Study Analyzes Recent Grads' Unemployment By Major

Hugh Pickens writes "A new report from the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce called 'Hard Times: College Majors, Unemployment and Earnings: Not All College Degrees Are Created Equal' analyzes unemployment by major. It shows that not enough students — and their families who are also taking on student loans — are asking what their college major is worth in the workforce. 'Too many students aren't sure what job they could get after four, five or even six years of studying a certain major and racking up education loans,' writes Singletary. 'Many aren't getting on-the-job training while they are in school or during their semester or summer breaks. As a result, questions about employment opportunities or what type of job they have the skills to attain are met with blank stares or the typical, "I don't know."' The reports found that the unemployment rate for recent graduates is highest in architecture (13.9 percent) because of the collapse of the construction and home-building industry and not surprisingly, unemployment rates are generally higher in non-technical majors (PDF), such as the arts (11.1 percent), humanities and liberal arts (9.4 percent), social science (8.9 percent) and law and public policy (8.1 percent)."

Comments

education is only useful for jobs

[liamevo]

Anyone else sick of encountering this kind of thinking?

Re:education is only useful for jobs

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. I'm also really sick of the student loans crap. I worked my way through college, and busted my butt for a couple of tuition-only scholarships.
I didn't borrow a cent, and people who think work starts after graduation definitely shouldn't.

Re:education is only useful for jobs

[AmberBlackCat]

It's not that people think it's only good for a job. It's that you need to have some expectation of getting a return on the investment in order to justify what the education costs. Basically people can't afford to learn things.

Re:education is only useful for jobs

[couchslug]

If you are rich enough to use it in furtherance of your hobbies, then by all means do so.

The problem is that schools SELL education and are not in the business of telling students that a particular major is a stupid choice if you want food, clothing, and shelter after graduation.

Once you have money, you have the power to pursue other interests. If you don't have money, you are, generally speaking, "fucked", and it's not out of line to remind potential education consumers of that.

MANY young people entering college have heads full of feathers and won't figure this out on their own.

Re:education is only useful for jobs

[Anonymous Coward]

Education in America is way too expensive for many people to pursue it for its own sake. That is very sad, but it is also very true.

Re:education is only useful for jobs

[jellomizer]

I would say so, except that our system, has made vocational schooling a joke, where lazy dump people who can pass college go.
Most people who go to school is because they need an advantage in the market. I was programming professionally while I was in high school, but I went to college because I knew the system wouldn't allow me to advance without a college degree. Then later I got to the point where work wouldn't respect my business decision so I got an MBA to force a degree of respect.
It would be great if people who went to collage for a real education, however for most people it a licences to get paid more then minimum wage.
If you want college to be for the pure education and learning, we need respectable vocational training for many professional activities.

Re:education is only useful for jobs

[FoolishOwl]

I am.

I am also tired of a model of social organization that cannot cope with the implications of exponentially growing productivity. I am becoming increasingly convinced that most paid labor amounts to busywork.

Re:education is only useful for jobs

[CSMoran]

Learning is only free in that you might not have to pay for it, but there are opportunity costs -- the value of what you could've done, but did not do because you were learning.

Re:education is only useful for jobs

[Lumpy]

Formal education is the only education that has any value....

Anyone else sick of encountering this kind of thinking?

Experience is worth FAR MORE than education. Yet I see a lot of jobs with a BS/BA degree requirement that have zero need for such a thing. For example Advertising sales position, WTF does that need a BS for?

Luckily I dont have to deal with it, but I rarely see a new grad with a nice shiny new CS degree that can actually do the job.

Re:education is only useful for jobs

[Lumpy]

I did the exact same thing and went to the University of Michigan. You can go full time and work full time. A lot of young adults that dont have mommy or daddy pay their way do it every day. I had ZERO social life in school as I was either working,studying, or attending class or lab. My only friends that I spent any time with were room mates, once a week I would have about an hour to sit down and have a beer or two before bed.

Re:education is only useful for jobs

[FoolishOwl]

And there's no good reason for that. Studying literature is a matter of reading books and discussing them, and the cost of producing a book has gone down over time. Textbooks are notoriously overpriced. Some fields require more expensive equipment -- but in general, that equipment has become cheaper to produce, or at worst has stayed at the same price. College instructors aren't particularly well paid.

