College is fast turning in to a suckers game

<I posted this on a sub thread, but thought it might be a good topic for discussion.>

As most of the jobs degrees were supposed to help people get end up outsourced or simply eliminated a lot of people are left holding the bag.

I started to realize college had turned in to nothing but a money making scam a few years ago when I found out corporate executives sitting on the boards of major corporations also held positions of administrative authority at major university's. How many people are aware of that? Not many, but it's true. I also knew something was up when some schools started calling students "customers" and staff "customer service reps". It is a business. A business that makes promises about getting good jobs that may not be there by the time you are finished. It is no longer about education. University = Expensive job training center. It is a business that can leave you in debt for decades.

Just like Fannie Mae went to hell I expect Sallie Mae to do the same. The only difference being Sallie Mae will be able to latch on and suck money out of people much easier like a giant parasite due to the fact student loans can not be discharged in bankruptcy. That is why student loan lenders are so willing to load up young people with tens and sometimes hundreds of thousands of debt in just a few years time.

Student loans are perhaps the BEST money making scheme to be in if you're a loan shark. You get to lend obscene amounts of money to people who are very young (and thus you can feed off of for potentially decades) AND they can never escape you due to the fact they can't discharge student loans.

Really it is to the point now that I would almost say if you have a choice of no college versus leaving college with tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt you may end up better off by simply NOT going. The way this country is going I really don't see many skilled jobs staying here in the future. Think about it. NOTHING has been done by our nations leadership to keep jobs here. NOTHING has been done to create more jobs outside of the service sector. They simply don't care. That's the reality of the matter. How much cash has been given to major banks? How much has been given to create jobs? Not a damn penny that I am aware of.

important in work. Location, experience all help. However a college degree is a requirement in major companies for higher paid jobs. It was useful for me, and I enjoyed it.

Average graduate earnings = $53.8K annually

Average nongraduate earnings = $28.7K annually.

In PRESENT (not nominal) additional value you are looking at about $900K over your career.

Now averages are strange things, but there are not that many Bill Gates' or Kevin Garnett's, and there are millions of accountants and engineers to compare to millions of retail assistants and warehouse workers. So the probability is all else being equal without some great talent, luck or entrepreneurial ability, you'll do a damn sight better with that degree than without it.

OF course common sense applies. Doing an art history degree at a $40K per year private school is not likely to pay off quite as well in purely cash terms as getting an engineering degree at a state school with your first two years at community college, but that's a decision each must make for themselves.

Outsourcing hits all ranks it's true, but it hits the less well educated far more quickly and far more comprehensively for the most part. I've worked in manufacturing all my career. I've seen some IT and engineering outsourced. I've seen a hell of a lot more labor outsourced though.

If you're striving for an Art History degree, ya just ain't using your noodle! :spank:

Just some stupid shit that went on in the past.

Of course, it is romanticized in so many movies... probably because they are written by writers!

Techies do much better with an undergraduate degree than most liberal art masters.

i.e., if you're too old to have a relevant degree in computer science, they'll tell you that you need to go back to technical school.

Its not like the dotcom bubble days, but new graduates seem to be doing fine from our Univ. 50+K for Comp Sci, and Comp Engr. 40K for Information Systems types. Those with AAs and tech school grads may not be doing so well. Liberal arts majors are clearly in a world of hurt.

Perception of not current, wanting too much salary, health issues/costs, unwillingness to work the extra hours etc. are what is in the press. I have no direct experience. I can do all the consulting I want, but the degrees and title help with that.

than graduates were 10 years ago, and studies show that their wages will probably never catch up.

All the people I knew made $100k with a bachelors.

That why I went back to school last year. I'm going to be the old man in class, though I look 10 years younger then I am.

they were in line with what you posted, with HS grads earning ~31K. It would be interesting to see numbers from 2009.

I am highly skeptical of this data, though. Some basic logic tells us that people who graduate college are more likely to be high achievers and hard workers. It's possible that this demographic of people would end up earning much more in life, with or without a degree. It's also true that wealthy and middle class families are overrepresented on campuses, and family income may be the single biggest influence on success in life. It's also fair to say that a few Wall Street traders and corporate executives could skew the college graduate data more significantly because it represents a smaller pool of people.

