How Much Is That Psychology Degree Worth?

[JohnBear]

Sometimes we forget the value the state approved schools gave. Without them the RA schools can raise prices to their heart's content.
That's what JB was saying and selling for a quarter century.

Saying, yes, for 41 years . . . and actually selling for 16 years: 4 years consulting with Columbia Pacific, 3 dreadful months with Fairfax, 3 years running International Institute/Greenwich University, and nine years doing US/Canada marketing for the Royal Chartered Heriot-Watt University/Edinburgh Business School. 

He was right, but for all the wrong reasons, and of course, it was for his bank account.

And the bank accounts of the schools as well. A great deal of money was made, and is being made, by schools, accredited or not, offering usable degrees at affordable prices.  The regionally-accredited Regents College told me in 1990 that more than half of their first ten thousand students came in because of my books. That's about $15 million for them . . . and one free lunch for me. (Not complaining, just observing.)

The only way to really keep down prices is with competition. We had that for awhile, but no longer.

I think we still do -- especially with the growing trend for junior and community colleges offering Bachelor's degrees and teaching credentials. I'd bet some will have Master's degrees within a decade. And when I tabulated the cost of the 320 distance and online MBAs two years ago, the range was from $5,000 to over $100,000 for the accredited and $3,000 to $20,000 for the state-approved. It is hard to argue that one MBA could really be twenty times more valuable than another.

College is much too costly for what you get. We the consumers have to be more price aware and knowledgeable about choices. If you need it get it, if not maybe something else will do.

Absolutely. For 25 years, I've been recommending the wonderful books by Charles Hawes (especially Proving You're Qualified: strategies for competent people without college degrees making the point that degrees are often unnecessary, Alice Bird's book The Case Against College (making the point that if one doesn't go to college but invests that money wisely, in 40 years you'll have more money than the degree(s) would have earned), and Ivar Berg's The Great Training Robbery (which suggests, based on research at Columbia, that there are a great many jobs, from air traffic controller to lab assistant, where people without degrees do just as well, often better, than those with degrees).