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?