I think colleges need to stop citing these studies as absolute proof that a degree is worth the money and time and instead really show us a breakdown of what their graduates earn by degree, region, family income, race and gender. They also need to let potential applicants know what kind of jobs their students are getting upon graduation. They've been hiding behind this income gap data for far too long.

..."It's also true that wealthy and middle class families are overrepresented on campuses, and family income may be the single biggest influence on success in life. "

I have degrees, but I make my money as a business owner. I don't really use any of the knowledge I got in college to run my businesses so I would be in the same income bracket had I not gone to college. Highly motivated people tend to go to college, but I think a lot of these people would become higher earners even without a degree. I have many friends who, like me, ended up in fields completely unrelated to their college majors. At most, the degree was a way to let potential employers know they could work hard and follow through.

I'm not saying that college is a bad idea, but I am saying that this particular statistic on grad. vs. non-grad. incomes should not be used by itself to judge whether or not it makes financial sense. There are too many other variables at play.

Please forgive me for being a little ornery. I see a lot of the evil that is occurring in today's world as a result of people in the financial world who have degrees. Where college was once a ladder up, some of those who got degrees decided to chop some rungs out of the ladder and make it harder for those who followed. Did they learn anything good in college? Maybe they should go back to kindergarten.

Finally, consider our dear former President bush. He wanted to make sure his talents weren't wasted. Oh, my! Whatever did we do to deserve his services? Just because someone has a high paying job doesn't mean that they're up to good. People need to stop thinking like Reagan is still the president. The old system has failed. If we don't take care of the people, how do we expect them to take care of us? Maybe we should start thinking like Lincoln and making sure that those who toiled for the food get a little to eat.

Supporting oneself while getting through college isn't free, and there's no guarantee that the magical extra earnings you pick up after graduation will get you ahead of student loan payments.

Will deduct the student loan payments from the monthly payments.

This has already happened to some people.

Meaning many people will have NEGATIVE Social Security payments!

Are you suggesting that one would be paying off student loans at age 65?

To have kids and raise them. In the sixties and seventies,w omen who didn't have college education and were married to someone who did, found it more rewarding to raise their kids rather than be file clerks.

Some ten years ago, my husband returned to school in his mid forties. Possibly one third of the women in his Master's degree program were women in their forties and fifties. For some of these women, the divorce settlements allowed their return to school; they didn't even need student loans. But for other women, they were using student loans just like a twenty-something would.

In fact, if you talk to admissions people at Universities, one of the fastest growing segments of student admissions is the older students. (That was four-five years ago, when I first heard that.) I cannot imagine that is changing now that the job market is so dire.

I'll agree with that. Now, as for people in their late teens and early 20's, people who can expect to have at least 40 years of productive work life after college, a college degree even encumbered with loans remains a very good investment.

When the economy is hot or whether you get out of school when it isn't.

If you go through a Master's program, and by the time you are out, you owe seventy thou, and it is five years before you are employed full time, then a mere two years later, that seventy thousand has doubled up to one hundred forty thousand.

And the student might now be expected to pay $ 1,600 a month. (They can carry deferments for several years while under employed. But the amounts keep multiplying.)


So now they may finally have the good job that pays sixty thou a year. But unless they have decided to live in their car, they will find it impossible to pay off this $ 1,600 a month.

This recession/depression will put many into that predicament.

Life happens.

As in while you would be putting food on the table you would not make back the money you sunk into it. Good thing at least some of it was other people's money.

have student loan debt. I posted an article about it a few years ago.

when they were in their 40s and 50s have gone back to school to train in a career with high demand. Such as me.

I came close to being able to do it cash. I should have been able to do it with $10k in loans max. But the advisor (read sales liar) lied by omission 3 times about info that the university doesn't publish anywhere, so is totally dependent on her honesty. And then she told 3 more blatant lies, although by then it didn't matter, the damage was done.

Her goal was to force me to take a couple courses more than are actually required for the degree thereby bringing in $1500 extra for the university. The result was to set me back a full year, put me in debt for an additional $10k, and I'm hanging by a thread here.

To add insult to injury, without warning or notice they postponed stafford loans for some of us by a month, so I had to take out an emergency (no interest) loan to pay for my books this semester.

They've just missed the 3rd dispersement date in a row. We'll see if they manage to get it out on the 4th date. x(

Before they can take it.

