Is College Overrated?
I grew up in a middle class home at a time when most of my peers were going to college. After spinning my wheels for a year or two, completely unprepared to make any kind of decision that might influence my future career, I decided to major in English, a subject that has never brought me great wealth, but has brought me great intellectual satisfaction. For me, college was a journey in self-discipline, and it’s an intricate part of who I am. I fully expected myself to marry another “academic type” and live out my days writing poetry and drinking martinis, driving a car with a five-star safety rating (not in that order, of course!). But then I met my husband. The word “safe” did not exist in his vocabulary. He was a risk taker. And, being a self-proclaimed neurotic, risk taking was not on my list of favorite things to do. But, I understand its merits in a world that doesn’t particularly care if I can quote Shakespeare. A world that is anything but safe.
We operate under the assumption that a college degree is a safety net, that it will launch us into the Dream. For many, it’s the white collar world where we work eight hours a day, Monday through Friday, sitting at a desk. But that just isn’t realistic. So often, graduates find themselves in jobs they are “overqualified” for, earning less money than they owe in student loans.
College degrees are overrated.
A survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers in 2009 found that only about 20 percent of college graduates actively seeking employment actually had a job. http://abcnews.go.com/Business/story?id=7636561&page=1
That’s one out of five college graduates. I wonder how many of those who have jobs actually have jobs in their field. Probably not many.
In a 2009 Chronicle of Higher Education article, Marty Nemko states, “All high-school students should receive a cost-benefit analysis of the various options suitable to their situations: four-year college, two-year degree program, short-term career-prep program, apprenticeship program, on-the-job training, self-employment, the military . . . A college should not admit a student it believes would more wisely attend another institution or pursue a non-college postsecondary option. Students’ lives are at stake, not just enrollment targets.”
(http://chronicle.com/article/Are-Too-Many-Students-Going-to/49039).
We’re not all college material, and we should never operate under the assumption that we are. Students who shouldn’t be in college fail, struggle to chase an unrealistic ideal, and often end up with low GPAs in fields that do little to benefit their futures. Often, they find themselves competing against those in their field who graduated with higher GPAs. Finally, Nemko says colleges should avoid admitting those who should really be placed somewhere else.
According to Richard Vedder, “A large subset of our population should not go to college, or at least not at public expense. The number of new jobs requiring a college degree is now less than the number of young adults graduating from universities, so more and more graduates are filling jobs for which they are academically overqualified.” (http://chronicle.com/article/Are-Too-Many-Students-Going-to/49039).
Are too many of us going to college? According to Nemko, 70% of high school graduates now go to college in America, a 40% increase since 1970, resulting in increasing numbers of “unemployed and underemployed B.A.’s.” Meanwhile, he points out, “there’s a shortage of tradespeople.”
We live in a disposable world. We manufacture products for the short-term. We don’t fix; we replace. In the book Cheap, Ellen Shell describes our relationship with goods as a “voluntary obsolescence” that “makes craftsmanship beside the point.” We have come to expect that things won’t last. Eventually, no one will even know how to fix a refrigerator. We need less—not more—people going to college. We need people who know how to build quality products that will last, as well as people who can service those products. People who are willing to be patient, and work hard.
Where do we go from here? I still believe in something called the American Dream, and it has less to do with how much money you make than with how much of yourself you put into what you’re doing. My husband never went to college, but he has managed to build a successful business from the ground up because he believed in what he was doing, because he believed that Dream was still possible, the Dream of investing in yourself and your future.
