Wall Street Journal: The Declining Value of Your College Degree

The Declining Value
Of Your College Degree
By GREG IP



A four-year college degree, seen for generations as a ticket to a better life, is no longer enough to guarantee a steadily rising paycheck.

Just ask Bea Dewing. After she earned a bachelor's degree -- her second -- in computer science from Maryland's Frostburg State University in 1986, she enjoyed almost unbroken advances in wages, eventually earning $89,000 a year as a data modeler for Sprint Corp. in Lawrence, Kan. Then, in 2002, Sprint laid her off.

"I thought I might be looking a few weeks or months at the most," says Ms. Dewing, now 56 years old. Instead she spent the next six years in a career wilderness, starting an Internet café that didn't succeed, working temporary jobs and low-end positions in data processing, and fruitlessly responding to hundreds of job postings.

The low point came around 2004 when a recruiter for Sprint -- now known as Sprint Nextel Corp. -- called seeking to fill a job similar to the one she lost two years earlier, but paying barely a third of her old salary.

In April, Ms. Dewing finally landed a job similar to her old one in the information technology department of Wal-Mart Stores Inc.'s headquarters in Bentonville, Ark., where she relocated. She earns about 20% less than she did in 2002, adjusted for inflation, but considers herself fortunate, and wiser.

For decades, the typical college graduate's wage rose well above inflation. But no longer. In the economic expansion that began in 2001 and now appears to be ending, the inflation-adjusted wages of the majority of U.S. workers didn't grow, even among those who went to college. The government's statistical snapshots show the typical weekly salary of a worker with a bachelor's degree, adjusted for inflation, didn't rise last year from 2006 and was 1.7% below the 2001 level. .....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121623686919059307.html?mod=yhoofront

What a lot of crap. How many college graduates decided to do nothing with their degrees, or become bums, or become blue collar workers, or simply go off and live in the woods?

There are lies, damned lies and statistics.

Excuse me, let me get back to enjoying novels, literature, philosophy and all the other things I probably would not even know about, let alone appreciate without my college degree.

n/t

Throughout my life I have worked hard and have learned more and more about less and less until I now know everything about nothing. My greatest personality flaw is that I am really devoid of ambition, a trait which has kept me successfully single all my life since women hate that. The result is that I can live quite comfortably on very little money and I'm satisfied with what I have. My needs are few and my life is simple and uncomplicated. Never lived in the woods, though. At least, not yet.

But all you've argued is that "guarantee" was the wrong word. There really is a statistical decline in the value of a college degree:



edit:typo

At which point my employer froze all raises. Which lasted for two years when they booted my and sent my job to India.

A degree would not have prevented it.

I have a degree now, as I used my severance package to go finish it off. Hopefully tomorrow I will hear that I got another tech job at 20% less than I had been making, BUT it's in one of the prettiest places on the face of the earth. It will cost me more to live there, but holy cow it would be nice.

scl

Only the "Greatest Generation" were allowed to partake.. they got the union jobs, the pensions, the cheap houses, the cool cars (and cheaply too)..they got the full benefit of medicare and escalation of social Security.. Their homes got cashed out at 1000% of what they paid off decades ago..

Their freebie educations came at the perfect time in history, to reap the benefits..

The 1st mistake they made was to have too many kids, and to stop paying attention when the largesse given to them , was withheld from their own children.. the 2nd error was for them to participate in the dismantling of the infrastructure that made thier own lives pretty decent.. By the time their
kids noticed what was happening in the 80's & 90's, it was too far "in progress" to stop..

As an HR recruiter, I see people with degrees competing for secretarial jobs everyday. However, the cost of higher ed has gone up so much that the proportion of people without a degree in the workforce will be rising. Also, with the baby boomers starting to retire, the workforce is going to start shrinking. The need for a degree is going to shrink as well, because it is going to start getting harder to recruit. When it is hard to recruit, it is hard to hold out for a degree when people have related experience.

Hopefully once we have Democrats in power, who actually VALUE intelligence and education, they will do something about making it more affordable, and the proportion of the workforce opting to get more education will rise again, purely because education is a good thing, regardless of the market. It's really a shame when the market starts pushing against higher ed.

I have a degree in CS and I am doing nothing good, despite having all the skills that my friends with the same degree, who are making lots of money, have. Lots of high paying positions that take experience nobody has, very few ways to get your foot in the door. Its very strange compared to other fields. For instance, if you have a nursing degree and therefore all the skills necessary to be a nurse, you can be highered instantly. But having all the skills necessary to do the job generally isn't sufficient to get an IT job, because human resources can't fucking understand the skills, let alone figure out how to test you. So they rely on having 10 years of experience in languages that came out 6 years ago, that kind of thing.

B4 schools of 'higher learning' offered CS degrees, businesses and government required programmers to have advance math and 'zip' for analysts (in the day analysts desk audited programs).

Then, there were the 90s. Who carried the water at the dawn of the Internet and computer boom? An army of non-degreed geeks and hobbyists. HR didn't understand the 'skills' required to hire CS-types back then either, its like trying to use keyword search in resumes to hire the 'right' artist.

Years passed, by the time schools of 'higher learning' settled on CS curriculum, that include more than the punch card, sorters, and binary or hexadecimal maths, the boom was over. Congress and businesses collaborated to either ship IT jobs overseas or increase visas. There are thousands of highly skilled U.S. born IT personnel who are displaced and jobless from the 90s and beyond.

Why are schools of 'higher learning' today offering U.S. students CS programs when Congress continue granting businesses visas or allowing them to ship IT jobs overseas?