I doubt that protection will be there for long but I think it is now.

Great sig line as well.

Universities used to be about the quest for knowledge simply to improve the mind. Reading Latin and Greek and proving the Pythagorean theorem were never about getting a job, but about honing the intellect. Somewhere, in the quest for workers that could run and fix complicated machinery, fill out tax returns, and build relational databases, college took on a more pedestrian task, that of cranking out obedient workers who were competent at performing tasks, but didn't engage in rational, analytical thinking. Rhetoric is not taught any more, as that would require students to construct independent logical arguments. Capitalist economics IS taught, but only after positing a bunch of axioms that are as dubious as the Genesis version of creation.

And for the privilege of attending a university so as to enter the work force as a white-collar worker, the student whose parents are not wealthy has to swear fealty to the system by taking on a student debt which could take more than a decade to pay off. You've got it right that if a student is in it for money, he would be better off learning to be a plumber, electrician, or auto mechanic. At least those jobs can't be shipped off to eager third world workers. Even the medical profession, which requires a high level of scientific education, works on the factory model of paying the worker for how many procedures he can perform, not on how he can use his intellect to optimize his patient's health.

No, the only people that can learn for learning's sake are the independently wealthy, like the Kennedys. For anyone who has to earn their living by the labor they can perform, learning is a luxury and training to do a task is a necessity.

I'm guessing either none or not a good one if that is what you think.

Although not Ivy League, both schools ranked highly on whatever measure you choose to rank them. However, I met a lot more students at both places who, as the OP opined, were more interested in being able to get a high paying job than they were in being educated. And if that is all they were there for, the global economy will play them for suckers by leaving them high and dry while low paid workers in the Third World take their place.

You see, an education is a very personal thing, something the student has to develop on his own. It is not the same thing as training, which can be done on an assembly line model. To get a driver's license, one has to take training; it is something that all normal people can be taught to a certain level of competency. However, the first people to drive across the U.S. in 1903 didn't have training, they had an education. They had to be mechanics when the car broke down (which it did often), cartographers where there were no road maps, and writers to document their journey. People with an education have the ability to think their way out of a problem; they are not merely conditioned to give the correct response to a limited set of stimuli.

Education is something that the individual acquires at his own pace. The best education comes from one-on-one interaction with a tutor, for as much or as little time as is necessary can be spent on a topic. Schools, in trying to educate 20 or 30 students in one setting, have to give up education for training. The whole concept of NCLB is one of training, that there is a certain body of knowledge on a test that the students will be expected to master. Training can be measured by fill-in-the-bubble tests; how well someone is educated on a topic is more difficult to measure. It requires a more educated person (the teacher) to engage the student in a reparte that looks for gaps in the material that was to be learned.

Education doesn't require a college or university. It requires reading and study -- lots of it. What colleges and universities provide is training: how to read and write (in a foreign language if the student is so inclined), how to calculate engineering quantities, how to design an object to a set of criteria. In today's global economy, American colleges and universities are close to pricing themselves out of the value of that training. How is a computer science graduate supposed to pay off tens of thousands of dollars of debt, when the job he was trained for is given to someone in India who will work for less?

You have painted me into a corner. How can I argue against your arbitrary distinction between training and education. It is just a matter of your opinion.

Our institutions -- particularly Grades 1-12 -- discourage independence to such an extent that it is hard for people to imagine how it could be different. The first question is, whose problem is it? The problem that one is trying to think one's way out of -- is it an artificial problem handed to you by someone else, or a real problem coming from one's own free will or one's own family?

What wonderful training it is, to have people accustomed to being handed a set of problems by someone else and told, go solve these. People think that the 3 or 4 hour schoolday in old America vs what we have now is because we have a more complicated world or that people back in the 1800s weren't educated. They certainly read more than Americans do today.. What else they did during their day was confront and overcome their real life problems -- whether it was harvesting crops or working at the father's waggon shop or learning carpentry skills.

