The Grim Economic Reality of a Liberal Arts College Degree, from a Specialist in University Education
This report blows the whistle on the "sure thing" investment of a college education in the humanities or social sciences.
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 ... .
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?" ...
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% reported being "frequently bored in class" up from 27.5% 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? ...
If this sounds bad to you, find out the loopholes available to college-bound students. Read my report: