Is a College Education Worth it?

When the “Greatest Generation” returned home from World War II, the federal government offered veterans the opportunity to attend college under the GI Bill. Many of these returning soldiers, sailors, and pilots were sons of immigrant parents and this bill gave them the opportunity to attend universities that had heretofore been out of their financial reach. This paradigm shift created an educated and skilled workforce that catapulted the American economy and led to significant advances in science, medicine and technology. The children of these veterans were forever to become known as the “Baby Boomers.” For many of them, going to college was a foregone conclusion. For this group too, the undergraduate degree was the golden ticket that created the path to a job (or an entire career) and the security and advancement opportunities that went along with it.  We now fast forward to the twenty-first century, where this nation has been mired in a major recession with high unemployment. The golden ticket has become a bit tarnished as a college education is no longer a guarantee at all for a job upon graduation. And for those students saddled with astronomical college loans that require payment commencing with graduation, the college education does not look like a good investment at by any means.

According to an Associated Press analysis of data from 2011, 53.6 percent of college graduates under the age of 25 were unemployed or, if they were lucky, merely underemployed, which means they were in jobs for which their degrees weren’t necessary.

So what message are you going to give your students? In years past have you found yourself chiding your students that “you’re going to need this for college?” The new message has a bit of a twist. "Going to college and getting a bachelor's degree is important, but the major that you take is more important than that," Anthony Carnevale, director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, remarked to ABC News recently. "If what they are interested in is money, they should go directly to engineering, computer science, the hard sciences or business."  Where does that leave the English major, the theatre major, or the liberal arts major? College is not merely something you do after high school. As educators we need to share today’s realities with our students. We cannot predict how this will all play out and what the future will hold. We encourage students to maximize their potential and encourage them to pursue their dreams and aspirations. But we are also obliged to provide the requisite dose of reality.

c.J. Margolis 2012