Is College Worth the Investment?

[Winston Smith]

[ham]

Number Of PhD Recipients Using Food Stamps Surged During Recession: Report
The Huffington Post | By Bonnie Kavoussi Posted: 05/07/2012 11:15 am Updated: 05/07/2012 3:36 pm

In this economy, even having multiple degrees isn't a guarantee against poverty.

The number of PhD recipients on food stamps and other forms of welfare more than tripled between 2007 and 2010 to 33,655, according to an Urban Institute analysis cited by the Chronicle of Higher Education. The number of master's degree holders on food stamps and other forms of welfare nearly tripled during that same time period to 293,029, according to the same analysis.

The boost in PhD recipients receiving food stamps is just the latest indication of how Americans are struggling in a down economy. Overall, the number of Americans on food stamps rose 43 percent over the past three years to 46.3 million Americans as of February 2012, according to the Department of Agriculture.

In addition, even graduate degrees that many used to consider a guarantee to a life of wealth and success are going down in value. The sluggish economy has pushed graduates with law degrees to look for jobs outside of the legal profession, according to U.S. News and World Report.

The situation is particularly dire for faculty working outside the tenure track as cuts to funding for public colleges have squeezed their salaries. Many adjunct faculty members are likely to be on welfare, since they live on "poverty wages," the Chronicle of Higher Education reports.

Meanwhile, secure tenure-track jobs are disappearing as adjunct faculty positions become more the norm, according to several news sources. While more than half of all university faculty members were tenured or on the tenure track in 1975, that percentage has plunged to less than a third of all faculty members as of 2007, according to Department of Education data cited by the Chronicle of Higher Education in a separate report.

All of these factors, plus a less-than-stellar job market, have forced many PhDs to work in menial jobs. There are 5,057 janitors with PhDs, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data cited by the Houston Chronicle.

In another sign that a graduate degree is no guarantee of a secure job, some students that are just graduating from graduate school are having trouble getting job interviews, according to the Hartford Courant.

[Armando Ramos]

Too Much College
Walter E. Williams
Jun 27, 2012

In President Barack Obama's 2012 State of the Union address, he said that "higher education can't be a luxury. It is an economic imperative that every family in America should be able to afford." Such talk makes for political points, but there's no evidence that a college education is an economic imperative. A good part of our higher education problem, explaining its spiraling cost, is that a large percentage of students currently attending college are ill-equipped and incapable of doing real college work. They shouldn't be there wasting their own resources and those of their families and taxpayers. Let's look at it.

Robert Samuelson, in his Washington Post article "It's time to drop the college-for-all crusade" (5/27/2012), said that "the college-for-all crusade has outlived its usefulness. Time to ditch it. Like the crusade to make all Americans homeowners, it's now doing more harm than good." Richard Vedder -- professor of economics at Ohio University, adjunct scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and director of The Center for College Affordability & Productivity, or CCAP -- in his article "Ditch ... the College-for-All Crusade," published on The Chronicle of Higher Education's blog, "Innovations" (6/7/2012), points out that the "U.S. Labor Department says the majority of new American jobs over the next decade do not need a college degree. We have a six-digit number of college-educated janitors in the U.S." Another CCAP essay by Vedder and his colleagues, titled "From Wall Street to Wal-Mart," reports that there are "one-third of a million waiters and waitresses with college degrees." More than one-third of currently working college graduates are in jobs that do not require a degree, such as flight attendants, taxi drivers and salesmen. Was college attendance a wise use of these students' time and the resources of their parents and taxpayers?

There's a recent study published by the Raleigh, N.C.-based Pope Center titled "Pell Grants: Where Does All the Money Go?" Authors Jenna Ashley Robinson and Duke Cheston report that about 60 percent of undergraduate students in the country are Pell Grant recipients, and at some schools, upward of 80 percent are. Pell Grants are the biggest expenditure of the Department of Education, totaling nearly $42 billion in 2012.

The original focus of Pell Grants was to facilitate college access for low-income students. Since 1972, when the program began, the number of students from the lowest income quartile going to college has increased by more than 50 percent. However, Robinson and Cheston report that the percentage of low-income students who completed college by age 24 decreased from 21.9 percent in 1972 to 19.9 percent today.

Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, authors of "Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses" (2011), report on their analysis of more than 2,300 undergraduates at 24 institutions. Forty-five percent of these students demonstrated no significant improvement in a range of skills -- including critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing -- during their first two years of college.

Citing the research of AEI scholar Charles Murray's book "Real Education" (2008), Professor Vedder says: "The number going to college exceeds the number capable of mastering higher levels of intellectual inquiry. This leads colleges to alter their mission, watering down the intellectual content of what they do." Up to 45 percent of incoming freshmen require remedial courses in math, writing or reading. That's despite the fact that colleges have dumbed down courses so that the students they admit can pass them. Let's face it; as Murray argues, only a modest proportion of our population has the cognitive skills, work discipline, drive, maturity and integrity to master truly higher education.

