OT- What's a degree really worth?
Because my son is 13 we pay close attention to all issues of college funding and return on education investment. I found an article at Business Week that seems to call into question how much all of that debt and spending is really worth.
There are some issues with the methodology that need to be cleaned up, but this does seem to be a sobering look at what future graduates can get out of spending boatloads of cash. I always wondered what some of my fellow students were going to do in order to payoff student loans that rivaled home mortgages with degrees that only payed in the mid 20's.
http://www.businessweek.com/print/bschools/content/jun2010/bs20100618_3…
In East Lansing it will get you 10 to 20 depending on the charge.
a professor at a university in the Mid-Atlantic region. Your son should go into a health care profession where he will be employed either prior to or soon after his graduation. Our grads are employed right away and make a great starting salary. If you have interest just indicate so and I can speak to you. The economy is not adversely impacting health care careers since the population continues to age and get sick. If he is interested he has many options.
Michigan provides far and away the most 'productive' degree of any school in the state, with a net ROI (return on investment) of 13.1% for in-state students.
Michigan Tech is second, and State is third.
so I guess, crime really does pay.
This really isn't all that surprising. As more and more people go to college, the smaller the gap is going to get.
If you go to an above average/elite school, major in something engineering/math/science related, and graduate on time, your ROI will probably be pretty substantial, I would think. And I'm talking about only earning a BS.
With In-State tuition, no financial aid, the cost would be something like 100K total. Graduating with an BS Engineering will on average net you 60k (excluding benefits) a year. Assuming a 3% raise every year, you will make $2.85 million over 30 years, or 28 times your investment.
Even assuming only 80% of the 88% that graduate from Michigan find jobs, you're still looking at $2 million over 30 years.
So, the lesson here is don't make fun of engineers.
Don't forget the time value of money....
Lesson here is don't laugh at accountants.
There will always be people on both ends of the spectrum no matter what school you go to or what you study. Speaking from a strictly business standpoint, you really can't get away with not having a degree. My Michigan education is by far the biggest advantage I have over the rest of the competition, and has really opened doors to interviews/jobs that otherwise I would have had no shot at getting. From my experience I would say that in the business world it is a necessity.
Seriously, most kids should probably spend the first two years at a junior college. There is no English, Math, Science, History classes that can't be carried over to a four year college. You will spend far less for the first couple of years and get the exact same knowledge, taught in a smaller classroom with more contact with the teacher. That is the first thing anyone should really know about college, after that, a four year degree can be completed at the university of choice and your debt will not be nearly as high.
often overlooked or done incorrectly. A friend of mine got into great schools in Florida with her heart set on going into international business. Her parents said "Tough shit," and made her commute to a closer school (SUNY Stony Brook in NY, which barely has a business school) for her first year because she had a better financial aid offer there. After that, they let her transfer to a bigger New York school with a better business program. Her father has also offered to pay her grad school wherever she gets accepted. If you're not trying to transfer into a program with a specialized first year this is your best bet, provided you make sure all the credits will transfer. I've heard it's difficult to transfer into a lot of engineering programs though.
But if you want to transfer into an engineering program (or theoretical physics), especially one of Michigan's calibur, don't take too many math classes at community college. You don't actually get the exact same knowledge...in fact, not even close in most cases. Once you get to mid- to upper-level engineering classes, the math will destroy you if you're not acclimated to ridiculous derivations and ugly formulae.
I took 2 years at a CC before PSU. I had some of the advanced math's (calculus 1 & 2) at the CC and they transferred. Unfortunately I wasn't ready for the next maths in the series (diff eq & matrice algebra) like those who took their math at PSU. I would have been better off if they hadn't taken those credits and I repeated the classes.
before transfering to UofM to get an engineering degree. I can tell you that the math, chemistry and physics classes I had at the small college actually helped me. I had great teachers and smaller classes (my physics class had 10 people in it) so I got more attention and one/one time with an actual professor, not a TA in a large lecture hall. I even got a job out of it helping folks with their math homework and grading tests in the lower math classes for one of the professors.....
If you do not have rich parents or a big scholarship from the university, you had better be considering your options to try and get a degree economically. The only draw back is you can't go to a CC for 2 years and dick around. You have to take the right classes that will transfer (you had better figure all this out before you sign up for them) and keep your GPA up for the entire couple of years you are there (mine was in the 3.7 to 3.8 range when I applied at UofM).
I took Physics somewhere else. I still know next to nothing about physics, and the mandatory MechE 200 levels almost killed me.
