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For too many people, college is less about broadening their intellect than it is delaying adulthood. After all, once you graduate, you're sorta expected to, you know, "get a job," and all that. No more "Animal House" (in theory anyway--I think too many adults never manage to outgrow their inner Bluto). So 18- to 20- year olds wander through different majors (including the famous "undecided"), cramming four years of work into five or six, all the while racking up student loan debt that makes no economic sense compared to what their degree will add to their earning power:
Natalie Hickey left her small hometown in Ohio six years ago and aimed her beat-up Dodge Intrepid for the West Coast. Four years later, she realized a long-held dream and graduated with a bachelor's degree in photography from Brooks Institute in Santa Barbara.Just as cheap credit made the housing bubble possible, so too has the smorgasboard of student loan programs enabled exploding tuition rates that far outpace inflation or the value of the education being offered.
She also picked up $140,000 in student debt, some of it at interest rates as high as 18%. Her monthly payments are roughly $1,700, more than her rent and car payment combined.
It's time to reorient social expectations so that someone who wants to earn a living as a technical specialist can do so without having to game a system and mortgage a firstborn child for a piece of paper that may or may not reflect a broader personal understanding of the world. But then, it's also time to stop using colleges to teach the basics the public schools failed to (how many colleges require remedial English and Math for freshmen???), and time for performance to count as much as resume fodder like degrees.
2 comments:
May I also add to the article that Brooks is one of THE most expensive photography schools and tries to justify this as it being the best on the West coast. As one who was interested in going there at one time in my life, the tuition alone did not justify the school. Not quite a fair example.
True, and I can appreciate your particular expertise on that aspect. The general point, however, that people are spending a LOT of borrowed money on degrees that may or may not give them the earning power to turn a reasonable return on investment is still a valid one. I've heard/known of more than one engineer or other specialist who shelled out money for a degree at a middle-tier program, dreaming of the six-figure entry salary, only to find out there's not as much gold in them thar hills as is sometimes imagined. In fact, given supply and demand, one could argue the very fact we've placed such emphasis on a growing number of people getting undergrad degrees has itself reduced the value of said degrees.
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