Why is the meme that an undergraduate degree isn’t worth the money so goddamn durable? For example, the Boston Herald seems to think that a young lady who decided to take out over $200k in loans for a degree from sociology from a rather average American university is “a great representation of a huge issue in America.”
As someone who will soon leave graduate school with a huge amount of loans, I would advise this young girl to look into a) income-based repayment and b) actually getting a job in the non-profit sector. Why? Because if you work for a decade for a non-profit and don’t miss any payments, federal loans are forgiven. Finally, I’m curious about the lament “the best school I got into” when Rutgers, this young lady’s state school, ranks higher on the US News and World Report’s not-at-all arbitrary list.
There seems to be an underlying assumption, both on this lady’s and the Herald’s part, that Northeastern is an exceptional school solely based on the fact that it’s private. This bizarre assertion exists in the Gawker comments mentioned in the Herald interview. If you are the type of person who believes that the US News and World Report signify absolutely anything, and in that case, you’d be wrong, you’d notice that Northeastern is ranked below more than a few public schools on that list.*
But this is all beside the point. This is an incredibly exceptional case. The warnings of a “student loan bubble” make no sense. People will not stop going to college because of the hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt they’ll have to accrue, because, frankly, there’s no reason to accrue that much debt. The numbers (from FinAid):
1. One-third of Americans don’t take out loans to go to college.
2. The average student debt for a current graduating senior sits in the $23,000 range.
So the person we’re holding up as indicative of the growing student debt crisis borrowed eight times the national average. If you work in the number of students who for reasons of wealth or scholarship didn’t need to borrow anything, she borrowed twelve times the national average.
Furthermore, via Wikipedia, we find that the average individual income for someone with a generic bachelor’s degree is $43,000, $17,000 more than that of a high school graduate. So the cost of a college degree should still easily pay for itself.
If you clicked on the Wikipedia link, you’d notice that people who attend “some college” or have an associate’s degree occupy a gray area vis-a-vis income on the chart. This is the corollary to the college-ain’t-worth-it argument: that a theoretical student would be much better off heading to trade school to be a plumber or an electrician. These arguments are usually made by people who have never worked a blue-collar, manual labor job in their life and thought waiting tables was stressful, but we’ll take them into account anyways.
June 2011 unemployment rates from the Bureau of Labor Statistics:
No HS Diploma:14%
HS Diploma: 10%
Some College/Associates: 8.4%
Bachelor’s Degree: 4.4%
Conclusion: Yes, the price of college is flying up irrationally and far too quickly. It would not be a bad piece of advice to recommend state schools or heading to school in Europe, where not only would you pay far less for your education but you’d learn a new language as well.
On the other hand, recommending that high school graduates consider not going to college at all is spectacularly bad advice, as the evidence we’ve looked at above shows. For the love of god, if anyone tries to broach this subject with you, feel free to disseminate this freely available and easy to find information so this doesn’t get to the point that people actually recommend to their kids that they skip college. Because if there’s one thing this country doesn’t need, it’s more stupid people.
*For example: Yeshiva University ranks at #50 on this list. Why? The report cites research at their school of medicine and various Jewish studies programs. So if you plan to study anything else (or live outside of NYC) there’s no reason for you to attend this university. Having an excellent Jewish studies graduate program has no relation to their undergraduate journalism school.