I took all my calc including differential equations at the junior college then transfered to an engineering university. All math and science at Jackson community college (Jackson Michigan) is geared and accredited so that it will transfer to UM, MSU, Michigan Tech. I took 2 semesters or Physics there as well, all of it transfered. Just options that people have out there to save money.
This can be great advice for a very particular type of student. A great friend of mine saved tens of thousands of dollars by going to a community college for two years, getting all A's, and then transfering to the University of Illinois (Champaign-Urbana). But as other commenters have stated, it's important to do your research beforehand to make sure that you don't end up wasting your time if your course of study doesn't match up well with this strategy.
Calvin College, where I just finished up my undergrad, ranks 457th with an ROI of 8.2%. I'd be willing to bet that number would be a lot higher if half the girls there weren't just looking to get their MRS degree.
I thought girls at Calvin College were supposed to get their MRS degrees by their Junior year and have at least one blonde kid by graduation?
I used to work in Utah. From my observations, marriage and procreation formed the core curriculae of BYU, Utah and Utah State.
as there are coed directed studies I'm OK with that.
I think it used to be a requirement, now it's only 'highly recommended.' Things are getting pretty liberal around there these days ;).
Bah. Lost to them in rugby. F-in backs sucked.
in the opportunities it opens for a graduate. It is a key that opens doors that are otherwise inaccessible.
And you better get the best key/degree you can.
In this article, the author seems to be lumping a lot of Universities together and making a generalized statement ("What ?", you say, "The media - our trusted watchdog?").
I think that this article certainly brings up thoughtful questions that students and parents should discuss. Certainly taking six years to graduate is a costly endeavor.
But a Michigan degree with very good grades will always be a benchmark.
... you will have four choices if you want a job:
(1) Have a degree;
(2) Be incredibly and specifically talented at something such that a degree does not matter;
(3) Have the money to start your own business;
(4) Be unemployed.
Figure out which category you want to be in and go from there.
And this is exactly why universities feel justified in making tuition as high as they please.
Although for OOS students the cost of an education is reaching the point of absurdity, particularly for a school like Michigan, the most expensive public U in the USA for OOS students.
I wonder what the ROI is for OOS students at U of M? In any event, getting the best education you can, including a graduate degree in a field where you can find a job still makes great sense.
Honestly I turned down a full ride from Cornell and am now paying about half the cost of OOS tuition at Michigan (thank you financial aid) because UM's aerospace program is ranked in the top 3 (by USNWR fwiw) and I'm not sure if Cornell's cracked the top 10. I was also told (unofficially) by my manager at my internship that I could expect to earn 70k+ starting at that company.
Unless you happen to live in Georgia (GT), Illinois (UI), California (Cal), Michigan (UM), Indiana (Purdue) or Texas (UT), you're going to pay out the nose for a good engineering degree.
Of course, even with OOS Upper Level Engineering approaching 40k/year tuition, you're going to earn it back within 3-4 years. Although Cornell is a pretty good engineering school (top 10) as well, I have no idea what their Aero program is like.
What can you do anymore without a degree unless, as you stated, you have some kind of money in your corner (like family money) or have some kind of bizarre skill or talent that will be sufficient to make enough money to last your life.
Reality is though that at some point the administrators (both at Michigan and elsewhere) have to stop the increases in tuition. We're creating generations of people starting out their professional lives with so much debt they'll likely never get out from under it and, likely prevents them from going into fields of social good like teaching or social work where they won't make enough money to pay those loans back.
I recognize I have no power to stop the increase which is why I advocate as hard as I do for new scholarship creation. Accordingly, BOBBLE-ON and buy some tickets to the Beer Tasting below and drink your way to helping two UofM Scholarships.
and everyone else who gives to scholarship causes. My mother financially falls into the "not capable of contributing" category as far as my education is concerned, and has another daughter starting her freshman year at UConn. UM grants, financial aid and federal work-study cover about half my yearly out-of-state tuition.
but in blunting the impact of the cost on individuals, they also make it easier for institutions to push up costs still more. Good and bad, all at once.
I love that GaTech is #31 (in-state) and #36 (out of state.) I always thought Ga-Tech was a great value; didn't realize it was also true for out of staters as well.
A Business Week ranking with a poor methodology? No way! I did pick a school ranked a little bit better than MSU in US News over Michigan, which would have been 75k more expensive.
