
Langston Hughes was a busboy at a Washington, DC hotel
Jack Kerouac was a gas station attendant, construction worker, and waiter
Ken Kesey was a night aide and test subject in CIA-sponsored psychoactive drug experiments at a veteran’s hospital
Harper Lee was an airline reservation clerk
Jack London was a canning factory laborer, seal hunter, gold prospector, and hobo
Herman Melville was a cabin boy, whaler, and Ordinary Seaman
Arthur Miller was a bakery delivery boy and a box assembler in a brewery
John Steinbeck was a ranch hand, fruit picker, bricklayer, and sugar factory worker
Henry David Thoreau was Emerson’s handyman before moving on to sell vegetables
Mark Twain was a printer’s apprentice, typesetter, printer, and steamboat pilot
Walt Whitman was an apprentice and printer’s devil</p>

<p>Failures? I don’t think so.</p>

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<p>Many of those who work at rental car companies (including the counter clerks) are college grads too (have spoken to several of them)! Perhaps those who wash those rental cars may not have degrees? Most of the secretaries I know also have college degrees. Are many over-qualified? Probably, but it got them jobs that may be less physical & better-paid than some of the others.</p>

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<p>“And I would add, not represented as a fact but as an opinion, (3) if you approach your college experience wisely, it will prepare you to live a fulfilling life in ways beyond enhancing your income, and it will prepare you to more fully engage life as a productive and useful citizen.” - annasdad</p>

<p>Anna’s dad is wise and, undoubtedly, a fully engaged, productive and useful citizen.</p>

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<p>No, but he knows lots of people who are.</p>

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<p>Mr Stossel…I have no doubt your children will attend college. Where do you think they will study? What have you done as a parent to ensure that they will have all the opportunities to have a happy and successful life? There is little doubt that you would ever tell your children that college may be a waste of time or money for them or you. However, you and many others are making claims that college may be a waste for them. I guess if you look at every college in this country from the lowest ranked to the highest you will find students that are just wasting time, and precious resources who could be out earning a living waiting tables, working in a trade, or tending lawns…yet these students are choosing to attend college. Some in fact are attending college with a huge ammount of financial aid because their parents could not afford the price of a college degree. To the Mr Stoussel’s of the world that may have a point that many kids are just throwing their college experience down the drain… Write an article about what these kids should be doing while they attend college to make that college degree worth their investment…or better yet get off your rump and visit some lower tier schools that do not have the resources that top tier schools have and donate some of your time to lecturing about making the most of the college experience which would include the importance of networking, getting internships, and doing well enough in college to be able to move forward in professional school. Don’t just write articles…DO SOMETHING to change even one college students life.</p>

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<p>While I agree with the main thrust of Bclintonk’s argument, I must point out that Charlotte Bronte was not a nanny; she was a governess. This may seem a trivial point, but when you’re talking about issues of class and education, it’s not: a nanny was then, at least, a servant, lower-class, uneducated. A governess was a member of the educated, and thus upper, class, even if she had no money–Charlotte was well-educated for her time. It might not have been a fabulous career, but it was very different from the kind of stop-gap jobs bclintonk is, rightly, pointing to as a good way for those aiming higher to make a few bucks.</p>

<p>The fact that education has always indicated class is at the heart of the problem, I think: to be able to go to college traditionally meant that one was a member of a higher class. Now that being able to go to college is more universally attainable, and even required, children are being pushed to go without regard to their goals and talents. While it is true that arguments like Stosser’s may be paraphrased as, “college is wasted on riffraff,” it is also true that a liberal arts education was designed for another purpose than job training, and that, as job training, it is in fact very expensive and inefficient. To go to college and major in “business,” as a recent NYT article pointed out, doesn’t seem to mean much, in terms of either teaching critical thinking and writing or preparing one for the business world. But people do it because they have a better chance of getting a job as a college grad than as a high school grad. To have spent those four years in some kind of apprenticeship position, getting specific experience in business management and decisions, would seem to me to be more useful. The down side is that our society still views a bachelor’s degree as vital to anyone in a position of responsibility, so that while a person with a high school degree who has worked hard and garnered much useful experience is regarded as an inferior job candidate to a person who has gone to college and fooled around for four years and graduated in the expectation of being ready to boss. (And haven’t we all had bosses like that!) Perhaps one solution is that more kids should be encouraged to work for a few years before college, instead of heading off like lemmings at 18.</p>

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<p>“What do Michael Dell, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and Mark Cuban have in common?
They’re all college dropouts.”</p>

<p>Mark Cuban is NOT a college dropout.</p>

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<p>Yes, but just to take the other side of my own (usual) argument, there’s a huge difference between being a Harvard drop out and never going to college, at all. Just for the sake of thinking it all the way through.</p>

<p>I don’t like it when these guys are held up as examples to high school students. All of them would have continued to graduation had they not had a viable career already going on. fwiw</p>

<p>ETA: My high school drop out father was a very productive and engaged and valuable citizen, but even he would tell you things were very, very different back when everyone got drafted and spent other years growing up and learning a trade and how to be responsible.</p>

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<p>It’s all a marketing ploy to keep students from diluting the market.</p>

