Imagine having to report to work at 4 A.M and that your job is to wash down a New Jersey raw sewage storage tower. To accept a job like that, Jill Plesnarski must be a high school dropout, right? In fact, she holds a bachelor’s degree in biology from Moravian College, at which the four-year full cost of attendance is $160,000 yet is still considered one of Barron's “Best Buys in College Education.” Why would Plesnarski accept that job? “When I graduated, I had hoped to get a job in medical research, but all those jobs paid ridiculously poorly: in 1989, $13,000 a year.” Now, 19 years later, Jill has been promoted but must still occasionally wash down the tower.
After completing his bachelor’s degree in liberal arts from the University of California, Berkeley and unable to find a job paying a middle-income-paying job, Brian Morris decided to get a master’s degree in music from Mills College, a private college. To afford the tuition, he went much further in debt and gave music lessons and tended bar. Despite the master’s degree, the best professional job he could find would pay just a few thousand dollars for teaching a three-month-long course. By that time, Brian was already married with a new baby, so he took a job as a truck driver at Checker Van and Storage. Now, 25 years later, Brian says, “I just have to get out of trucking.”
Then there’s Annie Padrid. Soon after graduating from the University of Michigan, she was earning $100,000 a year as a personal trainer. That’s a career she could have entered even if she were a high school dropout. It required less than a year of inexpensive training, much of it online. Annie predicts, “I think it’s realistic that in five years, I’ll be making $200K.”
Another Berkeley graduate went to greater lengths to make a middle-class living. She became an exotic dancer.
Unfortunately, those stories are far from rare. My most surprising discovery in working with 2,700 career coaching clients over the past two decades is how many well-educated, motivated people are severely underemployed. I’ve found this also to be true among people I’ve met outside my clientele: There are so many degree holders who, after graduation, waited tables or drove a cab “until I pay back my student loans,” but years later, are still at it.
How many college graduates are underemployed? Collegegrad.com surveyed 2,350 recent graduates in August, 2004, the peak of the most recent U.S. economic boom, a time when one would expect college graduates to be well employed. Yet the survey found that 18 percent of the respondents were doing work that didn’t require a college degree. That extrapolates to 300,000 Americans, not counting the millions of underemployed college graduates who are older. Worse, in 2007, with the economy declining while ever more professional jobs are being offshored, the number of underemployed college graduates is undoubtedly even higher.
Even more discouraging, the aforementioned people made it to graduation. One of higher education’s dirty, dark secrets is how few people do graduate: According to the U.S. Department of Education, among the 40 percent of college freshmen with the weakest high school records, more than 3/4 don’t earn a degree or even a certificate, even if given 8 1/2 years!
And the one-fourth that do graduate, are, on average, at the bottom of their class and likely to major in subjects unlikely to make them very employable: for example, sociology or American studies rather than engineering or computer science. According to Job Outlook 2007, an annual employer survey conducted by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), employers are most interested in hiring people with degrees in engineering, computer science, accounting, and business.
How can these weaker college graduates be expected to land and succeed in professional jobs when ever more people are waving sheepskins, and when demands on employees in the global economy are ever greater, requiring, for example, high-level computer, management, and quantitative forecasting skills? And in a nation in which so many jobs can be offshored to India and China, where workers do quality work for 70 percent less and who are unlikely to sue for wrongful termination?
The odds are terrible against such students. Yet colleges don’t inform them of those odds. If a physician prescribed a medical treatment that required four to eight years to complete and cost a fortune but failed to disclose the poor chances of that treatment succeeding, that doctor would be sued and lose in any court in the land. Yet colleges routinely welcome weak students and not only are they not sued, the colleges are rewarded with ever more generous government subsidies. Perhaps most outrageous, not only do colleges fail to provide prospective students with their odds of success, colleges use a wealth of marketing ploys to push those students to attend.
The oft-quoted statistic that college graduates earn more than those without degrees is very misleading. Not only are we sending so many weak students to college at the same time as so much is required for them to compete for professional jobs, as a group, the college-bound are brighter, more motivated, and better connected than non-graduates. You could lock them in a closet for four years and they’d earn more.
