Clark's Scribbles

The College Education Monster

The College Education Monster lies satisfied in its lair. Millions of students battle their way through college. Graduates struggle to pay off student loans. Parents scrape together money for their children’s education. Some adults are paying off a student loan and putting aside money for their children. According to a report issued in January of 2018, 44 million American college graduates owe a total of 1.48 trillion dollars (tinyurl.com/StudentLoan-debt-stats).

The College Education Monster started life as a helper. It is an offspring of the learning process that enables all of us to figure out life without reinventing the wheel. Basic education teaches us how to feed ourselves, how to dress and how to behave in polite society. We learn to read and write because those skills give us to access to every kind of knowledge. Getting from basic education in life skills to widespread college education took a long time.

The ability to preserve our knowledge in writing and pass it on to future generations is what gives humans the edge over all other beasts on our planet. We can talk to each other. We have incredible manual dexterity. Our closest relatives, the Chimps, don’t. They can make hoots and whistles but they can’t sing “Mary had a little lamb.” They have opposable thumbs but their hands are built for climbing and knuckle walking. Human hands are specialized for making and using tools. Language is one of our most important tools.

Modern human speech and languages evolved over millions of years. Writing came thousands of years later. Art came first. Prehistoric humans recorded their knowledge in paintings on the walls of caves. It took thirty thousand years to go from cave paintings to the earliest written languages – cuneiform and hieroglyphics.

Alphabets and writing materials evolved over the succeeding centuries. The next big step, the printing press, was invented 600 years ago. That made the mass production of books possible. Universities with large student bodies followed. But very few people obtained higher levels of education before the post WWII surge. (tinyurl.com/History-of-education)

Two hundred fifty years ago we entered the Modern Age with a shift to an industrial economy. People abandoned farms and moved to the cities. By the early 1900s, the majority of working class adults earned their livelihood either directly or indirectly from manufacturing. Education adapted to the changing needs of society. Office and factory skills, literacy,  math and science took on increasing importance. An elementary education in reading and writing was enough for most people. A select few attended college. A tiny fraction went on to obtain advanced degrees. Most of those who continued in school came from wealthy families and were preparing for careers in law, banking, teaching or preaching. Einstein studied for a teaching diploma in math and physics at the Zurich Polytechnic. He had five classmates. (tinyurl.com/Educating-Einstein)

College education took on new significance after WWII. Math, science and technology got a boost from the war effort. Consumers demanded and manufacturers delivered a seemingly endless array of new products. Television and air travel became necessities. Migration to the suburbs drove the demand for cars. Those developments created good paying jobs for people with college degrees in the right fields. Suddenly the demand for workers with diplomas skyrocketed and the College Education Monster began to grow up.

A college degree became a guaranteed ticket to a good paying job. Colleges could not produce graduates fast enough for decades after WWII. Salaries for college grads increased rapidly. No one complained about the steadily rising cost of a degree.

By 1970 the supply of college graduates was beginning to exceed demand.  Many new graduates, even in fields like electrical engineering, were finding themselves with a diploma and a student loan but no job. By then the value of a college education was a firmly established article of faith.

There are many arguments for the value of a college education (tinyurl.com/Financial-Value-of-a-degree). Employers like including a college degree requirement because it simplifies the job of weeding out applicants. People who have completed four years of college can read, write and analyze. Anyone with a degree in a certain field has enough interest and talent in that field to make it through a degree program. And those who have a degree have been exposed to key concepts.

That may be wishful thinking. Colleges can’t keep up with the breakneck pace of change in modern society. Students end up learning from out of date text books. The diploma has become more important than the curriculum for today’s college graduate. Real education comes from everyday, on-the-job work experience.

The College Education Monster is here to stay. Companies are committed to including a college degree requirement for some of the best paying jobs. But the approach to education is adapting to the needs of society. Less expensive solutions are emerging. Brick and mortar colleges are cutting back. Online colleges are taking up the slack. People are getting  jobs first and then going for the college degree to help them advance.

College degree programs including Graduate and Doctoral programs have their place. But getting a degree is an investment of time and money and should be evaluated like any other investment. What does the investor get in return?

Increased earning potential is an important consideration. It is not the only one. Studies have shown that a college graduate can expect to earn more over the course of a career than a contemporary who does not have a diploma. None of the studies shows that the extra income will be more than the cost of getting the diploma.

The cost of a college education includes tuition and fees. Living expenses can be ignored because they would be incurred anyway.

If money is borrowed to pay for college, interest on the loan is an additional expense that must be taken into account. Even if the money spent on tuition and fees is not borrowed, it could have been invested to produce income. That lost income is part of the cost of going to college.

Time spent working on the degree could be used to work at a paying job. Giving up that salary is another cost of going to college full time. In addition, part of that salary could be set aside to fund a profitable investment program.

One return on investment calculator (tinyurl.com/Investment-Value-Calculator) puts the earnings from a $100 per month investment at $50,000 over a 25 year period. That may not seem like a big deal at first glance. Add cost avoidance of $100,000 saved by not paying for tuition and books, and the sum is more respectable. Increase the monthly investment by $50 every year and the value of investing instead of going to college becomes very impressive.

A college education is not the only way to go. It may not even be the best alternative.What if parents saved up to give their children a $50,000 annuity to use in any way they see fit upon graduation from high school?

The College Education Monster is not such a terrible beast. Treat it with respect. Don’t let it take control. It is your life. Live it as you see fit.

JFClark1943, August 22, 2018. 6 Comments on The College Education Monster. Category: Politics, The American Way, The Human Condition. Tagged: College, Debt, Degree, Education, Finance.

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