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Megan points to the Forbes article, "The Great College Hoax", about how crushing student loan debt makes college a bad buy for many if not most students.
I should pause to mention my own recommendations on this very subject.
Megan tells her experience in the "gray market" of education: vo-tec "certificate" programs:
I decided to learn to be a network administrator, which I'd enjoyed doing briefly at my previous firm, before the venture capitalists had shut off the money spigot.
I don't know how I ended up at Career Blazers (yes, I cringe myself at the name). It was like one of those plucky, poor-but-honest people you read about in Victorian novels--everything clean, freshly painted, and nonetheless falling apart. But I was too desperate to get out of that secretary's chair to be picky. I gave them something like $5,000, in 1995, to teach me to be a Certified Netware Engineer--an administrator of Novell's corporate networking software.
The technies in the audience are wincing, and believe me, I am too. As I found out after I'd wasted thousands of dollars and three months, a CNE was a necessary, but not sufficient, credential to get a job in IT. The minute anyone tells you that he has one (or an MCSE, the Microsoft equivalent), any seasoned professional will bar that person from touching his equipment. Anyone who would actually mention his CNE is definitionally too ignorant to be useful, and just knowledgeable enough to be dangerous. Of course anyone competent usually had the credentials--but all the credentials proved, by themselves, was that you could breathe and answer a multiple choice test.
As far as I know, out of my class of fifteen people, a lot of whom were harder up than me and using the last of their severance to "retrain", two ended up with jobs after "graduation".
One of the things I love about Megan's writing is that it is informed by the viscisitudes of real life, not just academic theory. But still, this aspect of the story is especially depressing. It is precisely this kind of non-traditional education that I would have recommended for those folks not-quite-smart enough to benefit from a four-year degree.
The Forbes article points out that many trades (it especially mentions plumbing) are likely to pay better than a liberal arts degree. This is an aspect of education that seldom goes mentioned by the salesmen who promote it. Sure, go to college and you might get to work on something interesting. Maybe you won't have to take a shower before hugging your children at the end of the day. But you won't likely make much money, so you should evaluate the cost of your loans against that expected income. Educational institutions should submit to a standard, realistic methodology for calculating the debt-to-income ratios of its graduates, an realistically appraise students of their chances of academic success given their portfolio.
3 comments:
Back in the 90's, certification was an awesome route to success in the city I'm from. In fact, had I done that instead of going to college I probably would have been better off because I would have entered the economy when it was at its peak rather than three months after there were suddenly 30,000 people laid off in the local economy. Then I could have gone to school and gotten that degree. But as it was, in the tough economy I was facing, I was losing out on jobs to people with certifications and two or three years or work experience (compared to my college degree and 18 months experience). Many of those people out-earn me today.
Of course, it wasn't the certification that gave them the leg up but rather the experience they got by skipping college. Anyone graduating high school today shouldn't be going for certs on the idea that it's a sort of "lite degree" that will confer some of the benefits of a degree at a fraction of the cost. In my experience, if they're not smart enough for college to be worthwhile, they probably don't belong in IT. I think that one of the reasons that certs have become so much less valuable is that employers figured that out.
if they're not smart enough for college to be worthwhile, they probably don't belong in IT.
Trumwill: This is a good point, and I should perhaps have stipulated, as background, that the four-year "college experience" is vastly oversubscribed. There are, in fact, a lot of folks with great potential in IT that are presently wasting their time in "Lit 102" reading, I dunno, Derrida or somebody.
I more-or-less agree with the notion that there are more people that go to college and don't learn a whole lot that's directly applicable to their career. Very little of what I learned in college proved useful and much of that which was useful (programing languages) has since been forgotten. The problem is that college is still a useful weed-out. A lot of people talk about how "any idiot" can graduate from college, but that's simply not true. Some really don't have the brainpower to get through even a directional college and others don't have the self-discipline (something useful for employers to know). The problem is that some of those same people can pass the certs. They can even make it through a 2-year votech program. Second-level Chemistry and German, on the other hand...
It seems that there ought to be a better way of weeding people than an obstacle course that takes 5 years and costs $60k, but that's where we are at the moment. Particularly when times are tough. When times are plentiful, as I mentioned, it might be better to just go ahead and get on the job track to get some experience. As Half Sigma has pointed out, when you enter the job market has real lasting repercussions.
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