Stossel: The College Scam

In my experience, those people are some of the best journalists I've worked with.

Speaking as someone having considerable college experience but no degree in my professional field, I've found that the learning done on the job far, far exceeds the learning done in the classroom. Not to say the college wasn't valuable, but I think that what was useful--truly useful--could've been condensed into, perhaps, a year.

I think the process could be considerably streamlined--and made much, much cheaper and cost effective--for many professions.

Does anyone else see the irony in an Ivy graduate telling other people not to send their kids to college?

Try to get a decent paying job without a college degree these days. Doesn't matter your level of experience, the computer which scans your resume before a human gets to see it is programmed to reject those without degrees.

There's merit in saying we shouldn't be degree focused, but to cite folks like Zuckerberg as examples of why people don't need to go to college overlooks some rather important issues. Somebody who goes to Harvard has connections to people who can provide you financial backing and help show you the ropes. Most people aren't going to have those advantages by any stretch of the imagination. Not to mention how shitty most high schools are these days, not going to college ensures we're going to be plagued with even dumber morons than we have now.

Yup. College is big business. They're in it for the money.

As the economy continues to stagnate, this argument is going to carry more weight.

I say go to college if you have a strong intellectual appetite (most young adults do not) and/or there's something very specific you want to do with your degree, a career that requires it. Otherwise, it's a waste. And the worst part is that the system makes people feel like failures if they can't do it.

Most colleges anyway are just sausage factories for big athletics and fraternizing, with little care for the education aspect. They're operated by people interested only in money, their classes taught by people minimally interested in education, and attended by underachievers. Their standards for entrance and maintaining grades have gone down in the past few decades as a result of college being for "everyone." The value of a college degree in the labor market has been deflated away.

It may well be that the "received truth" that everyone has to go to college simply isn't so. He argues his case in the article; everyone is free to accept or reject it.

For myself, I know people who are college graduates and are having a difficult time making ends meet. I know people who barely graduated from high school who are doing fine. People get opportunities based on a lot of factors; education is but one of them.

I know--from firsthand experience on both sides of the transaction--that college kids coming into engineering jobs are very, very green and need lots of experience (and, ideally, guidance) before they're of much use in engineering.

My wife will likely complete her BA sometime next year. In all liklihood, she'll get considerably more money at her job than she's getting now (which is already an amazing amount of money for someon with "only" an Associate degree).

Hopefully I can go into a lower-paying line of work when that happens.

I know a multi millionaire that never finished high school and has a wharehouse full of man toys.

Whoever coined the term junkyard instead of auto salvage probably had a college degree.

Until employers become more willing to hire and train people with only a high school degree, young people will go to college to open up their job prospects. It's pretty much the only way a kid of this generation without connections can prove she's literate and trainable and ready for something beyond shelf-stocker or burger-flipper.

And with online job applications, it's even easier for companies to narrow down the applicant pool by education - as Tuckerfan said, the college-less applicants are gone before any human lays eyes on their resume.

It's not the young adults who are solely to blame for not knowing sufficiently how the world works that they do such a foolish thing as go off to unnecessary college; it's the older adults using college education as one of the primary tools to determine whom to hire who are driving this trend.

This. Eight years for my degree, can't find a job in it. And it's not some useless degree like English or Liberal Arts -- it's Geography.

It took that long because I worked to pay for my schooling until the work situ screwed me over and I took out a total of $20k in loans to finish school, and because I originally was a music major while I was trying to figure out just what I wanted to do. The department politics pissed me off and I left with enough for a minor. Useful, because it's helping me with my music composition and got me into the Oregon Symphonic Band. Downside of it is, it's still not paying the bills.

I won't disagree that college is really expensive, but the gains to income far exceed the initial investment.

Average debt for a college graduate, as of 2011, is ~$23,000. Now, if it is true that a college graduate will make $1,000,000 more over the course of their lifetime, than the determination for whether its a good idea to go to college should be dependent on whether it would be more advantageous to take that money and save it, while working for a living. To more appropriately determine the cost of a college degree, the overall graduating debt is less relevant than the total cost of borrowing.

Current interest rates on Stafford Loans: 6.8%
Term: 10 years
Total Borrowed: $23,000
Total Repaid: $31,761.60

So if we were generous, and assumed that the person not going to college would be given that much to start to invest with at 18. Being more generous, we'll give them a 6% interest rate on their investments, which is much higher than the current average. Being further generous to the example, we'll assume that the college graduate's extra $1,000,000 over the course of their career is not invested at all.

