Is college worth the cost?

Lots of parents I know started a college fund for their kids as soon as they were born. At age 18 if they weren’t college material, they could use the money for other things as long as they are responsible with it.
Is college worth it? I think it is. There probably aren’t very many fields that don’t need a diploma now, but in 2025 who knows what will be necessary to get a good paying job?

Start out at a local Community college, find what she likes and if she wants, continue to a four year school..

I say say a good education is worth any cost. It’s not necessarily about diploma; it’s about learning to be able to learn.

Listening to the gobbledygook that comes out of one of our two presidential candidates’ mouth makes me wish that one’s parents had been as focused on it as you rightly are.

It depends on what you go to college for, and whether that market will be viable by the time you’ve got a degree in hand.

I, for one, am incredibly glad I’m not paying off a journalism degree, considering the state of that market. If I had been able to go to college right out of high school, that would have been my major.

@Pachy – remember, that guy has a degree.

With respect, @Seek, I didn’t say he doesn’t have a degree. Just saying two of the big benefits of college is that it teaches a child socialization and how to be a life-long learner. The person I’m referencing clearly didn’t learn THOSE skills. ;-)

Amen to that.

$9 billion? Seems he did pretty well.

And all he had to do was screw over everyone who ever believed in him enough to invest in him. What a guy.

The cost and value of college are highly variable. The particular college plan someone has needs to be treated like a business decision. Community colleges are an incredible deal right now. In my state it’s free.

I say use the money to go into a business, you can go to college to learn just want you need to run it, and since you are your own boss, you do not need the sheep skin to convince someone to let you into a J-O-B (Just Over Broke situation).

@Pachy to play devil’s advocate for a moment, you don’t have to go to college to “learn how to learn” and if you want to be a lifelong learner you could take edX courses continually. For socialization, why not have your child learn to live on their own and make friends in a foreign country? $30,000 can do a lot of things.

It depends upon the courses you take and the job market when you get out.
I was lucky enough to have an interest in engineering and went to one of the best engineering schools in the country. I did well in school I was recruited and offered 3 different jobs before I even graduated.
College was well worth the cost. The immediate job offers and increased salary paid for my education many times over.
Had I taken 18th Century French Lit. or Ancient Mythology I might have a different opinion. o

@LuckyGuy when did you go to school? What do you think the cost/payoff will be in 2025 if current trends continue?

I should probably have phrased this question differently: “Will college be worth the cost?”

That’s what I’m actually curious about. Personally, I have a master’s degree and I do well enough, but I also could pay a semester’s worth of tuition with a summer internship when I was in school.

I doubt that will be the case in nine years.

@hornet My first degree was in electronics technology and it paid for itself in two or three paychecks. That was about 1999. Today it would be about a year. My second is in engineering. I was sponsored by my employer so I only had to pay roughly 20%, I had a full ride from the university for grad school. There are ways to get it done without debt, it’s often a lot of luck though.
Engineering, computer science and to some level certain business degrees are still very worth it when it comes to job demand and earning potential.
My current work is specialized and there are a handfull of people with just a high school diploma making six figures. They were lucky enough to be trained through unconventional means. They are smart but the lack of education often shows when talking about much beyond what they do at work.
Even at 30k average debt I still think just about any degree is still a deal.

@ARE_you_kidding_me: Is 30k the average debt for school now? I know school is more than 50k per year.

My parents paid for me by selling some stock, and I got grants. Luckily, I came out of school debt free.

@jca OP mentioned 30k. Probably a realistic figure. There are a bunch of easy and small scholarships most qualify for. Most I know in school now work too. That’s not the best way to do college but it beats getting out with the equivalent of a car loan vs a mortgage.

@hornet, I take your point. Guess I’m just, er, old school.

Yes! But get a job and work your way through. The pay-off is in the long run, over the course of your life, not immediate.

