Is Going To College Worth It?

[Tugg Speedman]

More at the link, below is some highlights ...


America's Outmoded "Factory Model" Educational System Needs to be Radically Reinvented
MONDAY, FEBRUARY 13, 2017
oftwomonds.com
Charles Hugh Smith

http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2017/02/americas-outmoded-factory-model.html

It's obvious that we desperately need a new decentralized, individualized and far more productive system of education.
I have long held that America's educational system is an outmoded "factory model" designed to produce interchangeable industrial and service workers en masse for an industrial economy of factories and a 1960s-era service sector that needed millions of employees with basic-skills: Is Our Education System Based on a Factory Metaphor? (November 15, 2005)

There are two fatal flaws in this idealistic thinking:

1. Funneling every child into a horrendously costly four-year university has stripped our economy of all the skills that aren't taught in college: welding, pipefitting, etc.

Reskilling America argues that we have purposefully let our practical-skills education decline in favor of the highly impractical goal of issuing millions of diplomas in gender studies, environmental studies, etc., four-year degrees that qualify the graduate to work in coffee shops or as Uber drivers.

Even STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) degrees appear to be mismatched with the real-world job market in terms of what employers want students to know and the number of jobs in STEM that are actually being generated.

Evidence suggests that the number of tech/STEM jobs has remained constant for years, undermining the assumption that graduating 1 million STEM grads magically creates 1 million new STEM jobs in the real world.

2. Most students gain little of value from their four years of squandering $100,000+.

Graduates exit college with a diploma but few if any practical skills, few if any practical knowledge bases and few if any of the eight essential skills I describe in my book Get a Job, Build a Real Career and Defy a Bewildering Economy.

Consider the study Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses which concluded that "American higher education is characterized by limited or no learning for a large proportion of students."

These charts illustrate the costs and diminishing returns:

[TAMU, Knower of Ball]

Was there a single fact in that article? The chart at the end looks pretty but all it really shows is that more people are going to college now then ever before.

[GGGG]

Was there a single fact in that article? The chart at the end looks pretty but all it really shows is that more people are going to college now then ever before.

And it is also simple.  As more people get college degrees, the less those degrees may be worth.  However that doesn't mean that they aren't worthwhile.  The average public university graduate who has debt has about the same amount of debt as a used mid sized car loan.  Is that worth it?  For most people yes.

And that second graph is very misleading and people do this stuff all the time.  Putting two lines on a graph and having them cross leads people to believe that something changed.  It hasn't.  And if you put the real wages of the average high school and tech school graduate on the same graph, it would likely show the same thing, but would undoubtedly be lower.