One mistake that the researchers seem to be making (though I haven't actually looked at any of their data/models) is that they're not accounting for differences in the average pre-standing, individual characteristics of students at different institutions. For example, if you took MIT's entire accepted class and somehow prevented them from entering any college, they'd likely earn a fair bit more than average high school grads in the workforce. Seperating out earnings benefits due to school attendance from earning benefits due to just being really smart and able to get into a good school would probably make the returns to education look even worse.
On the flip side, I think there's a great deal more benefit to be claimed from going to a good school than just having a better chance at a high salary. For instance, my current salary alone probably doesn't come close to justifying the money I spent on a master's degree, but I still think the degree was well worth it. It gave me a good deal of self-determination in the sort of work I do, and I think the learning process made me a more thoughtful and engaged person.
I think there is a huge signaling effect or "sheepskin" effect with college degrees/diplomas. If you have a degree from a prestigious institution it often can signal to the would be employer about your potential.
Also I guess discount rates and opportunity costs differ person to person which changes how much a person values future earnings.
Also don't forget about the networking (damn, I hate that word) effects. Particularly at some of the upper echelon schools, the value of having swaths of high-achieving college buddies can be immense later on in your career. When I read stories about how such-and-such business partners met in college, I wonder if that's a polite way of saying "they met each other puking in the same garbage can at the local frat house, and later on discovered that they shared a great love for electrical engineering. And the rest is history."
This goes double for the Ivy schools, often they will only hire people from those schools so in effect you can't qualify for some jobs that are out there if you didn't attend one of those schools.
I have an Engineering Degree and im unemployed...5 years worth of school...going in they pretty much gaurenteed a job after graduation...ha ya what a joke. Ferris and WMU.
... degree and school. For most schools and uni's with a liberal arts curriculum I'd say the diploma is no longer worth the paper they're printed on. I have a BBA (1981) and an MBA (1988) from WMU ($75 per credit hour back then). They are often a necessary requisite to get your foot in the door, but at the current exorbitant tuition prices, I'd have to think twice.
Bottom line, a degree from a good school will get you noticed when you apply to grad schools or apply for a job. I do the hiring for my firm and when I look through resumes I pull out the ones who have undergrad degrees or law degrees from the better schools first. When I first moved to Michigan I had several local law firms call me in for interviews because the law school I went to is higher ranked than anything in this state except UofM (and the UofM law grads rarely stick around).
Sure you can go to a "lesser" school and still be success in life or go to a better school and be a professional failure. I've met plenty of good attorneys in my field with far less academic credentials than I have. That said, when I talk to them, they all had tougher roads to where they were than I did as my degrees and academic success got me interviews at good employers which led to offers. But once you're in the door, you're on your own. Degree can't save you, its all about performance.
i'm having an MGoSummer while striking out in the job search. 2 BAs (double majored at UM), an MA from MSU and a JD from a school down south. not planning on taking the bar bc it almost looks like new attorneys are even MORE screwed come September
I wish all my friends starting law school could see this post. Because I don't have the heart to say anything to them.
bad right now.
But for someone starting law school, by the time they finish in 3 or 4 years the market should be much better.
The key is that first step. Even if you go to some sweat shop for minimum pay and no benefits you're in the game and getting your experience. From there, you're one step up because as you work on job #2 and are competing with all the kids applying right out of school (i.e. you right now) you've got the leg up. The reality is most firms don't like to train and if they can dump that responsibility on some other firm and then pinch their associates after they've been shown the ropes, thats worth the time time saved in not doing the training themselves.
I wish I could explain how completely SHITTY my first firm job was and how much I wanted to absolutely choke my boss every time I even looked at her. But I sucked it up for a 18 months, got what was a dog assignment and ended up winning the case and rode the win to a new job where I made partner a few years later.
Knock the f-ing bar down and get that first crap job under your belt. Can't win the game from the sidelines.
I'll second your notion that experience is the key.
Although I'm a barred attorney (passed last summer), I've only been able to find a clerkship. The pay is far from ideal and it is not at all in the area of law I want to practice, the experience has been invaluable.
One of the comments I've heard from other lawyers (and I have no idea how true this is, so don't shoot) is that there is a glut of lawyers that isn't going away anytime soon. Something about too many new law schools opening up (the Dwayne O. Andreas School of Law may or may not be a guilty party).
But again, I'm more curious what your (and JBA) thoughts are on this.
If you really want to be a lawyer, then take the bar and get a job, even if it's far from the one you want, and you can move on from there. The legal profession is all about networking--which is easy to do when you are actually practicing law, but not so easy when you're on the outside looking in.
If you just want to make money, don't become a lawyer. You'll just burn-out, and there are plenty of easier and more lucrative fields to get into.