Equity Financing and Online Schooling the Solution to Massive Tuition Costs and Soaring Student Debt

Amadan

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To be clear, I don't actually think English Literature or Medieval History or fill-in-the-blank studies is a useless thing to study. (Well, most fill-in-the-blank studies are.) I am all for learning and enriching the mind, and it's great if our society can support a certain number of people to spend their lives studying some small niche subject and adding to our net body of knowledge by doing so. And I personally like reading books about English literature and medieval history.

But, if you study those things in college and think you'll be able to get a job afterwards, and especially if you are going into debt to get your master's degree in fill-in-the-blank studies, then unless you have a clear and practical plan for employment when you graduate, you are being sold a pig in a poke. That is just not the modern job market.

Incidentally, my undergraduate degree was in Linguistics. The only job I found out of college was working at a CopyMat. A year later, I joined the Army.

Yes, linguistics is useful for lots of things. It taught me many basic skills that have actually served me well in areas from teaching to writing to software development. But employers, generally speaking, do not care, except in a very abstract and non-quantifiable way.

Writing papers in 19th century literature does indeed teach valuable skills, if you actually learn them, but because of the decreasing value and increasing commodification of college degrees, I really don't expect someone who supposedly wrote such papers in college to have actually learned them.
 

LittlePinto

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Writing papers in 19th century literature does indeed teach valuable skills, if you actually learn them, but because of the decreasing value and increasing commodification of college degrees, I really don't expect someone who supposedly wrote such papers in college to have actually learned them.

My faith in the average higher-ed student was destroyed after a graduate student gave me a four sentence topic proposal and three of those four sentences were plagiarized--direct copy/paste. The fourth sentence was a list of possible sources, all incorrectly titled with author names misspelled.
 
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Part of the problem is these conflicting goals we purport to have for college. Of course kids who have been sold on getting a STEM degree for employment purposes are going to be less than thrilled about having to take liberal arts classes in other areas to round out their education. Or kids who have been sold on Greek Life and parties are going to dislike all their classes, especially if they don't actually need their degree to get a job.
 

kuwisdelu

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Part of the problem is these conflicting goals we purport to have for college. Of course kids who have been sold on getting a STEM degree for employment purposes are going to be less than thrilled about having to take liberal arts classes in other areas to round out their education.

And then there are people like me who get letters from their home department "suggesting" I stop taking English courses and focus on my actual degree.
 

Cramp

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I'd prefer that world too, but something a lot of people miss is that that world, in which university was where young men went to become educated people and pursued whatever interested them without worrying about whether their particular course of study led directly to an employable skill (because everyone wants to hire a college graduate) was the pre-World War II era in which university educations were mostly for young men from affluent families who had a job pretty much guaranteed for them regardless of what they did or didn't do in college.

The idea of a college education being a valuable thing that made you a more well-rounded, educated, and intelligent person suitable for any sort of employment lasted for a few generations after it became a commodity available to everyone, but the more available it became, and the more expected it became, the barriers to entry necessarily had to be lowered. So of course it became a minimum qualification for most professional jobs.

It would be nice if those who want to could follow their bliss and live a life of the mind and not worry about employability, but that would be a world where you're one of the lucky ones who won't have to actually look for a job.

I'm very happy to imagine higher education in a very different world of jobs as well. I'm fairly sure we haven't got the world of work figured out either. Change change change.
 

DancingMaenid

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To be clear, I don't actually think English Literature or Medieval History or fill-in-the-blank studies is a useless thing to study. (Well, most fill-in-the-blank studies are.) I am all for learning and enriching the mind, and it's great if our society can support a certain number of people to spend their lives studying some small niche subject and adding to our net body of knowledge by doing so. And I personally like reading books about English literature and medieval history.

But, if you study those things in college and think you'll be able to get a job afterwards, and especially if you are going into debt to get your master's degree in fill-in-the-blank studies, then unless you have a clear and practical plan for employment when you graduate, you are being sold a pig in a poke. That is just not the modern job market.

This is kind of a double-edged sword, though, because if you study something very specific but you're not interested in working in that field, then you could end up with a degree that's no more relevant to your future job than any other degree.

That was why I quite engineering--not only was I depressed and thinking of dropping out school because I hated my classes so much, but I couldn't stomach paying for a degree that I knew I would never use for anything. I had very little desire to work in that field.

By the time I settled on English, I'd decided to make a calculated risk to study something non-specialized instead of take a risk on a very specialized field that I may not want to actually want to pursue. After investing so much time in a field I knew I didn't want to work in, I wasn't going to make the same mistake twice.

My English degree has only been a liability in that it doesn't qualify me for jobs in some fields that I wouldn't be that interested in, anyway. It took me a couple years to find full-time work, but I attribute this more to the types of jobs and fields I wanted to work in than anything else. And the fact that my only job experience was in sales. When I was looking for paralegal work (which is still a possible goal of mine, depending on where my current career takes me), I was told by one interviewer that my English degree was an asset.
 

Hoplite

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That, and being well-suited for the fields that happen to be lucrative. I started studying computer engineering because it was highly marketable. I hated it and also sucked at it. I can't imagine myself ever being able to go far in that field, degree or not.

On the other hand, I ultimately got my degree in English because for the jobs I'm most interested in, it seemed like a good fit. Certainly a better fit than theoretical math, which I love but, at a bachelor level, doesn't have a ton of career prospects. The fields that I'm most interested in working in aren't the most lucrative and in-demand fields, but not everyone is going to want to be an engineer or accountant.

If I could do it all over again, would I choose a different major? Probably not. I might consider majoring in computer science since I enjoy programming a lot more than I enjoy analyzing circuits, but I don't regret studying English.

I wish I had the guts to switch majors in college. For me an epiphany came my senior year, but I finished my civil engineering degree because I wasn't sure what I wanted to do for a job/career and with only 6 months left to graduation, and didn't want to start all over again.

I studied civil engineering for two reasons:
1) it was engineering. My parents were engineers and this made them happy (as would being a lawyer or medical doctor, but not much else), and I was told over and over again how engineering was a stable and high paying job.
2) civil engineering was known as the "easy" engineering degree. If I was going to get a degree in something I had no passion for I wanted to exert minimal effort.

I mean, people should be finding some sort of gainful economic activity at a certain point in their lives. Preferably in their early or late twenties. But I don't see why with our incredible economy we can't give them the college experience in mind-broadening/horizon-furthering terms instead of a desperate rat race to graduate with a degree that will lead directly to a job as soon as possible.

Blame employers that want employees with a specific skill set, or employees that are "serious" and didn't waste their time taking extra classes that added no value to their degree. In my job interviews no cared about my electives, but would hound me because I didn't take Finite Element Analysis I.

I was part of an Honors program in college that was supposed to offer better class sizes and more personal interaction with instructors for electives. They also tried to get their students to enroll in more electives outside their degrees to expand their education. This of course meant more time spent at college, more money spent, and presumably future employers wouldn't care about the extra courses. The year after I graduated the Honors program added two requirements for all their students: you had to take up to 200 level foreign language classes, and had to take at least one study-abroad program. Their STEM student enrollment tanked, because the average STEM degree took 4.5 years already, foreign languages werepurely electives and contributed nothing to the degree program, and study-abroad didn't count for anything. This worked fine for business majors and/or liberal art students, as they had to take foreign language and the study-abroad could substitute for other courses.
 

kuwisdelu

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I wish I'd done a study abroad as an undergrad.

I wish I'd done lots of things as an undergrad.