A fascinating shift in American culture occurred in the upbringing of children after the 'industrial revolution'. Some of it good, but some of it left us atomized, and some of it left us missing the connection of implementing vision or personal dreams, or feeling handless at implementing visions of our own design.

public research universities push their faculty to generate income for the school in the form of grants and patents/commercial products (private research universities do, too, but their budgets aren't constantly being squeezed by the legislature). Teaching is secondary to research. Science graduate students are admitted to feed the ego of the research faculty and to conduct research (more money for the university) even though everyone but the grad students know there are no jobs for them. Humanities graduate students are admitted to provide cheap labor to teach the necessary English and language classes even though there are even less jobs for them than for science grad students. Undergraduate students have bought into the product model and have a sense of entitlement (I paid my tuition, I should pass/graduate) and have no clue about the distinction between a public and private university (I once had a student at a public university say to the instructor - who was a grad student - "we pay your salary ..." - I wanted to say, "no, you dumb f**k, the reason you are not paying $40 - $80K a year in tuition alone is because the STATE pays our salary).

Nothing jobs like I have are more easily secured with a college degree. I don't make a lot but I have health care and retirement. My degree gets me this job over someone without a degree. So even having a looser degree like I have has resulted in very good health care and food on the table.

there is HUGE interest in having every capable person obtain Higher Ed.

Yet, there are LARGE numbers of schools that have non-competitive admissions and that "bring struggling students along."
Both these practices put people with ACT's of less than 20 with mostly poor high school grades in a position to surrender tens of thousands of dollars per academic year. And the risk takers do it with little honest opportunity to get a financial return.

Yes, it sounds great to give everyone a chance at a higher education, but for many students it turns into tremendous exploitation. Putting 19 year olds with little academic promise in tremendous debt (15-20 thousand per year isn't unusual), is not unlike the predatory lending practices that place very risky borrowers in debt to buy homes far beyond their honest capacity to discharge.

In the old days (1955-1970) only 10%-15% of high school grads would be ADMITTED to a school of higher ed, of those about 30% (5% of the total) would FINISH with a 4-year degree. You could argue that more high school grads were (and are) capable of success in higher ed. I'd agree, but more doesn't turn out to mean 5x more.

Changes in society have resulted in 50%-65% of high school grads being admitted to some form of higher ed after high school. Was that 35%-55% increase college admissions a consequence of better prepared students? I really don't think the US education curriculum was so successful that it made 5 fold more students capable of succeeding in higher ed.

It seems much more likely that the increased admission percentage was something that expanded to fill empty seats in a higher ed infrastructure built to deal with the baby-boom/veteran's benefits bubble, and to pay-off construction loans from Sallie Mae to replace increasingly dilapidated college classrooms that don't receive tax support. The result is a higher ed system that functions like Wal-Mart--always looking for a new group of consumers who can be convinced to buy crumby products.

I teach at a college that services inner-city kids seeking opportunity to advance in the world. Every semester I expect 50% of the students in my college freshman classes to withdraw BEFORE the first semester is over--but then, that will be after they have gone into tremendous debt. About 25% of my students continue in my courses, even though they are failing, because they receive state and federal loans that put food on their children's plates. Having taken a path in which they surrender their full time jobs for part time jobs, and having told their part-time employers to reduce their hours, they have little choice. The students that PASS with a C will represent between 12% and 15% of those who started.

_THAT_ 12%-15% represents the students who should probably have been admitted in the first place. The failed 85% represents kids w were given a "special chance to start over." Yeah, Hoo-rah! A start-over with debt given up to a predatory higher ed "business practice."

However I look at it, what higher ed has on its hands is a tragedy. I have NO DOUBT education remains THE path from the lowest working class status to the highest class of licensed professionals. But it is very risky. Yes, it's better than telling a kid to concentrate on being a professional basketball play, but even in higher ed there aren't ANY guarantees. Especially for at-risk students, those with ACT's less than 20.

Much of what the higher ed system generates through current practices is the sort of disappointment expressed in the OP.

**

Education has become a For Profit enterprise.

In the 60s and 70s it was possible to attend a State University and graduate Debt Free if one was willing to work a part time job. You could even own and drive a used car.

It could be that way again if we had a Political Party that represented Americans who Work for a Living.




If you want an education, get a BA in History or Literature.

If you want a job, go to trade school.
Viewing an Education as a way to make MONEY has contributed to the dumbing down of America.
Some of the most ignorant people I have ever met have had Engineering Degrees.

As a Liberal, I support FREE universal Education at ALL levels for anyone who wants it.

full-time tuition for a year was $375 for a commuter student, or 300 times the minimum wage in 1968.