Admitting weak high school students to college instead of encouraging them to consider other options, dilutes the quality of a college education for everyone, and although well-intentioned, ends up devastating those weak students, who are disproportionately poor and people of color.
How Much Do Students Really Learn in College?
Higher education leaders argue that even if students don’t get a degree, their year(s) at college will have been worth it. But that bottom 40% of students, disproportionately low-income, can least afford the mountain of debt they will have accrued. They also can least afford the years out of the workforce where they could have been earning money while learning a trade such as robotics repair or cheffing, careers they’re more likely to succeed in than those requiring a college degree.
As important, students who end up dropping out of college learn much less from their courses than do those who graduate. And even graduates learn far less from their college education than the colleges would have you believe. Read any college brochure or website and you’ll hear much lofty talk about a college education’s making you a more enlightened person. Alas, as with many brochures, there is often a Grand Canyon of difference between the brochure’s claims and the reality.
Scott Ellison, a student in U.S.C’s prestigious film school, in a recent unsolicited email, wrote, “If I knew, as a college freshmen, what I know now as a junior, I would never have enrolled...I'm not learning much in my large, lecture-based classes, and every year U.S.C. gives me smaller grants and more loans. I already have $50,000 in student loans, and would love to drop out but if I do, it would be financial suicide--I’d have to start paying it all back, and I’d have no way to do that. What do I do?”
Jeffrie Givens, a Berkeley graduate said, “I was disappointed with Berkeley. For example, chemistry is a difficult subject, yet they taught it in an auditorium, sometimes on TV. I’ve been even more disappointed by how little use my learning has been, especially the required classes. For example, Berkeley has an American Studies requirement that’s supposed to help you live in a diverse society. The course I took to fulfill that requirement was Linguistics 55. All that did was teach me some linguistic principles in Latin American and European languages. It is of absolutely no use. Another example: I took Poetry for the People, one of the many courses whose main purpose seems to be merely to preach the joys of diversity. (Givens is an African-American.) When I tried to raise questions about the problems that diversity brings, the professor, June Jordan, (also an African-American,) would shoot me down.”
The aforementioned Berkeley grad who became an exotic dancer also complained about the irrelevance of much of her courses: “A lot of it seemed like busy work, memorizing things I’d never use. And most assignments were just useless--their main purpose seemed to be to give the professors a basis for grading you.”
Such dissatisfaction with college instruction is common. In the definitive Your First College Year nationwide survey conducted by UCLA researchers (data collected in 2005, reported in 2007) only 16.4 of students were very satisfied with the overall quality of instruction they received and 28.2 percent were neutral, dissatisfied, or very dissatisfied. A follow-up survey of seniors found that 37% percent reported being “frequently bored in class” up from 27.5 percent as freshmen.
The dissatisfaction with the quality of instruction is not surprising. At every stage in the professorial pipeline, there are pressures, ironically, to weed out good teachers:
§ The usual credential for becoming a professor is a Ph.D., a degree that trains people to be researchers, not teachers, so the kind of person who self-selects into such a program is unlikely to become a scintillating instructor.
§ Especially at brand-name universities, professors get hired based not mainly on their teaching ability but on their research. That’s why there are so many professors who speak poor English, especially in the hard sciences and math.
§ After hiring, the Holy Grail for professors is tenure--virtually guaranteed lifetime employment. And at most universities, the key to getting tenure is writing: publish or perish. Spend too much time preparing your classes and it will usually hurt your tenure chances--that’s time spent away from research. The late Ernest Boyer, vice-president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching wrote, only half-joking, “Winning the campus’s Distinguished Teaching Award is the kiss of death for getting tenure.”
Not only are many professors inadequate teachers, they’re so often forced to teach in the least effective way: the large lecture class. Ironically, the more prestigious the college, the more likely classes are to be taught in lecture format. A letter to the editor by Phil Hunter in USA Today captures the college academic experience. He writes, "I mostly remember the pomposity of professors who lectured in amphitheaters. They were fly specks from my perch far up in the theater, unreachable and unapproachable. They were paradigms of classic academia, dancing to a mysterious tune with their overhead projectors, while we sat in confusion, wondering what they were talking about." Why would colleges use so many lecture classes? Because colleges are a business and the lecture class is the cheapest way to dispense instruction.