If non college student starts work at 18, and both work until 65, the future value at retirement of the non college students investments at 65 will be $491,212.98. Compare this to the college student making $1 million over the course of those 47 years, and it's pretty obvious which is the winner.

Pretty much. I learned far more from research than from my classes. I got creative and applied all those boring definitions and made them into something neat. If I skipped all the non-science coursework (about half my degree) and just kept the chemistry, math and research, I'd have been out in 2 years and learned the exact same amount of stuff for my field.

Which reminds me. "General education classes" need to burn in hell.

That said, I learned a lot in college. I went through a difficult program that covered every major area of chemistry in painstaking detail. I can talk about everything chemistry (except biochem, YUCK! I avoided that!) and I'm more prepared to become a researcher than most chem students in the country. I definitely know more than a freshman. A helluva lot more. I would NOT stick a freshman in a senior level chem class from my university, much less the lab. Even with detailed instructions, I wouldn't stick them in lab. They'd have no idea if the reaction went wrong and how to fix it. They would break equipment, miscalibrate, and get tons of error. There's too much knowledge they're missing to do any of it safely.

I think we overemphasize the need for people to go to college, as there is a lot of money to be made in skilled trades. But at the same time, as technology increases and automation replaces jobs the need for an educated workforce to develop and repair technology becomes increasingly necessary, with the need for unskilled labor decreasing.

Your friend may be a statistical outlier, but for the most part, the ever increasing complexity of our technology, healthcare, and financial systems requires a highly educated workforce.

Some of my favorite courses of college were general ed classes: political science, economics, philosophy. Even if the professors had their own private agenda, the classes were structured in such a way to get you to think critically about the systems that make up our world.

For those of who think I'm such a liberal and that I got it from my courses, my professors had noticeable conservative leanings.

Don't go to college?
Done!
Thanks, Stossel!

I think college is a great stepping stone, but only for certain types of professions and certain types of students.

The majority of people who go to college probably shouldn't bother. They have no clue what they want to do with their lives, and they are wasting money.

The last year of high school there should be more emphasis on deciding a career path and then instructing the student on how to begin working towards that goal.

This may involve going to college or university. It may also involve some other trade or vocational school.

Or it may involve jumping right into the working world, learning the skills necessary for that job, and being ambitious enough to look for ways to rise in that setting.

College definitely is not for everyone. Since I always planned to go into health care, college was a must and there was no question for me that I needed work in that direction.

But if my passion in life was cooking... college is a waste of time and money. Better to just join some culinary institute right off or get your foot in the door at some restaurant, etc.

There are too many people going to college. For some things it is necessary. Very often it is not, or could be done much more efficiently than it is.

Of course, there's also a danger that this kind of measured critique would get used in service of those anti-intellectuals who wish to celebrate ignorance. That's much worse than the kids who go to college to drink and be lazy.

Ugh, what a load of shit.

1. Some people don't need to go to college because they have a great idea and just need to get on with it. That's fine but it doesn't equate to 'You can be rich without going to college!'. For most people that isn't true.

2. Some college degrees are dumb and mostly dumb people do them and they aren't going to help them avoid being a bartender all their life. True also but again, doesn't mean many, many people don't benefit from going to college because...

3. Even if you learn more about your job from doing your job (and how wouldn't this be the case?) you are much more likely to GET the job if you have a good college degree to wave around.

Really? I don't enjoy blowing things up or driving heavy machinery and I was in The Army learning a valuable trade (Electronic Tech/Air Traffic Control Equipment) that now (as a civilian) pays 25 dollars an hour. I don't even have an Associate Degree, because I can't do college level math. No sense getting a gazillion credit hours if you can't get a degree because you have a math/abstract reasoning learning disability.

And I was in the USAF too first - where ironically I DID help blow things up as a bomb loader. I also worked my ass off humping bombs - my Army job was actually much easier.

Anyway, about the cost of education. Why has college gone up way ahead of the cost of inflation/wages? Where is all that money going? Teachers don't make shit...theoretically if the the cost of high tech equipment goes down compared to wages (which it does) then why does it cost more to go to college? Who's "wetting their beak" at the students' expense? One of you collegiate types "school" me on the college racket!

The administrators and athletic department get most of what money is taken in by the school. There's also this tendency to spend an awful lot of money on making the place look nice.