If you lived with your parents and worked part-time, you could easily graduate debt-free.

A year of tuition is now 2000 times the minimum wage.

**

Really? As a current college student, that blows my fucking mind. I've worked part time school-year/full-time summers every year, and I'm still coming out with 10's of thousands in loan debt, and I go to a state school and don't live terribly lavishly.

If we had subsidized education as they do in most European countries, we'd have no hitmen for capitalism. According to my active duty friends, the majority won't leave for fear of losing their GI Bills--everything they've been working for by risking their lives. Many are so desperate they sell their souls for an education. A friend of mine said that he puts jingoistic, all-American loonies at about 20-25% of our Army and Navy (slightly higher in the Marines and Air Force). Everyone else just wanted to go to college and get a hand up. Very sad.

Went to college, went to graduate school...paid for it on my own by working.

Don't have any student loan debt. Still was useless for getting a job.

B.A. and J.D. here.

I stopped looking and decided to retire.

I work at a low cost PUBLIC university and tuition is $18K a year. If you have a high school education and make $8 an hour working full-time that's $320 a week before taxes and about $13K a year in take home. Two courses a semester means $9K a year, 8 years to graduate with a BA and that's living on $5k a year for 8 years. One course a semester means you graduate in 16 years and live on less than $9K a year for 16 years. And let's be realistic: you'll probably make $10 an hour after that.

Student loans are a reality for all working class students unless their parents were able to save or able to take out loans on their behalf.

Yes, it's good for teaching you to think, and appreciate culture.

As far as getting a job, nope. Did absolutely nothing.

I earned my BA thirty years ago and my JD twenty-five years ago. Worked full time and went to night school for five years to get the law degree. Both of those degrees are from well-esteemed private schools.

Did either degree help me get a job? Nope. Was it fun? The BA was.
Cost? $25,000 in 1980 dollars for the JD.

The BA, I'm not sure what it was, but it wasn't cheap.

--Hamburger University

--The Olive Garden University in Italy that invented shrimp scampi

--DeVry Institute a.k.a. the 13th Grade

I love college. College is not about jobs and investments, college is about the joys of formal education. College is its own reward.

However, that's not how college is sold to young people and their parents. It's always sold as an investment toward future earnings, with the extravagant costs justified by the higher income potential that supposedly comes with any degree.

If it were only about learning for learning's sake, the costs would be much, much lower. These days there are so many free and cheap educational opportunities that private colleges would not be able to compete if employers based the worth of a degree on knowledge accumulated instead of on the status and prestige of the institution.

Don't forget the babes.

You went to college and majored in whatever you were interested in. Maybe it led to a career; maybe it didn't. If you majored in nursing or engineering or accounting, you went directly to a job.

If you majored in liberal arts and didn't want a career in teaching or the arts, you looked for a management trainee position, whether you had a business background or not. Then, believe it or not, the the company trained you. Yup, some of my college classmates (1972) with B.A.'s in English or French or political science were hired by some of the major corporations that were headquartered in the Twin Cities at the time.

At about the time the Reagan administration came in, companies stopped hiring anyone who didn't have a business degree for any position except outside sales.

In around 1981, I was the proverbial unemployed Ph.D., and I did informational interviews at all the major companies in the Twin Cities. There I met people my age or slightly older who had been English or math or even music majors and who had responsible positions in these companies. All of them told me that they would not be allowed to apply for their own past entry-level jobs if they were coming out of college in 1982. Everyone said that their HR department now automatically trashed the applications of anyone who didn't have a vocational degree, i.e. business (preferably a specific area of business like finance or marketing), accounting, or computer science.

The following year, I picked up some college adjunct jobs, and at all three colleges, the students had flocked to the business department, starving the rest of the departments of upper-level students.

At one school, I had a Marxist colleague (a biology professor) who said that it was all a move to snuff out student protests and create obedient corporate cogs. Liberal arts students not only led campus protests but tended to question authority when they were in a corporate setting. Other colleagues, not Marxist, said that they missed the days when students actually cared about their literature and philosophy and history courses and argued in class instead of just taking notes and asking what was on the test.

After a few years of full-time teaching betweeen 1984 and 1993, I came to the conclusion that my Marxist colleague was onto something. I've found that if you encounter someone who spouts Milton Friedman Libertarian nonsense, it's usually some affluent suburbanite who went to college between about 1980 and 1995.

