The Declining Worth of a College Education

A college education is no longer the golden ticket to prosperity.

With education costs soaring and financial aid dwindling, many people still see college as a necessity for success in America - failing to note how many of America's most successful people are college drop outs.

While a college education is certainly valuable - after all, college is about learning skills that can advance you in the workforce - it is starting to seem like the price for post-secondary education is entirely too high.

Annys Shin recently blogged in the Washington Post Business section about her impressions after spending a decade to pay off loans she had accumulated in college. Shin writes:

"When I finally paid it off about three years ago -- 10 years after I graduated -- it was a bittersweet moment. I had loved my college experience. I value the education I got there. And, of course, I adore the friends I made there, but I had to face it: Financially, it wasn't worth it. "

As an independent student, it has always been a struggle to reconcille college costs against real world application. After a great school career, ending in a lackluster senior year, I launched myself full on into the workforce, grabbing my first office job paying $10.00 an hour and handing the HR director a work permit on my first day at work - as a 17 year old, I was still a minor, and subject to stricter work laws. After about 8 months toiling in a cubicle for $400 a week, I was ready to gouge my eyes out with a Bic. While I had passed on college to try to support myself as an adult, the work world was pretty bleak. As I looked around the call center at all of the older people relying on this job as a means for supporting entire families, I realized this was not the life I wanted. I resigned from that job, took a part-time position, and enrolled in school full-time.

The next few years consisted of volleys between working full time to save money for school, and attending school with a combination of grants and the money I saved. In 2004, I left the community college circuit and entered an online college program that hosted the major that I felt fit me best: Global Business and Public Policy. The program was more expensive than community college, but a lot more rewarding.

And a lot more challenging. My grades began to suffer, and working part-time became less and less of a possibility now that I was fully independent and learning to enter the adult world. For the last year, I finally sat out from school, to try to get an idea of what I wanted to accomplish while I was there.

I am currently paying off last semester's remaining balance and preparing to return to school in the fall. So far, my education is halfway complete, and I owe 3, 400 in student loans. I currently pay the bulk of my educational expenses completely out of pocket. If I continue this way, I will not complete school until 2010 or 2011, but will emerge with about $10,000 in student debt. At my current salary level, it will take me less than 5 years to pay off my loan in full, paying an average of $200 a month on the loan.

Is the extra time and hard ship worth the lower debt level? After all, if I just charged my whole education, I could probably finish in the next year and a half. However, I find myself hesitating to commit fully to school.

Many of my friends graduated college in 2005 or 2006. Many of them are toiling in the kind of entry level jobs I held right out of high school - often for the same rate of pay I held then. Some of my friends are frustrated because they cannot find jobs in their chosen field, or that the jobs pay so poorly. Graduates come out of school anticipating salaries of $40,$50, and $60,000 a year. Unfortunately, many employers are using a college degree as a screening tool, and the positions that require a college degree are starting lower and lower - I recently saw a job ad that required a candidate to have a college degree and offered a starting salary of $25,000.

I think the time may have come to re-examine the role college plays in success. In the net-savvy world of web design, self-publishing, and the ability to generate buzz based on a cool website or Internet clips, and rising class of nouveau riche dotcom millionaires, more and more people are finding out that you can be successful without college.

Personally, I am sticking with the college education bit - after doing the research, finishing my degree will lend me more credibility in my field and help me iron out some of the wrinkles in my current writing style. However, it looks like I will continue to work my way through. This gives me both work experience and education, with a minimal impact to my take-home pay.

Still, I have to wonder - how much are all these 100,000 educations really worth?

Legislating the Fantasy

No one could ever accuse the modeling industry of being realistic.

From the overly campy, bordering on costumey couture offering to the emaciated silhouettesthat make their way down the runway, to the actual price of couture offerings, fashion and reality are happy to exist upon separate planes.

Despite criticism from most laypeople about the price of clothing to the size of models, the fashion industry was seen as something outside of our collective ken - a self-governing entity that has completely unconventional approaches to how they created and displayed their wares.

All that changed in August of 2006, when the death of fashion model Luisel Ramos (attributed to complications from anorexia nervosa) rocked the fashion industry, and led to widespread calls for reform. The government of Madrid has since set a minimum body mass index for all models who walk the runways, much to the chagrin of certain designers and prompting a wave of media attention toward the fashion industry.

Last Friday, Robin Givhan provided an excellent follow-up piece to the washington post, detailing the "efforts" of the fashion industry to raise model awareness of eating disorders. She goes on to state:

"A PowerPoint presentation on the symptoms of anorexia and bulimia is not the solution to getting rid of sickly thin models. Nor can the answer be found in a crudites platter. As one model agent put it, the industry needs to start at the top of the pyramid. If there's no demand for skeletons on the runway, there won't be any skeletons.

I find her statement completely true. While in general, the last thing America needs is more legislation, people are dying for someone else's unrealistic standard of beauty.

My friend Edina is a fashion designer in New York. We had a conversation about fashion a while ago that put somethings into perspective for me. Edina had made a comment about almost being finished with her sample clothing, and I asked if she was going to model any of her fashion. She laughed, and with the my-god-how-dense-can-you-be tone she has perfected, stated, "Honey, I can't fit any of the sample clothes. Those are for the models."

I asked her why she would make clothes she could not wear, expecting to hear some spiel about working to fit a model's shape. She instead told me "Fabric is expensive. Smaller clothes are cheaper."

While I am sure it is not that simple for the major couture houses, Edina's explanation made sense. Sometimes, a lack of resources dictates what you present and who you use to present. However, the fact that designers have accepted size 0 and 00 as normal is a bit disturbing.

Givan goes on to say:

The fashion industry has to ask itself: Why do we want to be represented by a model who the average person would suspect is sick? Why shoot an advertising campaign using a model that women would pity rather than envy?

The fashion industry likes to point out that a lot of these models are naturally super-skinny because of their metabolism, age or genetics. So what? Pear shapes are natural, too, but the industry has no trouble rejecting them.

The industry needs to think of models as women -- not as girls, mannequins, coat hangers or any of the other terms typically used to describe them. Think of them as women, and perhaps that's what they'll more often resemble.

Another valid point made. Flipping through the pages of Elle magazine this month, I found that the fantasy had lost quite a bit of its luster. I remember looking at the two or three outfits profiled in their pages, and noting how the model didn't seem to fit the clothes. Some clothes (like wrap tops and dresses) are designed to accentuate womanly curves - so why don't the models reflect that? Dresses with detailing in and around the chest look ridiculous hanging against a 32AA bust.

Maybe the fashion industry would benefit from learning to create a range of fantasies, as opposed to rigidly defending one waning ideal.