Primary and secondary school education is in shambles. Colleges are increasingly in academic decline as they endeavor to make comfortable environments for the educationally incompetent. Colleges should refuse admission to students who are unprepared to do real college work. That would not only help reveal shoddy primary and secondary education but also reduce the number of young people making unwise career choices. Sadly, that won't happen. College administrators want warm bodies to bring in money.

[Martin Eisenstadt]

Country Financial Study: More Americans Question Value Of College, Yet Are Willing To Assume More Debt For A Degree
The Huffington Post | By Ryan Grenoble
Posted: 07/18/2012 2:30 pm Updated: 07/18/2012 2:33 pm

Some Americans spend thousands--even hundreds of thousands--of dollars on higher education. As the cost of a degree continues to rise, it appears some have begun to question the worth of a college education.

According to a survey recently conducted by Country Financial, only 57 percent of adults believe a college education is a good investment.

ABC News reports that number has "plummeted" since 2008 when 81 percent of adults considered college a worthy investment. The network attributes the steepest decline in those numbers to the Great Recession.

That figure remains constant (fluctuating about 4 percent) across nearly every demographic, including various age groups, race, family size, and marriage. Income seemed to have the greatest impact, with 70 percent of households making $100,000 a year or more affirming the worth of a college education while only 47 percent of those making less than $20,000 per year agreed.

Despite the decrease in a college diploma's perceived value, the survey found an increased tolerance for the debt that people would be willing to take on while pursuing their degree. Just over 50 percent of respondents said $20,000 in debt was too much; last year, however, NBC News points out that 61 percent of respondents had the same limit.

About 62 percent of those surveyed placed the quality of education as a higher priority than the cost, which may partially explain the higher tolerance for debt, according to a press release accompanying the data.

In March of this year, student loan debt hit $1 trillion for the first time, leading some to label the loans as "too big to fail."

Still, most experts agree that, regardless of public opinion, investing in a college degree is worthwhile.

In April of this year Time magazine concluded that college grads out-earn their lesser educated peers by an average of around $570,000 -- enough to justify the investment.

[Winston Smith]

Is a College Education a Prerequisite for Personal Economic Success?
Daniel Doherty
Jul 20, 2012

After the 112th Congress effectively struck a deal last year preventing interest rates on subsidized Stafford loans from almost doubling to 6.8 percent from 3.4 percent for another year, many students from across the country were exultant. Not surprisingly, they deemed this bipartisan compromise (a rarity in Washington these days) as step towards lowering higher education costs and alleviating the crushing burden of debt threatening the futures of so many American college graduates. But this eleventh hour resolution, although widely praised by both Republican and Democratic lawmakers, is nothing more than a temporary fix to a longstanding problem; one that cannot be addressed without painful and systemic reforms.

On Thursday night, I attended “Bursting the College Bubble: The Status of Higher Education Today,” hosted by America’s Future Foundation and the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy. Moderated by Lindsey Burke, an education scholar at the Heritage Foundation who focuses on state and local issues, the four-person panel expounded on the value of a college degree, discussed why college costs are rising exponentially, and reviewed the government’s pernicious role in the American higher education system.

Conventional wisdom dictates that obtaining a bachelor’s degree from an accredited university is a golden ticket to the American Dream. Indeed, as the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy’s Jenna Robinson explains, “70 percent of high school graduates go on to [pursue] some kind of [postsecondary] academic degree” for this explicit purpose. But despite this seemingly positive trend, students are dropping out of college at unprecedented and alarming rates.

Andrew Gillen, a fellow at the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, explained this phenomenon in simplistic terms: “For every 100 students who attend college [only] 58 graduate,” he said. And of those 50 student who graduate, “only 38 use their degree in some meaningful sense.”

Let those numbers sink in.

In other words, only a small percentage of Americans attend college, graduate, and use their degree in a relevant field. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, as Burke explained during her opening remarks, “there are 115,000 janitors, 83,000 bartenders…and 80,000 truck drivers [in the United States] with bachelor’s degrees.”

Not only have recent college graduates earned degrees they don’t use (after having taken out hundreds of thousands dollars in loans to pay for them) but the labor market is moving in a surprising and perhaps unanticipated direction.

“The economy is not demanding the degrees we’re using anymore,” Robinson intoned, referring to a different Bureau of Labor Statistics study estimating that only 3 of the 30 jobs projected to have the most growth by the end of the decade will require a four-year bachelor’s degree or higher. “[And thus the Obama administration’s] push for universal enrollment is a step in the wrong direction.