College students may be dissatisfied with instruction, but, despite that, do they learn? A 2006 study funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts found that 50 percent of college seniors failed a test that required them to do such basic tasks as interpret a table about exercise and blood pressure, understand the arguments of newspaper editorials, compare credit card offers with different interest rates and annual fees or summarize results of a survey about parental involvement in school. Almost 20% of seniors had only basic quantitative skills. For example, the students could not estimate if their car had enough gas to get to the service station.
Deborah Wadsworth, executive director of the non-profit organization, Public Agenda, interviewed teacher education faculty--the professors who teach college graduates who have been admitted to graduate school and who will become our future teachers. Wadsworth reports that 75% of the teacher education faculty said that their students have trouble writing essays free of grammatical and spelling mistakes. Can we really tolerate that people who can’t write basic English will be teaching our children how to write? What does this bachelor's degree that often costs $100,000-$200,000 certify if it doesn't even attest to basic reading, writing and thinking skills?
Advice for parents/grandparents
Are you sure that a four-year college is the right path for your child? Today, colleges’ marketing pitches, often made through the media, make students think they’ll be doomed to poverty and second-class citizenship if they don’t attend college. Of course, if your child loves learning, did well in high school, and wants to go to college for more the piece of paper and the partying, great--your child will likely derive ample benefit for the four to six years and the cost. But if your child was relatively unmotivated in high school, got B- or lower grades in academic courses, and scored below the 40th percentile on the ACT or SAT, your child would be wise to consider other options:
§ apprenticeships (a great portal to apprenticeship websites: www.khake.com/page58.html)
§ short career-preparation programs at community colleges
§ the military
§ on-the-job training, perhaps learning how to run a business at the elbow of one of your friends who is a successful entrepreneur.
Many people who could have succeeded in college decided they could learn more and accomplish more by starting a business. For example, the three most successful entrepreneurs in the computer industry, Bill Gates, Michael Dell, and Apple co-founder SteveWozniak, all dropped out of college. Here are some other non-degree holders: Malcolm X, Rush Limbaugh, Barbra Streisand, PBS NewsHour’s Nina Totenberg, Tom Hanks, Maya Angelou, Ted Turner, Ellen DeGeneres, former Governor Jesse Ventura, IBM founder Thomas Watson, architect Frank Lloyd Wright, former Israeli president David Ben Gurion, Woody Allen, Warren Beatty, Domino’s pizza chain founder Tom Monaghan, folksinger Joan Baez, director Quentin Tarantino, ABC-TV’s Peter Jennings, Wendy’s founder Dave Thomas, Thomas Edison, Blockbuster Video founder and owner of the Miami Dolphins Wayne Huizenga, William Faulkner, Jane Austen, McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc, Oracle founder Larry Ellison, Henry Ford, cosmetics magnate Helena Rubenstein, Ben Franklin, Alexander Graham Bell, Coco Chanel, Walter Cronkite, Walt Disney, Bob Dylan, Leonardo DiCaprio, cookie maker Debbie Fields, Sally Field, Jane Fonda, Buckminster Fuller, Dreamworks co-founder David Geffen, author Alex Haley, Ernest Hemingway, Dustin Hoffman, famed anthropologist Richard Leakey, airplane inventors Wilbur and Orville Wright, Madonna, satirist H.L. Mencken, Martina Navritalova, Rosie O’Donnell, Nathan Pritikin (Pritikin diet), chef Wolfgang Puck, Robert Redford, oil billionnaire John D. Rockefeller, Eleanor Roosevelt, NBC mogul David Sarnoff, and seven U.S. presidents from Washington to Truman.
And remember, just because your child forgoes college now, doesn’t mean he can’t later decide to reenroll when he’s more mature and thus less likely to fritter away the time and money.
You can save the money without shortchanging the child. If, after reading the above, you and your child decide that a four-year college is a good idea, it’s important to know that the data does not support choosing an expensive college. Paying more mainly absolves parent guilt.
