Via Memeorandum, Marty Nemko berates colleges for peddling worthless college degrees that leave students in debt for decades and no better educated.
Among my saddest moments as a career counselor is when I hear a story like this: "I wasn't a good student in high school, but I wanted to prove that I can get a college diploma. I'd be the first one in my family to do it. But it's been five years and $80,000, and I still have 45 credits to go."
I have a hard time telling such people the killer statistic: Among high-school students who graduated in the bottom 40 percent of their classes, and whose first institutions were four-year colleges, two-thirds had not earned diplomas eight and a half years later. That figure is from a study cited by Clifford Adelman, a former research analyst at the U.S. Department of Education and now a senior research associate at the Institute for Higher Education Policy. Yet four-year colleges admit and take money from hundreds of thousands of such students each year!
Even worse, most of those college dropouts leave the campus having learned little of value, and with a mountain of debt and devastated self-esteem from their unsuccessful struggles. Perhaps worst of all, even those who do manage to graduate too rarely end up in careers that require a college education. So it's not surprising that when you hop into a cab or walk into a restaurant, you're likely to meet workers who spent years and their family's life savings on college, only to end up with a job they could have done as a high-school dropout.
Such students are not aberrations. Today, amazingly, a majority of the students whom colleges admit are grossly underprepared. Only 23 percent of the 1.3 million high-school graduates of 2007 who took the ACT examination were ready for college-level work in the core subjects of English, math, reading, and science.
Perhaps more surprising, even those high-school students who are fully qualified to attend college are increasingly unlikely to derive enough benefit to justify the often six-figure cost and four to six years (or more) it takes to graduate. Research suggests that more than 40 percent of freshmen at four-year institutions do not graduate in six years. Colleges trumpet the statistic that, over their lifetimes, college graduates earn more than nongraduates, but that's terribly misleading. You could lock the collegebound in a closet for four years, and they'd still go on to earn more than the pool of non-collegebound — they're brighter, more motivated, and have better family connections.
My parents were determined that their children would all attend college (two out of the three of us graduated and I have an advanced degree) because, at the time, college-educated adults held better jobs and had more job security. Unfortunately, neither of those things can be said these days. White collar jobs are just as likely to be eliminated or sent overseas as manufacturing jobs. This joke:
The engineer looks at an idea and asks "How will it work?" The accountant looks at it and asks "How much will it cost?" The businessman looks at it and asks "How do we sell it?" The liberal arts grad looks at it and asks, "Do you want fries with that?"
is unfortunately quite true.
Nemko offers a series of suggestions for making a college diploma worth more, but I'm skeptical. I've sworn there will be no liberal arts majors (no communications, no art, no French, etc.) out of my brood. It's fine if they like school and studying new things; they can do that once they can support themselves.
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