Put simply, the Obama administration’s “push for universal enrollment” is a code-phrase for making college an entitlement directed to every American. In fact, the White House is publicly pursuing policies that would give the United States the highest proportion of college graduates in the world by 2020. Unfortunately, as each panelist pointed out, this initiative is merely driving up administrative costs and making college increasingly less accessible to millions of young Americans.

According to the Heritage Foundation, the cost of attending college has increased 475 percent since 1982. Last June, I had the opportunity to speak to Lindsey Burke by phone about this trend. (The interview was subsequently published in Student Groans, an article printed in the July issue of Townhall Magazine, available for purchase here). Here’s an excerpt:


“Part of the reason [government intervention] has led to an increase in tuition and fees is because universities have zero incentive to lower costs,” she said. “They’ll spend as much money as they take in. And so there’s been no outward pressure on universities; they don’t have to worry about their bottom line because they know students can just go back, request more federal financial aid, [request] more federal subsidies, and they’ll have what they need to pay these increases in tuition.”


Given the inflated price tag of college, the panelists suggest Americans should seriously consider whether or not college is (a) needed at all for certain career paths and (b) worth the time and money invested. Bill Glod, a researcher and mentor at the Institute for Humane Studies, went a step further and praised innovator Peter Thiel, an entrepreneur who has long advocated that college is not only a waste of time, but can hinder hard working and industrious young Americans who would otherwise benefit from entering the workplace immediately after high school. His eponymous fellowship gives “20 people under 20” a one-time, $100,000 check every year to start their own companies, effectively encouraging these individuals not to go to college.

In short, a college education is not necessarily a prerequisite for personal economic success anymore. Let’s hope the next generation of Americans figures this out before it's too late.

[Martin Eisenstadt]

[Don Dresden]

The Higher-Ed Bubble is Bound to Burst
Jeff Jacoby
Sep 12, 2012

"If you want to go to college," my mother said, "you'll have to get a scholarship."

Luckily, I did. I was admitted to George Washington University, which generously awarded me a grant covering the full cost of my tuition. To the best of my recollection, that sum was $2,400 in 1975, the year I entered GW. To pay for my other expenses there were several forms of need-based financial aid, and I received what is now called a Pell Grant and a subsidized work/study job on campus.

Adjusted for inflation, the $2,400 GW charged for tuition when I was a freshman would equal $10,220 today. But for freshmen entering this year, tuition at GW is $45,780. In other words, four years of GW in the 1970s cost less (in 2012 dollars) than a single year there -- or at many other universities -- today.

GW is a private institution, but the price of a college education has been skyrocketing at public campuses too. All told, the average cost of an undergraduate education has more than doubled in real dollars since I entered college in the mid-1970s. Over the past 3½ decades, the consumer price index has climbed around 3.8 percent per year; over the same period, college tuition and fees have been soaring at an annual rate of 7.45 percent. But nothing soars forever.

College opened my mind to all kind of new ideas, many of which I can remember animatedly chewing over with fellow students. But one thing I know we never discussed was the prospect of graduating from college with tens of thousands of dollars in debt hanging over our heads. In the 1970s, that would have been unimaginable. Now it's anything but.

"At a protest last year at New York University," began a story in Sunday's New York Times, "students called attention to their mounting debt by wearing T-shirts with the amount they owed scribbled across the front -- $90,000, $75,000, $20,000." Outstanding student-loan debt in the United States now stands at more than $1 trillion, a number greater than the total credit-card debt Americans owe. Millions of borrowers are in default; many others face the prospect of spending most of their lives paying for their college education.

If there were a museum of good intentions leading to bad results, the government's longstanding policy of trying to make higher education affordable would be a featured exhibit. Most of the adults I grew up with had no more than a high-school education. But by the 1970s it was becoming axiomatic that college was a virtually unmitigated good, and that government subsidies could put a college degree within every family's reach.

So politicians right and left vied to increase funding for student aid, channeling ever more public dollars into Pell Grants, guaranteed loans, work-study subsidies, and tuition tax breaks. Colleges happily raised their prices to soak up the subsidies -- and to soak up as well all the money being borrowed by parents and students to finance college degrees that grew steadily less, not more, affordable. All the while Americans were assured that a college degree was an excellent investment, a gateway to prosperity tomorrow that justified the sticker shock today.

Many people said the same thing about technology stocks as their share prices shot upward in the 1990s. Even more recently people were saying the same thing about housing prices. In retrospect, the ugly collapse of the dot-com bubble in 2000 -- and the even more calamitous end to the housing bubble in 2007 -- seem inevitable. Is the higher-education bubble going to burst too?

Economic bubbles are sustained by belief, and there are signs everywhere that Americans no longer believe that a college degree is everything it has been cracked up to be. "Potential students are becoming aware of just how bad student debt can be," writes University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Harlan Reynolds in a recent monograph. "That's causing them to change their behavior." More students, he notes, are choosing military service, community college, or vocational training over a traditional university education. Inexpensive web-based learning programs, such as EdX, the online school founded by Harvard and MIT, are drawing lively interest. A growing number of students, The Washington Post has reported, are backing away from college entirely, finding success and satisfaction in the skilled manual trades.

