how worth it is college really?

By alice | February 10, 2009

jude-the-obscure

Nobody wants to end up like Jude…

According to this place, the average 4-year college course is a bit over $25k per year at a private school and just over $6,500 at a public school. The average grant award per student reduces that by $10,200 for private students and $3,700 for public ones, so if you multiply both of those reduced rates by the four years:

4 year private college course with grant = $59,200
4 year public college course with grant = $11,200

Here’s a sensible approach to college, from Kirstin Davy, who had a head start in independent thinking and pragmatic approaches to learning as a result of a wonderful homeschooling start all over the world. This was followed by community college in the US from age 15 (an approach far more young people should consider, given the limitations of the high school curriculum and culture) (my bolds):

I attended UC Santa Barbara because I loved the location and it had the majors that I wanted. It was also the one that gave me the best financial aid package – an important factor when you’re paying for college on your own and you believe that it’s only a means to an end! I was accepted to UCLA and Berkeley as well as a few well-known private schools here in SoCal, but when it came down to it, I realized that I firmly believe that the “4 year experience” is a joke and you don’t need to attend the “best” school to have a great education! : )

Then there is what Penelope Trunk says about graduate school. I’m sure she’s right. How can spending thousands of dollars you don’t even have be a sensible reaction to financial stress? A better idea if you’re unemployed: start a new business that can be bootstrapped. The competition won’t be as ferocious as it used to be.

Then there are all those degrees that may not even amount to anything useful other than a piece of paper proving you have a degree, which if everyone else has one too must be meaning less and less in the real world, and let’s face it, what did it ever mean in the real world anyway? If it was a good degree from an intellectually demanding college, it means you are clever and worked to prove it. From anywhere less good, it means you worked. But it doesn’t mean you’re going to work hard at being the office photocopier, which is a lot less interesting.

What if college is basically useless?-

At the end of the day, the world is changing and colleges must redefine their role in it as we as a nation struggle to redefine the importance of education overall. On the one hand, we view education as the “great equalizer”; yet if this is true the exorbitant prices of a college education must be addressed. [...] There seems to be resistance and a desire to stick to older notions of the importance of the academy, like knowledge for the sake of knowledge or college being a place of camaraderie and fun.

What if college is merely a conversational investment- wouldn’t it be better to spend all that money on just learning and living and talking online and in your local/ chosen town, potentially with people of all ages and skill levels?

Education has evolved, and if we think it’s going to stay as it is now forever, we could be wrong. Once upon a time, academic learning was broad, all about arming yourself with the knowledge required for good judgement and ultimately wisdom: it enabled you to make informed comparisons, to be better acquainted with this world and its people and history and so on. This was nothing to do with your career, which was likely to be something your had ancestors decided for you already. It was about becoming a better person.

Then academic learning was opened up to working-class people who needed to think about earning money and improving the futures of their families, and it became a way of bettering oneself by getting into well-paid professions. More recently, vocational training started competing with academia, and giving out degrees instead of just certificates of aptitude. By now the idea of totally abstract learning for pure wisdom’s sake has long ago left the building. University is a career move, not an extended liberal schooling designed to help you be a better person upon finally making it to adulthood.

But we now have the potential to accomplish both abstract learning and career training without going to university. Just as we don’t need tickets for the orchestra (or even a big old gramophone and a stack of vinyl discs) to listen to a symphony, we don’t need to go to college in order to learn…. anything? We still need coaching, testing, syllabi and so on, and we will still pay for those, but it isn’t necessary to do them all the old way. I think we’re going to get better at assessing the value universities really offer, as teachers and testers find ways of freelancing and offering alternatives. Student satisfaction is already being assessed- and the UK’s highest scoring university in that area is… the Open University, which offers correspondence courses that you can do anywhere. People who need to work have long studied this way, taking a bit longer to get their degrees but ending up with little or no debt due to having supported themselves while learning. Younger people may well study this way more in the future, if they can work out how to get any kind of interesting work at the same time.

Anyway, when colleges are justifying their fees in mystical self-referential terms – “the college experience”- you know something is not quite right. Academic institutions, like museums, are often grand and impressive community buildings reminiscent of ancient monasteries and cathedrals, but they aren’t actually sacred.

Possibly the worst reason you could have for going to college is set out by Thomas Hardy in Jude the Obscure:

And the city acquired a tangibility, a permanence, a hold on his life, mainly from the one nucleus of fact that the man for whose knowledge and purposes he had so much reverence was actually living there; not only so, but living among the more thoughtful and mentally shining ones therein…. Suddenly there came along this wind something towards him—a message from the place—from some soul residing there, it seemed. Surely it was the sound of bells, the voice of the city, faint and musical, calling to him, “We are happy here!”

Although this also implies one of the best possible reasons- you want to be a professor. In which case, bear in mind that you might end up freelancing on the net more than sitting at high table etc.

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2 Responses to “how worth it is college really?”

Tim Almond Says:
February 10th, 2009 at 4:34 pm

There was a recent piece in The Guardian where this subject was raised and someone was talking about a son’s friend doing a degree in photography, and her opinion was that he’d be better off not doing it, but creating a portfolio and going around photographers and learning his trade that way.

She’s right of course. The problem is that “the degree” has become one of those things in life that one might describe as a “deluded dead cert”. Some people assume that if they get into university and work hard for 3 years that they’re set up for life. It used to be some years ago that people urged their children to get a “good office job”. They saw office work as being incredibly safe, well paid and full of prospects. Problem is that it became saturated and the growth ceased and now, it’s not that safe or even that well paid.

The number 1 thing that a degree (other than in the subjects above) gives you is a mark of ability and work. Which pretty much means that you spend 3 years doing it to get a foot in the door of a job. You’re no more useful, smarter or more ambitious (OK, except that 21 year olds are smarter than 18 year olds generally). So, if you can work out how to do what you want to do without spending 3 years and thousands of pounds, then you should.

Shefaly Says:
February 11th, 2009 at 1:34 pm

It really depends on what one does. I, for one, would not let a self-taught surgeon touch me with a barge pole, leave alone a scalpel! Think if a self-taught engineer had designed the Millau viaduct. Would you speed your supercar on it with confidence?

Self-taught people are only common in one trade – the amalgamated hash which is loosely called business. Everything else requires training and while apprenticeships are probably the best way to learn some trades, they are not for everything.

Of course, I speak with the mixture of humility and contempt – please feel free to work out which one is reserved for which degree ;-) – towards my various degrees in engineering, management, policy and philosophy.