NEWS FEED

Con: Is college worth the expense?

Written by Diane Gromelski, Junior Editor

On a humid Saturday afternoon, a long stream of college students wipe sweat from their brows and nervously shift their weight from foot to foot, waiting for their names to be called. They are hit with the sudden realization that this is it: the culmination of four long, demanding years of work. What these students don’t realize is that in the following years, they will be drowning in student loan debt and will not be guaranteed a job in their field of study.

Overpriced and overvalued, college is not the investment that it used to be. Over the past thirty years, the tuition and fees charged for college attendance at both public and private colleges and universities have increased exponentially. Public college tuition and fees have doubled in the past decade while private college tuition and fees have risen 70 percent, according to the College Board.

Due to the current recession, high-paying jobs that require college degrees are becoming less available, especially to recent graduates with little experience in the field. The unemployment rate for college graduates is 4.7 percent, up from 2.8 percent last year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Even when college graduates obtain jobs right out of college, they are making less than graduates have in previous years. The average salary for recent graduates in 2010 was $27,000, down 10 percent from 2008.

College graduates not only have problems finding jobs after graduation, they also have the additional obligation of paying off their student loans. As college tuition has increased, so has the number of students taking out loans and borrowing money. Student loan debt now represents about five percent of all debt in the average household which is more than double the percentage that it was in 2001, according to a study conducted by the Pew Research Center this year.

Experience at an actual job where you are earning money is more beneficial than sitting in a classroom paying to learn how to work. Many of the courses that students take in college are graduation requirements that are not applicable to the career path that they are planning to take. Internships are one way to gain experience in a real-life setting rather than wasting time listening to lectures for the sole purpose of passing a final. The Pew study found that among four-year college graduates only 55 percent said that their college education was very useful in helping them prepare for a job or career.

With the opportunities presented by today’s advanced technology, a college degree is no longer imperative to achieving success. Steve Jobs, multi-billionaire and founder of Pixar and Apple, never obtained a college degree. He dropped out of Reed College in Portland, Oregon after realizing that college was not a good investment and considers it one of the best decisions he has made.

“I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it,” Jobs said in a commencement address delivered to Stanford University students in 2005. “I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made.”

There are many studies coming out that find college graduates make more money in their lifetime than those who only have a high school degree. The key words are “in a lifetime.” The Collegeboard, an advocate for college attendance, admits it takes 14 years before the average college graduate’s income after loan payments starts to beat what the high school graduate earns.

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