"Is College A Lousy Investment?" asks Newsweek's current cover story. More and more Americans are deciding that the answer to that question is yes. It may not happen tomorrow, but the higher-education bubble is getting ready to burst.

[bigfoot]

I just spoke with a cable technician who was upgrading my system yesterday. He graduated from "Westwood College", with a BA in "gaming technology". he can't find a job in this field yet, and he said he loved the education that was provided by this institute. He also stated that he was "80,000" DOLLARS in debt! For 80 K, you could get an IVY league education from an outstanding academic institution, instead of an institution that is nothing more than a glorified trade school. I did a little research on "Westwood" on the net, and have found a bumper crop of dissatisfied students and graduates, shackled with a mountain of debt...many are still trying to find work in their respective discipline, and the majority of them were crowing that the education that was provided was substandard... to say the least! I paid around 5 K for my state approved "masters degree"...and am very satisfied. According to the net, this school is under a microscope for some less than wonderful business practices and is being sued as well. This school seems even more "shady" than Phoenix, which calls it's "telemarketers" academic advisers...student/buyer beware!

[ham]

Most often educational offers are no better than those pesky pop-ups who in glamorous terms beg you to start earning $150...300...4000 an hour with this secret online trading scheme stolen from the wealthy'n'powerful...for only $19.99, 29.99, 49.99...PFFT!

[4Knee Kate]

Academic Dishonesty
Walter E. Williams
Sep 19, 2012

Many of the nation's colleges and universities have become cesspools of indoctrination, intolerance, academic dishonesty and an "enlightened" form of racism. This is a decades-old trend. In a 1991 speech, Yale President Benno Schmidt warned: "The most serious problems of freedom of expression in our society today exist on our campuses. The assumption seems to be that the purpose of education is to induce correct opinion rather than to search for wisdom and to liberate the mind."

Unfortunately, parents, taxpayers and donors have little knowledge of the extent of the dishonesty and indoctrination. There are several clues for telling whether there's academic dishonesty and indoctrination. One is to see whether a college spends millions for diversity and multiculturalism centers and hires directors of diversity and inclusion, managers of diversity recruitment, associate deans for diversity, and vice presidents of diversity. See whether colleges spend money to indoctrinate incoming freshmen with programs such as "The Tunnel of Oppression," in which, among other things, students call one another vile racial and sexual names in order to develop "oppression awareness."

An American Council of Trustees and Alumni survey in 2004 of 50 selective colleges found that 49 percent of students complained of professors frequently injecting political comments into their courses even if they had nothing to do with the subject, while 46 percent reported that professors used their classrooms to promote their own political views. One English professor told his students that "conservatism champions racism, exploitation and imperialist war." The "critical race studies" program at UCLA School of Law says that its aim is to "transform racial justice advocacy." At an East Coast college, an exam was found with questions such as, "How does the United States 'steal' the resources of other (third world) countries?" The answer marked correct was, "We steal through exploitation." An economics professor told his class, "The United States of America, backed by facts, is the greediest and most selfish country in the world." A Germanic languages professor told his class, "Bush is a moron, a simpleton and an idiot."

A recent National Association of Scholars report, "A Crisis of Competence," reported that the UCLA Higher Education Research Institute found that "more faculty now believe that they should teach their students to be agents of social change than believe that it is important to teach them the classics of Western civilization." Use of public funds for private advocacy not only is academic dishonesty but also borders on criminality.

In today's college climate, we shouldn't be surprised by the outcomes. A survey conducted by the Center for Survey Research and Analysis at the University of Connecticut gave 81 percent of the seniors a D or an F in their knowledge of American history. Many students could not identify Valley Forge, words from the Gettysburg Address or even the basic principles of the U.S. Constitution. The National Center for Education Statistics reported that only 31 percent of college graduates can read and understand a complex book.

A 2007 national survey titled "Our Fading Heritage: Americans Fail a Basic Test on Their History and Institutions," by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, found that earning a college degree does little to increase knowledge of America's history. Among the questions asked were: "Who is the commander in chief of the U S. military?" "Name two countries that were our enemies during World War II." The average score among college graduates was 57 percent, or an F. Only 24 percent of college graduates knew the First Amendment prohibits establishing an official religion for the United States.

A 2006 survey conducted by The Conference Board, Corporate Voices for Working Families, the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, and the Society for Human Resource Management found that only 24 percent of employers thought graduates of four-year colleges were "excellently prepared" for entry-level positions.

Our sad state of college education proves what my grandmother admonished: "If you're doing something you're not supposed to be doing, you can't do what you're supposed to do."