There’s no one way to answer this. It depends entirely on the kid – their needs and wants and the parents’ desire/ability to pay. If I were you, I wouldn’t predict what might happen 9 years down the road but I would be putting money away toward it.

For my kids, it was worth it and we paid a lot for their college but insisted that grad school, if desired, would be self-funded. One is now a developer and manager at Pandora, the other a project manager at Google in Paris. Each reads and writes wonderfully and is conversant in the liberal arts. Was it worth it? Completely.

Like Janbb said it depends on so many things it’s not worth typing it all. There are factors like the type of degree, your and your parents’ income, and all kindsa other stuff lol.

But with current costs I really want to tell you to find a trade. Do you know how many electricians, welders, HVAC techs I know that make hella money? It’s crazy.

As someone who works with professionals that have degrees, there’s a bit of “ohhh uhhhh, what happened” moment that goes on when people find out you didn’t complete your own.

It mainly only matters when applying, looking for promotions, and discussing salary, and I now work for myself, so it doesn’t come up much. But I think for those times alone I wish I would have just finished out a degree in anything.

My kids are a little younger than yours, but I will be encouraging them to get a degree in whatever ways I can. There’s an opportunity cost that can’t be figured in salary returns alone. “what if” is a hard game to play.

Tech people who make that kind o money are, of those I know, educated and certified in skills which comes from classes and testing, just like college. The majority of people need to be prepared for employment because only a small percentage of people have what it takes to be a business owner. I have a nephew who left college after two years because he didn’t need a degree. Now he knows he does and is back in university,,,,,,,,,,,,,sorr y thhat he let his scholarship go. Now he’s paying for it.

College is about more than getting a job. An education is life enriching and I can’t put a price on that. I would encourage my child to go on to university. Not online and not at night. Go to college and have the whole experience. It is a privilege.

From the standpoint of a degree as a ticket to future earnings, I am increasingly convinced that for the great majority, college is a waste of both time and money. There are of course career exceptions, and we all know what they are. The truth is that the feedlot aspect of college as a requirement for survival is now just another one of those proliferating schemes for extracting money from people for the enrichment of the few.

What a college degree does for many people is open doors that would be shut to them if they didn’t have a degree.

For much of the workforce, you will be competing with people who have degrees. If all else is equal, the person with the degree might be interviewed while the person without the degree will be on the bottom of the pile.

For many civil service jobs and other jobs that require a test, you can’t even take the test without a degree. You may have a lifetime of stellar experience, but you’re not taking the test and therefore, not even going to be considered for the job.

That said, there’s no doubt that you can do quite well for yourself as an air conditioning mechanic, house builder, carpenter, electrician, etc. However, those jobs require training, classes, certificates and working as a laborer for a period until you can be successful on your own.

“Those with 3rd World skills will earn 3rd World wages” – Lester C. Thurow

I parlayed a Bachelor’s degree in Engineering into a well-paying job, then parlayed that income to pay my way to get a Master’s degree in Materials Science into a better job. Been employed ever since.

Methinks Mr. Thurow failed for foresee a time when high-tech jobs could be outsourced to telecommuters living in East Asia for pennies on the dollar.

I suppose it depends on what you choose to study. Get a degree in something valued by the society around you, and you can make your investment back in the second year out. Study piano or one the arts, and you will starve. It is best to leave those things as serious hobbies after the workday is over.

A $150k Masters in just about anything medical will get your investment back withing the first 24 months. Even at today’s cost of a university education, you can’t expect returns like this so quickly from any other investment. Even a year studying as an X-ray tech at a tuition cost of about $15k will allow you to walk into a 40k per year gig to start. Where else can you find a comparable low risk investment return like that? Nowhere.