As for college being a scam, uh, you kind of need a 4 year degree to get into the vast majority of your professional fields, like me, who got a degree in Mechanical Engineering. About the only thing I hated having to take was the chemistry, and to be fair I needed some of that anyway because of how it comes into play for materials properties.

A couple disjointed thoughts:

1) Stossel is from Portland!? Along with '90s MTV VJ Kennedy!? Successful conservatives from Portland=

2) Something foil said stirred something in my brain--about communications. What it made me think maybe has nothing to do with what he said, but is relevant. You know my biggest disappointment with my education? Unless you're in a technical job, life is selling. Whether you are selling your ideas to your manager (or investors), selling a product to customers, selling yourself to employers, or selling what needs to happen to your subordinates, it's all selling. I'm not aware of any classes on selling. That is the one thing I wish I'd have gotten from an education. It doesn't matter shit what you know if you don't know how to convince people that you know it. I've done my best to round out that education and I've gotten better at it, but it sucks the amount I've shelled out to be successful and didn't get that knowledge in a packaged form.

3) Related to what PGT said, the problem is that HR people are unimaginative, timid souls who feed credential inflation. (That's my term. If you want to use it you must pay me $.02.) Someone decides a college degree makes them more competitive and pretty soon everyone runs out to get a college degree. And almost as many other dubious places start offering college degrees. Pretty soon the college degree is worthless and you need an advanced degree. Then the same thing happens with the advanced degree so you need to go out and get a $2,000 certification that says you know what you're talking about. Then shady people come along and teach you how to get your certification without actually knowing anything either. At this point, you need the advanced degree and the certification just to be considered (because HR people are unimaginative timid souls that are determined to shield their company from choosing the best choice for a job in favor of the safest choice for the job) but you STILL have to do something else to prove you're qualified.

This is why I've decided to instead focus on killing hobos and harvesting their organs to sell on the Chinese black market.

No, he's from Illinois.

He got his first teevee job at KGW.

I've had issues with our college and educational system for years.

I've been to school and have a diploma in mortuary science and an AAS in nursing. Back when I went to mortuary school, it was a one year program, took the national board exam, did a one year apprenticeship, and got my licenses. Around that time, some schools were starting to go to 2 year associate degree programs. When I left the bidness for good 10 years ago, some states were starting to require 4 year BS degrees.

Now, think about that. Now you have to go to school for 4 years and wrack up a lot of debt to get the same job and earn the same pay as I would with only one year of school.

I did 2 years of school and got my ADRN. Back when I got out of school in '88, a BSRN had 2 more years of school which, of course, costs a lot more money and they only made 50 cents more an hour. Today, most places pay ADRNs and BSRNs the same. In the past, BSRNs were more likely to get into management, but today more hospitals and facilities are starting to realize that the ADRNs have been down and dirty in the trenches and know how things work in the real world, and tend to make very good managers.

I've seen a lot of BSRNs who got out of high school, went to college for 4 years with a romantic ideal of becoming Techno Super Nurse, and when they went to work they discovered that it's a damn dirty job. You work in blood, piss, shit, vomit, and various other sundry bodily fluids all day long. Within 6 months after we graduated, one of my former classmates contracted a nosocomial infection and died.

A lot of the BSRNs can't hack it, but they've got 4 years and a lot of money tied up in their education, so they go back for 2 more years and get their Masters. Then they go into administration where they screw everything up with theory rather than reality, or go into teaching where they screw up the next generation of nurses.

There's a lot of truth in the saying, "Those who can do do and those who can't do teach."

Honestly, the best RNs are the old ones who went to the old 3 year programs that hospitals used to run. They worked shifts on the floors while they were in school and knew what to expect and what to do when they graduated.

Both times, school only taught me how to pass the board exams and I learned how to do the job when I went to work.

I agree with Stossel. I think there's too much emphasis on college and too little on practical training. We're more concerned with "certified" rather than "qualified".

I'm always torn when it comes to college. I think it frustrates me that it creates an artificial wall in careers where it serves no purpose. I was working on my Associates Degree only to be told a Bachelor's Degree is the new high school diploma. When you realize you're spending $12,000 to get a degree that will be ignored in an effort to get you to spend $23,000 on a degree that will be ignored, it gets disheartening.

So I said "fuck it", am studying for my A+/N certification, and will pay $300 and push my business that much harder. I would love to get a college education, but after Phoenix screwed me over, I'm more than a little gunshy to try again.