Are you the first in your family to throw away $100,000? On Tuesday, The Onion, a satirical news site, poked fun at higher education with an article titled “College Graduate First Person In Family To Waste $160,000.” Sadly, this joke hit home for many college grads, as rampant unemployment, high tuition and the decreased utility of degrees in the workforce are causing people to reconsider whether higher education is worth the cost.
Being the first in one’s family to attend college is quintessentially representative of American opportunity. However, this glowing achievement is increasingly being replaced with being the first in one’s family who is out of work and in debt from a degree that hasn’t helped one’s career.
Tens of thousands of dollars for an education has become an unnecessary and expensive bridge between a person and his or her future career, especially in a bad job market. Unemployment is at a high across all levels of education, which diminishes higher education’s value.
In 1995, 2.8 percent of college graduates ages 25-32 were unemployed. In 2013, it was 3.8 percent. So, a 27-year-old in 2013 received less value for his degree than he would in 1995, assuming the tuition was the same. However, the cost of college has drastically increased, making the 27-year-old even worse off in 2013.
Additionally, in 2010, 48 percent of working college graduates held jobs which required less than a bachelor’s degree. In 2012, twice as many college graduates held minimum wages jobs as in 2006. People attend college in order to prepare themselves for their future careers, but their degrees aren’t being put to use.
Some argue the experience of college and bettering one’s self through higher education justifies the price. Yet, the concept that one can only improve one’s self by spending an exorbitant amount of money is extremely questionable.
People, including employers, are increasingly skeptical of how well college prepares students for the workforce. But employers still prefer college graduates, if only because of the misguided belief that graduating college is only test to prove the applicant can stick with a task. $150,000 is a high price to pay for a simple test.
Some think employers should stop requiring degrees. Andrew McAfee, co-director of the Initiative on the Digital Economy in the MIT Sloan School of Management, thinks there are many indicators of how suitable a young person is for a job, and a college degree is not one of them.
“I think one of the most productive things an employer could do, both for themselves and for society at large, is to stop placing so much emphasis on standard undergraduate and graduate degrees,” McAfee writes.
He bemoans the unfortunate fact that the college degree has become the new high school diploma — the new minimum. It has become a necessary, but not sufficient, condition to obtaining a job in one’s preferred field. McAfee describes the current state of higher education as “something between a bubble and a scandal,” and calls on employers to change the dynamic by evaluating applicants on more substantive basis.
This is especially true, as attending college also doesn’t mean you’re learning. McAfee cites a statistic that 45 percent of college students don’t learn much during their first two years and 36 percent don’t learn much after four years. Instead of evaluating applicants by degree, he suggests employers evaluate them by their skills, past work history, completion of MOOCs (massive, open, online courses) and the like.
He has a point. A high school graduate who spends four years interning, working and learning online in the relevant field after high school makes a better job candidate than a straight-A college graduate with minimal work experience.
Few things are worth upwards of $50,000. College is not one of them, especially when considering post-college prospects. Unfortunately, employers still arbitrarily require a college degree. Until that changes, an overpriced degree still stands between many people and their careers. Though, many who complete that degree will end up underemployed in jobs that don’t require college degrees.
Congrats on wasting $100,000.
