Is College Worth the Investment?

[ham]

All those studies are pretty abstract, and countered by others that say something different if not opposite.
The truth is the guy whose old man owns the company, or the guy with the right party card or affiliations will ALWAYS get the job.
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2010/06/03/larson

...With millions more students attending college, it makes sense to ask whether their degrees will pay off.

First of all, it is debatable whether a majority of future job openings will require a college degree. ...The New York Times reports that, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, most job growth in the next decade will be in labor markets where a bachelor's degree is not necessary. Furthermore, the cost of attending college has risen dramatically in recent years. Conflicting claims about the economic value of a degree along with skyrocketing tuition raise a question about whether college is a good investment for all students, especially those low-income students who can least afford to spend money and years on a higher education venture that may not produce rewards.

Secondly, the issue of college payoff becomes even more complicated when we consider that many students who begin college will not complete degrees. While the U.S. leads the world in college attendance, it is ranked near the bottom in the number of students who actually graduate. In fact, college access, which is touted as a symbol of our meritocratic ideals, leads to a degree for only about half of all students who enroll. Completion rates are even lower for first-generation collegians and people of color. According to education researcher Peter Sacks, the chance that a low-income child will earn a bachelor's degree is no higher today than it was in 1970, a grave contradiction in the meritocratic narrative of the education gospel.

In fact, as the sociologist Annette Lareau has shown in Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life, the qualities that lead to academic success are not linked to college access, effort, or intelligence, but to accidents of birth. For the most part, the children of affluent parents attend the best colleges and get the best jobs. Opening the doors of higher education has not altered this basic arrangement. Still, the myth persists that, to get ahead in life, the first thing you ought to do is write a tuition check.

These days it is more likely that a student's first tuition bill will be paid with money from a loan. What looks like an investment in the future, however, can often turn into an economic disaster.

They prey on the rags-to-riches complex...spend $90.000...130.000...200.000 right now with us at the education cartel, then earn $1.000.000 over a lifetime...
Guess what?
The $90.000...130.000 or whatever are the only sure thing...the rest is speculation based on hypotheses or market values that will be completely different by next year.


http://www.nypost.com/seven/06282009/pos...176545.htm

A student who secures a degree is increasingly unlikely to make up its cost, despite higher pay -...-. Consider two childhood friends, Ernie and Bill. Hard workers with helpful families, each saves exactly $16,594 for college. Ernie doesn't get accepted to a school he likes. Instead, he starts work at 18 and invests his college savings in a mutual fund that tracks the broad stock market.

Throughout his life, he makes average yearly pay for a high school graduate with no college, starting at $15,901 after taxes and peaking at $32,538. Each month, he adds to his stock fund 5% of his after-tax income, close to the nation's current savings rate. It returns 8% a year, typical for stock investors.

Bill has a typical college experience. He gets into a public college and after two years transfers to a private one. He spends $49,286 on tuition and required fees, the average for such a track. I'm not counting room and board, since Bill must pay for his keep whether he goes to college or not. Bill gets average-size grants, adjusted for average probabilities of receiving them, and so pays $34,044 for college.

He leaves school with an average-size student loan and a good interest rate: $17,450 at 5%. The $16,594 he has saved for college, you see, is precisely enough to pay what his loans don't cover.

Bill will have higher pay than Ernie his whole life, starting at $23,505 after taxes and peaking at $56,808. Like Ernie, he sets aside 5%. At that rate, it will take him 12 years to pay off his loan. Debt-free at 34, he starts adding to the same index fund as Ernie, making bigger monthly contributions with his higher pay. But when the two reunite at 65 for a retirement party, Ernie will have grown his savings to nearly $1.3 million. Bill will have less than a third of that.

People should be very careful with beliefs invested in those sirens in the night promoting fast track gains: that is why DE is a great option.

rom the Wall Street Journal, 2008-Dec-5, by Eric Gibson

Quote:
We can now add colleges and universities to the list of victims of the financial crisis. The stock-market collapse has badly eroded endowments, forcing schools to suspend capital projects, freeze hiring, rethink need-blind financial-aid policies and cut budgets. The Journal reported this week that Harvard University's giant-killer endowment, which stood at $36.9 billion as of June 30, has lost 22% of its value in the months since and that the university's administration is planning for a 30% decline for the fiscal year ending next June. -...-
The soup-to-nuts cost (tuition, room and board, extras) of one year at a private college is already in the region of $50,000, bringing the cost of a bachelor's degree to close to a quarter of a million dollars. As one wag has observed, that's like buying a new BMW every year and driving it off a cliff.

Moreover, tuition increases have consistently outpaced inflation. Since 1992, inflation has averaged between 2.5% and 3% a year; annual tuition increases have often been as high as 6%. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, the reason that tuition increases at private four-year institutions kept pace with inflation this year is not that these schools suddenly curbed their free-spending ways but that inflation itself jumped dramatically. The average tuition increase was 5.9%, while the Consumer Price Index rose 5.6% in the 12 months from July 2007.