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<p>There is a great deal of marketing, and also a great deal of telling kids not to worry about the cost and then stting them up with a great deal of debt, and I really dislike this current element in the higher ed game, which makes it seem like a racket.</p>

<p>I wish the state schools could be kept incredibly affordable and high quality for the less economically advantaged. Right now the state schools have become the affordable school of the middle and upper middle class. The less advantaged, or those who are financing their own education, are priced out of the market. Nobody should have to go into that kind of debt for a degree, imho.</p>

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<p>Agree that it is staggering how much debt folks/kids are willing/forced to assume to get a college degree. There ARE some choices, but it is true that some state schools are getting very costly as well. Striking a balance is very challenging, especially as schools make empty promises about better jobs and some grads can’t find ANY job. Many kids/parents/families don’t know much about debt and are staggered when they realize what it means to have to repay a loan of $100K or more.</p>

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<p>Some students select colleges that they can’t really afford and end up with overwhelming debt burdens. Some students pick majors that make it harder for them to find employment after graduation. Some students are finding it difficult to find employment in their chosen field, because of the economic downturn. Tuition increases are rising faster than the inflation rate. Some of the most successful individuals in the U.S. never went to college or dropped out.</p>

<p>None of the above is news. However so-called pundits use these facts to hype their own overheated rhetoric about college education being a worthless or a ‘scam’. As others have already pointed out, these authors undoubtedly earned college degrees themselves, and also undoubtedly sent their own kids to high-priced colleges. I am particularly bothered by the ‘scam’ allegation, which implies that colleges are deliberately duping students by selling them worthless diplomas. That may actually occur in some for-profit diploma mills, but I think that it is exceedingly rare in public and non-profit institutions.</p>

<p>It may be unwise to major in something like Ethnic Studies at a $50K/yr LAC, but I have a really hard time seeing how this could be construed as some sort of scam or con.</p>

<p>Finally, anyone who really wants to go to college inexpensively can easily do so. Community Colleges remain undisputed bargains, and then you can transfer to an in-state regional university for your last two years. In my state, your total tuition for four years on this plan would be $25K-$30K. Not much of a scam there.</p>

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<p>I completely agree with the goal and the sentiment. Not too sure about the facts, though. Apart from a handful of super-wealthy HYP-level schools, private universities are on average actually leaving their graduates with a bigger debt burden than the leading publics. The average total indebtedness of a 2009 UC Berkeley grad was $14,493; for the average Stanford grad it was $16,219. The average UCLA grad came out with $16,824 in debt, or just barely over half the debt burden of the average USC grad, at $30,097.</p>

<p>UNC Chapel Hill grads came out with an average indebtedness of $14,262, substantially less than Duke’s $23,059 and Wake Forest’s $24,561. UVA grads ($19,939) had less debt than their counterparts at Georgetown ($25,085).</p>

<p>Penn State grads had the highest total indebtedness among top-50 publics, at $28,680. But that was less than CMU ($29,456) or Lehigh ($31,123). And at no top-50 public did graduates incur as much debt as those graduating from s number of top-50 privates, including RPI ($30,838), NYU ($33,487), and Case Western (tipping the charts at $37,490).</p>

<p>Of course, these are just averages. The most vulnerable are those on the tail of the curve on the high end of indebtedness, where the individual debt load can be truly staggering. But I haven’t seen any data to indicate that problem is more severe at publics than at privates—and if it is, it must mean those NOT at that tail of the curve must be doing even that much better relative to their private-school counterparts, or the public school averages would be higher.</p>

<p>As for the “less advantaged” being “priced out of the market” for public higher education, I’m again not sure the data back that up. Pell grant recipients are a pretty good proxy for those with the greatest financial need, and on that score most publics do a better job than most privates. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, all the public universities with top-50 endowments had student bodies comprised of at least 10% Pell grant recipients in 2008-09, with the sole exception of UVA (with a paltry 7%). UCLA led all universities with top-50 endowments, with 30.7% Pell recipients, and 14 of the top 25 in that survey were publics; in contrast, 23 of the bottom 25 were privates, including such well-heeled notables as WUSTL (#50 out of 50, with 5.7% Pell grant recipients), Harvard #49 with 6.5%, Penn #47 with 8.2%, Northwestern #46 with 8.3%, Duke #45 with 8.3%, Yale #42 with 8.9%, and Princeton #40 with 9.9%. Ironically, it’s the wealthiest colleges with the reputations for the most generous financial aid that do the least to serve those with the greatest financial need. And no doubt more publics would have appeared toward the top of the list of schools serving the most Pell grant recipients, but the Chronicle survey was confined to the colleges with the 50 largest endowments, and only 16 publics make that cut. For the most part, though, the wealthiest publics do a far better job than the wealthiest privates of serving lower-income students.</p>

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<p>None of the above is news. However so-called pundits use these facts to hype their own overheated rhetoric about college education being a worthless or a ‘scam’. As others have already pointed out, these authors undoubtedly earned college degrees themselves, and also undoubtedly sent their own kids to high-priced colleges. I am particularly bothered by the ‘scam’ allegation, which implies that colleges are deliberately duping students by selling them worthless diplomas. That may actually occur in some for-profit diploma mills, but I think that it is exceedingly rare in public and non-profit institutions.</p>

<p>^ ITA</p>

<p>John Stossel lol</p>