I will never forget being in a meeting of upper managers for a fortune 1000 company with over 25,000 employees. We were to participate in a roundtable discussion on the following years strategic goals for the company. Most of the managers being the same level were making roughly 185k – 205k per year. Since we were all from different parts of the country, everyone was asked to first introduce themselves. Most people would say, how long they were with the company, what particular city and state they came from as well as what college and degree they had attained. One of the new managers, said all the above as well as how he had a BS in Economics a BS in Pharmacology and finally an MBA in something else.

The next persons turn came up, and he said his name,the city and state where he was a manager for and that he was still getting his degree from the “school of life” but that he had the same title as the guy that just spoke. Some laughed, some did’nt but the fact is he was one of the most succesful people in that room.

So the degree is important,but I am not sure that being in debt with over 100k without some kind of work ethic, vision and specifically desire of whom you want to become or what you want achieve will get you the happiness or “success” you are looking for.

My advice to any humanities/arts major is to get a real major. And don’t listen to your hippy counselors when they tell you to “do what you love b/c it’ll all work out in the end if you’re just passionate enough”. All that is going to get you is a job that you hate more than if you would have just gotten a math/science degree in something that you weren’t passionate about. Well, if you can even get a job.

Lucky for me I got a good job selling cars to idiots who c/not afford them before the market crashed, and our banks stopped giving loans to broke a** losers. Now, at least I can afford to go back and get a masters of science in nursing.

>”The secret sauce is the selectivity”
No, I have in fact learned a great deal here, both in classes and by hanging out with and working on projects with other smart and accomplished people.

- Andrew Farrell
course VI, 2012

“Let’s say you go to college and then earn $45,000 a year working in the theater… You’re clearly better off in many different ways than a high-school graduate earning the same amount…”

And that’s as may be, but one of the ways you are emphatically not better off is in terms of the money you’re making. You may well be much worse off–and it’s time to take a hard look at that reality. You can’t really fault an ROI study for measuring what it sets out to measure!

I have two friends, neither with a college degree, who worked their ways up from grocery clerk to store manager. Each of them makes more money than I–college credentialled–do.

Now, of course, money isn’t everything. That person working in theatre may be much happier, and have a “better” life overall, than if she’d gone off to manage a big-box retail store. But you would like to think she was able to make an informed decision about the path of her life, and one thing she’d need to do that is some hard numerical information on what a college education is going to do for her finances. That’s why this study, for all it’s shortcomings, is critically valuable. We need much more of this sort of thing.

First, they rely solely on self-reported income from graduates. I can think of all sorts of selection effects here that could be skewing the data. Second, they do not include individuals that are not full-time hourly or salaried employees. That means project- and contract-based employees are left out of their sample. What’s more, self-employed graduates are also excluded. Third, this simply looks at former students who only received a bachelor’s degree. Those that went on to earn graduate and professional degrees were excluded. I can understand why they did this–makes it easier to draw a line from school invested in to future earnings–but there is something to be said for the effect of one’s undergraduate degree and their likelihood of being accepted into a solid post-graduate program and the future earnings that result.

I played around with the data and created my own rankings (http://bit.ly/c0vmBz) based on a simplistic composite of the data presented by PayScale. I ended up with Brigham Young as the school providing the best ROI. Bottom line is these types of rankings are tough to get right.

As DanHess says, the students who go to the top schools would be successful anywhere. One study looking at workers five years out of college concluded that students ACCEPTED to top-ranked schools did just as well financially as those who ATTENDED top-ranked schools. Moreover, students who APPLIED top top-ranked schools also did just as well whether or not they were accepted. Within reason, at least, ambition is far more important than the choice of college. The biggest advantage of a top-ranked college is that it improves your chances of getting into a top-ranked PhD program, however that career track is not particularly rewarding financially.

willid3, ALL jobs are now subject to global competition either directly or indirectly. I see no evidence that the value of a useful degree from a good school has been decreased.

davidwe, some degrees explicitly teach you useful skills. Unsurprisingly, those graduates tend to fare the best in the job market. As for the rest, a college degree is nonetheless proof of one’s ability to produce a large quantity of high-quality work while working within a somewhat arbitrary system of rules. It is that self-discipline that (as a group) distinguishes college graduates from those who drop out or do not attend college.

Of course there might be cheaper ways of verifying that an individual possesses those characteristics (as well as the basic literacy that is essential for so many jobs).

The biggest flaw of all is that getting into MIT and the rest means you are already scientifically or technically brilliant. I am sure that folks who get into MIT but choose not to attend also make lots of money.

Folks pay these schools tons of money for the secret sauce when in fact the school is busy selecting students that possess the secret sauce. What a racket!

a) Many individuals at the top schools will go on to get additional education so their total expense is higher.
b) Some percentage of the individuals will have to take out loans, so one has to consider the cost of debt payments and the associated spread.

More generally, the point of the “Liberal arts college is too expensive” crowd isn’t that additional education doesn’t lead to higher wages, but rather that it shouldn’t be a requirement for better jobs. Why does one have to bury themselves in 100k of debt for a college degree so they will be hired for “a steady job in public administration or social services?” Why is everyone who is unable to get that 100k loan, destined to spend their entire live working at the drive-thru. I can think of three reasons, but none are socially worthwhile by my accounting.

The first is that the academics at college are the important part. I find that hard to believe. There are jokes about majoring in “underwater basket-weaving” for a reason, and the vast majority of college graduates still can’t do calculus. If academic knowledge is the real reason companies prefer college graduates, then we should spend the money we would spend trying to “send every child to college” hiring college professors to teach at the secondary level.

The second explanation would be that living away from ones parents for four years provides time for individuals to mature into productive workers. If that’s the case then virtually any structured activity outside of the home should be worthwhile. We could dramatically increase the size of programs like Ameri-Corp and the Peace Corp, we could even bring back apprenticeship, all without unduly burdening young adults with debt.

The third explanation would be that it is just a signaling device used by middle and upper-middle class families to perpetuate their middle class status onto their children.