Besides, its been proven again and again, that often, job placement in the U.S. is more about social nepotism than degrees.

"Who carried the water at the dawn of the Internet and computer boom? An army of non-degreed geeks and hobbyists." I am in total agreement. I know at least six people (including me) at my last employer who fit that description exactly. We were "contract" and were never hired direct because we didn't have the degree. However, all of us had an average of 15 - 20 years in and essentially wired that place for the productivity they now enjoy. Funny(?) story - said company just laid us all off because we were contract. The remaining direct-employee IT talent are what I would call "maintenance-minded" and not coders or builders with any real vision. But they are degreed...

And the other thing you're dead on about were the CS degrees not being there for the pioneers. In the earliest of the PC upswing, there was no such animal. People who knew anything about them came to the table with the skills from playing around on our own and figuring out the landscape. I was accidentally discovered and moved to IT that way after I coded a set of (to me, simplistic) programs for an engineer that made developing his test specifications and test reports about 10x faster. I was a degreeless administrative assistant at the time.

on edit: runaway italics

understandably?? complained the loudest about the new crop of 6-14 weeks Novell or MS 'certified engineers'.

Strange, looking back, isn't it? And many thanks for the earlier post. I was thinking I was alone in that opinion. IOW, I've been telling people exactly what you said for years, and they (usually HR folks) look at me blankly and say, "What do you mean? There have always been CS degrees." (Unspoken: "And you should have one with your skills.") Evidently they are perfectly capable of the cognitive dissonance which tells them...uh...I already have the skills. Ah well. Live and learn. :shrug:

This layoff actually works out for me, because my (degreed haha) husband has been trying to get a consulting business up and running while working full-time. He knows my skills and thinks my former employers are nuts. So I'm assisting him now with setting up a lot of stuff that I didn't have time for when I was working crazy-long hours. His business idea is actually very good, so I hope it takes off.

BTW, it was very nice talking with you. :hi:

:hi:

My current prospects are more due to who I know than what I know. `Although I will say that I think my CS degree was worth it, though the good stuff was the time timeless aspects: basically the math.

I also think, though, that it can't possibly keep up with technology. I think that's the rub. HR wants it both ways: degree (distilled past knowledge) or keeping up and advancing (self-training). There's a lot of things in that picture that are gray, methinks. Some folks can do both, and it sounds like you may be one of them, which can only be good for you. :-)

A good CS prof is a rare thing, they have to distill the timeless aspects of technology old and present so you know something worthwhile in 4 years when you graduate. The problem is that the people that can do this could be making 4 times as much money by working in the industry. People who give up all the extra money to work as professors deserve serious kudos, they are rare.

They are few and far between, but the ones that do so are to be commended.

Nothing new about that regardless of the degree level.

College students today have very limited skills in understanding issues, researching, and writing. They don't know the difference between reputable sources and those that are not.

It takes a masters degree to represent the level of knowledge a bachelor's once represented.

Unfortunately, a college degree is mainly a weeding out tool in today's job market. It's something to reduce the applicant pool.

A lot depends on your fields...for example in mine...broadcasting...just having a bachelors degree puts you a leg up on many others...a lot drop out of college or never went. That opened the door for management back "in the day" as I was usually one of the few who had a degree.

However, for my daughter, who just graduated and is now teaching, she knows the bachelors degree is her entry level...if she wants to move up into administration and into more money, she'll need at least a Masters and more likely a doctorate. Her figuring is that each additional degree means another 30-50k a year earning power.

I've always said that a degree never makes you smarter, it just shows how well you've been able to cope with the system.

Yup. Preparation of a lifetime of navigating mounds of bullshit.

We have a 14 trillion economy and it works out to 46k in per capita income (46k for every man, woman, child). It works out to 200k for a family of 4. Real income for a family of 4 is about 50k a year.

First off, supposedly barely 16% of jobs pay more than $20/hr now, and only about 1/2 the pop is in the workforce. So off the bat less than 1/12 of the population is making 46k or more. Where is all the extra wealth? Is it really going strictly to the rich?

got a second masters degree and state certification and am working as a full-time substitute with no tenured position in sight. In my state at least, two masters degrees means districts are contractually compelled to pay at a much higher rate, which they will not do for an over-the-hill "new" teacher, especially when they can get a 23year-old with a BA for less.

I have no degree yet run circles around 99% of the employees in my building, which of course is why I'm relied on so damn much. I'm also proud of the fact that I accomplished being successful without needing that piece of paper, and make a pretty good salary considering. Actual intellect, work ethic, past experience and interaction is far more valuable than the paper. Unfortunately too many places still require that as mandatory before even letting you walk through the door, but people are fooling themselves if they think simply having that piece of paper is enough any longer to succeed or impress.

...from the inside looking out. I was laid off (NOT performance related - economy alone) after 15 years just last month. On the outside looking in, however, it's very hard getting that foot in the door without the degree now...the world has changed a great deal since I last looked for work. Some receptionist or entry-level clerk positions now require a BA or BS. That's just nuts, IMO, and I know because I have been a receptionist. I'm not talking cr4p here.

My degree status has never made me any less good at what I did/do, it just changes the rules of getting the chance to prove it. Once in, I'm generally gold; folks recognize the talent. That said, reading it on dry, boring, stupid paper (aka the resume)? Not so much. It's a conundrum I guess. I still think the insistence on a degree is going to come back and bite this country in the a$$. Sometimes, you have to accept that people learn in different ways, and some of us didn't find it in college.

on edit: clarity