So, look for low-cost options. If your family is middle-income, you will likely get too little cash aid (you’ll get loans) to justify the cost of private college, so consider having your child attend an in-state public university and/or start at a community college. Maybe the best deals of all are the U.S. Military Academies: West Point, the Naval Academy, Air Force Academy, and Coast Guard Academy. They provide an outstanding education, are absolutely free, and you’re guaranteed a career as an officer. (Just hope we’re out of Iraq before you have to start your required four or five years as an officer.)
No matter your income level, if you’re applying to private colleges, apply to at least three--financial aid offers can vary wildly. And before signing on the dotted line, ask the college this crucial question: “If my family’s financial situation remains the same, can I count on the same proportion of cash aid each year? Through year 5 and 6 if necessary?” (Most students do take more than four years to graduate.) Some colleges employ the drug-dealer scam: They give you the first year cheap and once you’re hooked, jack up the price.
Don’t let your child prostitute himself to get into a designer-label college. Studies (including, ironically, one by Princeton researchers) show that Ivy-caliber students who attend their local public college are as successful in their careers as those who attended an Ivy. Yet, in our designer-label-obsessed society, the competition for admission to colleges such as the Ivies and Stanford is so fierce that high school students (often pushed by their parents) do things that hurt the child more than the Ivy degree would help:
§ They often take six academic subjects per semester including three Advanced Placement (college-level) courses to show how much rigor they can stand, even though it overworks them to exhaustion, leaving them little time for extracurriculars or the pleasures of being a teenager.
§ They often choose extracurriculars not because they’re of interest but because they’ll look good to the colleges: they might serve soup to the homeless or get up at 3 every morning to freeze on the crew team lake.
§ Prestigious colleges give brownie points to students who show growth in one extracurricular area, so rather than exploring different extracurriculars and possible careers, which is in the student’s developmental best interest, many Ivy aspirants feel the need, for example, to work like heck on the student newspaper as a sophomore so they can become an editor there as a junior, and then start their own alternative newspaper as a senior.
It’s wiser to encourage your high school student to take a moderate schedule, explore a variety of careers and extracurriculars, and leave enough time for just plain fun. Even if you child ends up attending a less prestigious college than if she had killed herself to get into an Ivy, the net effect will be a happier and more successful person.
Teach your child how to make the most of college. If a student knows how to make the most of college, he can have a better experience at a local low-cost college than many students do at designer-label institutions. The keys to a great college experience:
§ Choose an academic or quiet dorm. Most residence halls are non-stop party time--After all, the colleges are cramming together dozens of young adults away from home for the first time without parental supervision. According to a 2007 study by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse, half of U.S. college students binge drink or abuse drugs. The good news is that most colleges have at least one academic or quiet residence hall. Even in those dorms, there’s plenty opportunity for sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll, but at least when you want to study or sleep, you can. You’re also more likely to make quality friends.
§ Find the best instructors. As mentioned above, there’s a lot of bad teaching in colleges, but, with effort, especially at a larger college, you can find four years worth of good-enough instructors. Here’s how: Some colleges post the student evaluations of professors on their website or the student government’s. Most colleges at least publish a list of teaching award winners. Also, get recommendations from your advisor, a professor you like, your friends, or even an academic department’s administrative assistant. (They see the evaluations of faculty).
§ Get involved in productive extracurriculars: Join the debate team, volunteer to host a show on the campus radio station, get involved in campus politics, join a make-a-difference club, or even better, start one. For example, most campuses have many liberal-oriented clubs but few if any conservative ones. So you might start or revitalize a Republican, Libertarian, or Objectivist (Ayn Rand) club.
§ Find mentors; be a mentor. Real growth more likely occurs one-on-one than in a classroom. So, find professors, advisors, and friends you like and open up to them. Ask for guidance on how to get more organized, manage that killer course, figure out your career, find a better romantic partner, even discover the meaning of life. Do the same for them; mentorship is best when it’s a two-way street.