It's true, people going to college in the 80s learned how Milton's free market was the answer. You can take some comfort in the fact that after a few years in this "free" market, we all figured out that it's purpose was to screw us over.

Oh, and you forgot to mention that before 1980, a lot of Americans really enjoyed their jobs. After that, we were micromanaged into misery.

It's ironic that Milton will always be famous for his depiction of hell. Paradise lost indeed. (Yeah, it was a differnt Milton, but I have an enGineering degree.)

The corporate charter school movement now being pushed by our education secretary, arne duncan, is right out of the neoliberal, friedman playbook.

Friedman's little experiment in Chile should be a clear warning to all of us exactly what they have in store when their finished with this country.

:-)

So I don't know what was being taught.

As a graduate of the class of '07 and a current grad student in social science, that's exactly how it seems to me. We all have to pay for our own corporate training these days by majoring in business or else give up on having a "real job". It's sad.

were going to be as early as 1967. This apparently became the norm.

You give the students a list of x number of essay questions that cover the material in the course up to that point, and you tell them that their test will consist of half of those questions, the numbers of which you will determine by tossing dice or drawing numbers out of a box.

We used to have tests like that in our religion and philosophy courses. Students would study together by brainstorming about each question and writing practice essays. Invariably, different people remembered different details, so by the time the test came around, the students who followed this technique were capable of writing pretty good essays.

This was also the technique that a lot of graduate departments at Yale used for their comprehensives, only there were more questions, they were more complex, and the tests took an entire weekend.

comparing Hobbes and Locke on human nature and societies but some of the students I encountered seemed to want a list of facts to know in advance which, I more or less informed them, did not work so well with discussions of metaphysics or ideology!

And nonresidents can move to GA, pay for the first year, and then get the next 3 years worth of classes for free if they maintain a 3.0 college GPA.

A good deal.

where they can make some money. Also some good stuff going on in Health Care Professions. Forget Wall St. and the rest...Make the money and do some GOOD for your fellow humans while you are at it. Go to a good Community College and learn a SKILL...they will be much in demand.

Don't push kids into stuff but follow their inclination even if it might not be all one hoped for them as a parent. Expensive education is not the "be all and end all" for life choice. Job "well done" and satisfaction for contributing to society and feeling good about your work is worth more than Billions on Wall St. and a 20,000 sq. ft. house in Greenwich,Ct. or the NY Hamptons where your kids parade around in bikini's like Paris Hilton or Donald Trump's daughter as EyeCandy for RANDY PERVERTS! Same thing for your Sons WHORING THEMSELVES to WALL ST. BONUSES to buy the Fancy House, Cars, Jets and pay for the jewelry and life style of the Hilton and Trump daughters.

They get out sooner and make more money than most liberal arts majors, even if they are non-union. Service jobs are very hard to offshore as well.

We would have the FOUNDATIONS for AMERICA TO BE SAFE/PRODUCTIVE/ and WHOLE!

Without our "Literate/Hands On Workers ...we will be a lesser Nation. But, we allowed all our folks to strive for Harvard/Yale..etc. etc. etc. Educations when many of them would have been happier "MAKING THINGS WITH THEIR HANDS AND SWEAT!

How do we reconcile that as "Educators?" Aren't we pushing kids into two groups: ACHIEVERS=Wall St., Lawyers, Engineers,Physicians..

As Opposed to the LEGIONS of PRACTICAL FIXERS..who TAKE CARE OF THE "McMansions" and even the most inexpensive of our HOME OWNERS!

Let's PUT MORE MONEY INTO "VO-TECH" and encourage READING! :shrug:

In the corporate state, the young worker must be immediately loaded down with indebtedness, otherwise she would have the ability to stand up for what is right, even if it meant losing a job.

Later in life, it is employer provided health insurance, coupled with the pre-existing conditions game that keeps employees docilely chained to their enslavement.

I'm to short of time to do it for you. But, sinking kids and parents into debt so that Harvard/Yale and the rest get more income...just doesn't cut it in these times.

The fruit of your labors belongs to the predators. Period. Blue collar, white collar it doesn't matter. Someone with triple advanced degrees does not impress them any more than a high school dropout. You are merely an economic unit. When they decide you are not worth the investment you are discarded.