You can pursue any art or small business you want at those wages as long as you stay out of debt, don’t buy cars or a home you can’t afford and don’t have babies too soon. If you are later appreciated for your artistic or business pursuits, you can drop your profession and do it fulltime. I know a few people who have done that. I know three doctors who quit and went into the restaurant business with enough money to weather the first few years of the business development stage—one of the riskiest businesses in America. I know a glassblower that spent six years as an LPN—in most states is a one-year program and now makes more money than she did as a nurse. I know a paralegal who now is circumnavigating the globe on his own yacht with his wife, a former RN who supplement their voyage by writing for yachting magazines. I know two former teachers doing the same.

These people now have full and rich, satisfying lives, especially enriched by their experience in the workforce. None of this is a waste. But none of this was possible without first getting an education of value and doing time in the workforce.

An interesting stat: Only 30% of college grads work withing the major they studied.

In our society, unskilled workers starve working for Burger King and have no discretionary capital beyond their living expenses, if that. Don’t waste time. Get a skill ASAP.

@Seek If you are working on a U.S.government project, they can’t outsource “overseas” they can outsource to US citizen in the USA. That is Federal law.

That’s nice for the small number of people who are contracted to federal positions.

It’s no small number

@Seek The largest employer by far in your county is Bay Pines VA Medical Center. They employ 18,000 people. They are feds and they employ everything from librarians, HVAC people, environmental people, their own fire department, their own police department, secretaries, archivists, pharmacists and pharmacy assistants, researchers, CNAs, nurses, doctors, patient advocates, couriers and just about anything it takes to run a huge establishment of this kind. They also offer scholarships to employees who want to move up.

One county over, actually. And I’m not really sure what federal contractors have to do with the topic of conversation at all.

I think that grim reality now renders a degree in any field that can’t be visibly monetized bordering on fraud. Academics with doctorate degrees find themselves on adjunct teaching hamster wheels with grueling schedules at 30–40 grand a year. This scourge is no longer confined to merely the humanities, as even the hard sciences like chemistry and physics are blighted with the epidemic. It turns out that colleges which are in fact corporations, now mirror their cousins in both avarice and greed. Only they are unhindered by pesky labor laws when it comes to faculty. Nor are they saddled with troublesome consumer protection measures on matters of tuition and fees. The sinister truth is that the current system of higher education is a perfect example of the way things now work in the country. The schools are an example once again of how profits are privatized and wealth is concentrated, all at public expense, this time through the student loan programs, which represent the greatest transfer of wealth scheme ever realized.

Look at it realistically. A college education is deemed a necessity. Schools are free to charge what they choose and pay as well as treat teachers as they choose. In a society with a surplus of people with advanced degrees, the predictable result is of course teachers amount to a faculty of serfs, while tuitions and fees skyrocket. School is now unaffordable without wholesale massed indebtedness, the primary beneficiaries being the banks raking in billions in interest for absolutely no risk with all losses covered of course by the taxpayers. Free enterprise!

However, how long can it continue this way? As I said in my original post, the internet makes it so that colleges can’t have a monopoly on information. What if employers start looking outside of a college degree? What if you, as an employer, start looking at people with coursera or edX certificates? Won’t that give you an advantage over employers that limit who they’ll consider?

Small businesses and new fields tend to already hire on skills and tightly related experience, so in those areas a course or certificate is already extraneous if you have proof you can do the work.

But if you want to get past an HR hiring department that doesn’t really know much about what you do all day, then you better meet the specs laid out by “the hiring manager” or “the VP of talent acquisition” or whatever machine of madness will be reviewing your credentials.

The thing is, the company gets to choose what proof of competence they accept, and a related college degree and X years of experience is still considered the gold standard because it’s very easy to quantify and justify.

For example, what makes someone a “senior developer” or an “Accountant III”. Unless you do those jobs, you have no idea, but it’s easy to say “7+ years experience and a related degree” when you need 20 “senior” and 40 “junior” folks on staff at all times. Without that, you just don’t get the interview.

When I read stuff like this, I wonder if there will be free alternatives by the time my daughter is college age:
http://arstechnica.com/business/2016/08/can-42-us-a-free-coding-school-run-by-a-french-billionaire-actually-work/