In spite of this, universities are still crying poor. Surely beleaguered college presidents are already tapping their in-house experts in the economics departments to tell them how to live within their means. No? Then allow me to help. Having spent the fall visiting several colleges with a son who is applying for next year, I've been getting a tutorial in college costs. And what an education it has been.

Let's start with presidential salaries. In its latest survey, published last month, the Chronicle reports that compensation for private university presidents rose on average 6% in the past year, a figure that represents 50% more than the standard annual merit increase for private-sector employees. The total compensation (salary plus benefits) of three private university presidents for 2007, the most recent year for which data are available, was in the stratosphere: Columbia University's Lee C. Bollinger earned $1,411,894 and Northwestern University's Henry S. Bienen, $1,742,560; Suffolk University in Massachusetts paid David J. Sargent $2,800,461.

Then there's the cost of college life itself. I've been wide-eyed on some of my visits, struck by the extent to which being a student today resembles living at Versailles, where Louis XIV's every whim was so thoroughly accommodated that there was even a Superintendent of the King's Furniture. One college tour guide proudly informed us that upon arrival every freshman is issued a brand-new laptop. Even if the students already have one? Why, yes, the guide replied.

Then there's the food. I can't say we were deprived when I was an undergraduate 35 years ago. (For a time steak was served every Saturday night.) But compared with today's students we were like inmates of a gulag, having to survive on a single daily bowl of gruel. Nowadays, every taste and eating disorder is catered to -- Japanese, Mexican, vegan -- and, in many cases, 24/7.

Indeed "24/7" could be the motto of undergraduate life. Facilities like libraries and gyms are open around the clock. Computer services are available at all hours, too. One college we visited must keep its tech support team doped up on amphetamines. Accidentally dump a cup of coffee into your laptop? No problem! They'll have it back to you in full working order in a day -- something no private-sector IT department could afford to offer.

On every tour we took, guides proudly boasted about the wide selection of clubs at their respective institutions -- a number that almost everywhere runs into the hundreds. And they reassured us that if, after surveying these abundant offerings, a student finds some lack, he can start his own organization and the college will subsidize it -- no questions asked.

Of course, it isn't really the college subsidizing it. It's us, the parents. Until I started these tours, I used to assume that college kids tilted left politically because they were young and impressionable. Maybe, but it's also because they get introduced to the welfare state at a tender age and become addicted. The government (college) offers cradle-to-grave (matriculation-to-graduation) care and feeding, levying higher taxes (tuition) on the populace (parents) whenever the spirit moves them -- which is every year. Not even the actual government is that brazen.

Indeed, private higher education has it better than an actual welfare state. Politicians are answerable to the electorate. In theory their efforts to take a larger slice of your paycheck can be thwarted at the polls. Not private higher education. There's nothing to put a brake on their fiscal expansiveness. -...-

Could it be that, as families strangle with the new economic climate and reduced financial aid, some of these colleges will find themselves having to choose between cutting back to realistic levels -- trimming the presidents' paychecks and the students' imperial lifestyle and limiting tuition increases to only the rate of inflation, for example -- or being priced out of the market? One certainly hopes so.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig8/maloney8.html

Yet, if you insist on becoming a college man anyway, citing the salary discrepancies between the have degrees and the have not degrees, my advice to the young men who wrote to me, those holed up in college libraries clutching Mises and Rothbard to their furrowed brow, is to take stock of where you are and what college is really about. Think about what position you are in.

A recent blog post by Lew Rockwell sums up that position perfectly – "as I walked on a university campus this morning…the girl-boy ratio was overwhelmingly girl." Haven't you watched Animal House? What in God's name are you doing in the library? Who the hell goes to college to learn anything? Understood properly, America’s college system is not a haven of learning; it is a four-year party with the background noise provided by tenured hacks giving their interpretations of foolish utopian schemes culled from other long-dead hacks.

In college happy hour is every hour, so remember to ignore your professors and let your dog off the leash; it’s hunting season. You are there to network, drink, smoke, and build up the fond, blurry memories that will allow you in later years to watch a porn movie and reminisce about when you used to get up to such wondrous madness. Stop wasting valuable college time reading Mises and Hayek – they’ll be plenty of time for that later – and cease frittering away a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

I suppose the bit about living the porn star dream while attending B&M universities is on par with the bit about income.
Yes, there are studies published that -often in very a-specific terms- foresee an income of n thousands per year for graduates in the A, B or C field (subject to periodical change )...much like that cute new ad from a multi-millionaire media campaign of the new grow-me-hair, trim-my-waist or virility fix tonic, Barney lost 30kg in seven days and Beulah 28 eating all they wanted while sitting on the couch, but watch out for small print:"your results may vary".
If a study claims that your demographic group in your geographic area "typically" dines out once a week, it might just be you dined out three times last year and someone else dined out everyday.