That said, taking 10 years after college to pay back the loans will probably give you a bit more comfortable existence than someone who passed on it. Not always, but probably.

It's not a coincidence that most of the teabaggers and anti-health care reform protesters are clearly ignorant morons who probably have "left" and "right" tattooed on top of their feet to help them put their shoes on.

Unfortunately, a high school education is not enough, particularly since they has devastated it with their spending cuts, testing nonsense, and right wing revisionist history as recently occurred in Texas.

"Heritage Foundation, Hudson Institute, Carnegie Foundation, Ford Foundation, Council on Foreign Relations, Brookings Institute, Carnegie Institute for Peace, Better Business Bureau, United Way,etc. etc. etc. etc. etc........it goes on.

Just do a Goole of "Foundations who Support Political Causes" and see what you come up with.

Unless your kid gets into one of these in these hard times...or get's a gig on Wall St....then WHO IS HIRING? :shrug: It's the reality of life today. Maybe an Oil Company, Blackwater, Halliburton, Honeywell, or a Major Drug Company or Defense Contractor "under the radar" is another bet.

OBAMA needs to FUND ARTS and BASIC SCIENCE and ENVIRONMENT in COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES! He needs to do this to counteract the funding for all the Privileged who fund the "THINK TANKS" that RUN US!

how to advocate for that stuff too.

Perhaps some of the high school grads headed to college without distinct plans for post college should be encouraged to take up a trade instead.

On the other hand, many undergrad degrees will get you work, and others are prerequisite to degrees or training that will lead to a good career. 100% of our teachers, scientists, doctors, pharmacists, lawyers, librarians, dentists, commercial pilots, engineers etc. are college educated. There are a LOT of good jobs for graduates and advanced degree holders, and many are not going anywhere. Calling college a "suckers game" is indefensible.

specific jobs and those jobs are gone

and the schools are good!

Call it REVERSE outsourcing...

where ideological purity of maintaining a free market in every sector is trumping common sense and societal requirements.

Here we leave it all to the fucking credit industry which has become a parasite and sucked the lifeblood out of society. Nothing has changed in the last year. And you'll still be forced to take out massive debt just to get a Goddamn bachelor's degree in something that may not be very useful anyways. We like to take pride that we encourage "entrepreneurship" but who the fuck can start a business when they know they'll be charged exorbitant prices for health insurance? Better to be a drone.

But another question is, why are so many pushed to get a bachelor's degree in fields which have no inherent marketability? All bachelors degrees are not the same. It's time to start emphasizing that everyone has different strengths and should be encouraged different routes to a successful future. Some are definitely better suited for a vocational role and there is nothing demeaning about having such a job. Hands on skills should be respected and encouraged for more people.

Meanwhile, we should also be emphasizing education at lower levels, especially in math and science at the elementary level. But look at the reaction to the president making a speech stressing such things! He's receiving disdain and criticism. Of course, I think we're also the only western industrialized country to have school districts finding evolution to be a controversial subject.

So nothing should be surprising. The free market trumps all in America. For a country that prides itself on so much open thought and freedom, we've become slaves to an extremist philosophy. Pathetic.

But, you can entertain yourself cheaply with all intellect you develop from all those Liberal Arts Classes. At least that is what I keep telling myself.

I was scared off from college when I turned 18 due to the insane costs. Here I am, 10 years later, in a dead-end job that I absolutely can't stand; I went back to school, will graduate in less than a year, and feel that's a way out for me. I have taken on debt, but where did not taking on any debt get me? Almost 10 years of my life lost because I wasn't able to get a decent job.

Maybe I won't get a decent job once I get my degree, but I doubt it. I guarantee I will be in a better job than I currently am in. So many employers won't even give you the time of day if you don't have a college degree. I know the talent I have, but prospective employers don't.

I get tired of people like you complaining like this. WHAT ELSE IS THERE TO DO? I am a living example of the type of situation which you speak of, and I would tell anyone reading this: DO NOT FOREGO YOUR EDUCATION, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES. I did that, and I look back and regret the last 10 years that I wasted.

I had perfect credit and almost zero debt, but I have nothing to show for it. Now, I am in debt, but I also have many more opportunities opened up for me, opportunities that would not be there if I had not chosen to go back to college.