Marty Nemko, holds a Ph.D. specializing in the evaluation of innovation from the University of California, Berkeley and subsequently taught in its graduate school. This is the fourth in a series on thinking outside of the box when it comes to the nation’s leading challenges.
We have, for decades, accepted that graduates earn $1 million more than non-graduates over their lifetime. That statistic is misleading for a number of reasons. For example, it’s retrospective to an era when only the best and brightest went to college and employers couldn’t offshore jobs.
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Special series | Dr. Marty Nemko thinks outside of the box on subjects ranging from education and job training, to health care and politics.
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Those days are over.
Higher education has recently been the subject of a spate of reports finding that students benefit little from their college experience. It began with a 2006 report by the Secretary of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education and has accelerated with such books as: Higher Education?, The Five Year Party, Crisis on Campus, and Academically Adrift, the last of which found that 36 percent of college students did not show a significant gain in critical thinking, complex reasoning, or writing in four years of college.
Today, assuming you graduate and learned anything, your employment prospects are uncertain. Slightly more than half, 53 percent, of college graduates are employed full-time, according to a 2011 study from Rutgers University’s John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development. Meanwhile their average salary between 2009 and 2010 was $27,000 — barely enough to either pay back their student loans or to live on — but probably not both. Another 21 percent are in graduate school. And almost half of the employed are working in jobs they could have qualified for straight out of high school. The numbers are even worse for the many weak students colleges now admit. An analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data by the Chronicle of Higher Education indicates that 60 percent of the increase in the number of college graduates from 1992 to 2008 worked on jobs barely requiring a high school diploma.
Many college students who got into and graduated from a designer-label institution are doing well. But many others who bit the college apple can’t be blamed for feeling deceived by the marketing machine: brochures, Web sites, targeted emails, and spiels by tour guides and admission “counselors” (salespeople) that hide the aforementioned facts. Many college Web sites make it difficult to find the sticker price, let alone the difference between the likely four-year cost in cash and the loan- or financial-aid-adjusted cost of attendance.
Many college graduates and especially dropouts might reasonably wonder if they might have been better off forgoing college and instead getting an apprenticeship or on-the-job training, perhaps at the elbow of a successful, ethical entrepreneur and investing the fortune they would have spent on college in blue-chip stocks. Indeed, in a GfK Roper Public Affairs & Media poll, nearly half of Americans polled felt college students, at both public and private colleges, were not getting their money’s worth.
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