Advice for Education Policymakers and College Presidents
Redirect tax dollars from the massive amount of trivial research to undergraduate learning. The aforementioned illiteracy and innumeracy of our college graduates is a national disgrace. As the late American Federation of Teachers president Albert Shanker said, “Imagine a business in which more than half of its products fell off the assembly line, and most of the products that reached the end performed poorly. That business would quickly go out of business.” Yet our colleges graduate fewer than half its freshmen and many of those who do graduate have frighteningly poor basic skills. Currently, government spends billions of dollars on research that has much smaller chance of improving society (yet another deconstruction of Beowolf?) than if those funds were used to reward institutions that produced graduates who could reason, write, and compute well, and who were competent at tracking down information.
Create a separate track for teaching professors. Of course, we need researchers, but the personality and training to be a researcher is different from that of the outstanding undergraduate instructor. A new kind of professor training program should be created: a Masters in College Teaching. Among those graduates, teaching professors should be hired on their ability to fascinate students and bring about important undergraduate learning, not on how many research journal articles they can crank out. This proposal would take a long time to implement, so in the meantime, every college receiving tax dollars (99% of colleges, private and public) should be required to provide a Teaching Bootcamp, which all new faculty and those who receive mediocre student evaluations would be required to complete.
Mandate a Truth-in-Education Report. Except for a home, a college education is the largest purchase most families ever make--and the most time consuming. Yet, prospective students choose their college primarily on fluff-filled marketing pap and campus tours led by students hand-picked as loving their college. All colleges receiving taxpayer funds should be required to prominently post on their website:
§ The high-school grade-point average and SAT scores of all students--not a cherry-picked sample used to make the college seem more selective than it is.
§ The average full four-, five-, and six-year cost of attendance (subtracting cash financial aid) for students with the full range of high school records, parent income, and assets.
§ The percentage of freshmen graduating within four, five, and six years. Similar statistics should be provided for transfer students.
§ The results of the college’s most recent student satisfaction survey: What percentage of students is happy with the college’s quality of instruction? Out-of-classroom life? Career assistance?
§ Perhaps most important, the average amount of improvement in reading, writing, reasoning, and numeracy from freshman through senior year.
§ The percentage of graduates, who within a year of graduation, are employed in a position requiring a college degree. This should be broken down by major. A journalism major would seem to be a pipeline to professional employment, yet, at many colleges, it’s far from it. I was sitting on a top floor of the Time-Life building with a number of the editors of Money magazine, and one of them said, “It is unconscionable that colleges continue to allow students to enter journalism programs because only a tiny fraction will earn a bare middle-class living as a journalist.” The other editors nodded.
Ensure ideological diversity. A pair of white professors or students could be more alike in perspectives than a white and black pair. The sort of diversity that matters most is ideological diversity. A college is supposed to fairly expose students to the full range of responsibly held views. Alas, on most college campuses, political correctness is rampant: views that veer right of center are typically excised from the curriculum and if a student dares to advocate one, she risks a lower grade. Just as colleges are strongly encouraged to select racially diverse faculties and student bodies, at least equal pressure should be exerted on them to select ideologically diverse ones.
As I’ve tried to show, higher education may be America’s most overrated product, but if it were to adopt the above changes, it could become what most people think it is: a national treasure. Citizens should lobby colleges and legislators for such changes.
But even if the colleges remain intractable to such changes, parents, grandparents, and counselors who follow this article’s advice give their students an excellent chance of having a fine high school and post-high school experience and with a career infinitely more rewarding than cleaning raw sewage at 4 A.M.
The author holds a Ph.D in education from the University of California, Berkeley and subsequently taught in its graduate school. He has been a consultant to 15 college presidents and is the author of three books on higher education including The All-in-One College Guide: A Consumer Activist's Guide to Choosing, Getting Into, Finding the Money For, and Making the Most of College. His 500+ published articles have appeared in periodicals ranging from U.S. News and World Report to the Chronicle of Higher Education. He is Contributing Editor, Careers, at U.S. News. The San Francisco Bay Guardian named him, “The Bay Area’s Best Career Coach.”
http://www.martynemko.com/articles/higher-education-americas-most-overrated-product_id1539