So where's all the money going?

Re:education is only useful for jobs

[Beeftopia]

They are not really counseled on what degrees will lead to what opportunities. Therefore, they get to pick what they like to do. Sorry, I'm not a believer of the adage "do what you love", unless what you love is a salable skill, or you've made enough money to not worry if you get paid pathetically for it.

The goal of the college is to grow and bring more revenue in, despite being labeled "non-profit." A college's desire for money is never satiated, just like any profit-making enterprise.

So, this is why colleges try to have full enrollment in all of their departments, from basket-weaving and women's studies to computer science and civil engineering. It's for their own organizational purposes, not some selfless desire to help the student.
 

Re:education is only useful for jobs

[hedwards]

Not really. It's the consequence of having more educated people and the increasingly sophisticated world we live in. It used to be that one didn't have to finish high school to get a decent job, these days those pickings are quite scarce.

I know, let's show those liberals who's boss by never improving ourselves or the world around us in any way, that'll really show them.

Re:education is only useful for jobs

[Rakishi]

So you missed out on arguably the most important function of college: networking.

It doesn't matter what you know as much as who you know, always been the case and will remain the case.

Re:education is only useful for jobs

[sgt scrub]

They are definately not places to go to take some courses out of curiosity. If you want to take some courses out of interest you have to go through all kinds of bullshit. I wanted to take some courses on data forensics at a local Jr College. Because they were not available as continuing education courses, they wanted me to transfer to the school. I didn't want to go through a transfer process to take a few courses so I told them no. As a result they wanted me to take placement tests. They also said I would have to take standard courses for the associates degree, english, math. etc... before being able to get INTO the classes.

"Hi. Prior education? Yes. I received my ___ in ___ at ___ in 19__. And um huh? No I don't want to transfer to your shitty little Jr. College, that wasn't even built when I graduated, as a freshmen. I just want to take those 3 classes. Test what? Take 101 & 102 what and what?"

Re:education is only useful for jobs

[DerekLyons]

It is important to remind people that college is not a trade school

Actually, historically that's exactly what colleges have been - vocational and trade schools. The belief that they are otherwise not only runs contrary to that, but also seems to be utterly without foundation. Even a liberal arts degree is vocational, it was meant to produce teachers and individuals with the knowledge and skills to take their 'proper' station in life.

Re:education is only useful for jobs

[Will.Woodhull]

Collegiate neocolonialism is a more fitting term.

Catch the suckers while they are young, hook them with blue sky visions of grand careers. Milk them, but oh so gently so their tits don't get sore, with student loans that will put them in debt for years to come. What better way could there be to assure that your tenured nest is comfortably feathered? Of course you want to do this in such a way that not only will they pay and pay for their undergraduate years, but they will also desperately seek to continue the experience by doing post graduate studies, with yet more loans. Gee, if you structure it right, you can make sure that in order to avoid facing a debt they do not have the skills to pay down, they will need to keep learning all the stuff you do not mind teaching, and that they have no time left over to learn any of the stuff that would be useful in getting a real job.

A lot of employers really like the idea of having a pool of warm bodies to draw from when they need more help. A student with a B.S. or B.A. is a wonderful thing to hire, because they have demonstrated that they know how to be mushrooms (one hand washes the other, you have to go along to get along, etc) and they have these wonderfully huge debts to pay off so they cannot just walk away. It doesn't matter to the employer what the degree is in; all baccalaureates are interchangeable cogs as far as they are concerned. What matters is that college graduates have proven that they have what it takes to keep themselves in the dark and eat whatever sh*t is fed to them, and that they have fscking huge debts so that when you push them a little beyond their moral or ethical boundaries, they will go along with it rather than facing an unemployment line.

In the USA, it has taken more than 50 years for colleges, businesses, and government (student loan programs, etc) to develop this neocolonial system of eating its young. The system has not grown very fast, chiefly because it depends on a kind of doublethink blindness of what is really happening among its supporters, and you can never build things at speed when you need to keep one hand from knowing what the other is doing. But at this point the overwhelming majority of professors, business leaders, and civil servants who administer the programs are products of the system itself. That is, any tenured professor with less than 30 years in his c.v. is a product of the system itself and learned how to go along to get along, not to look too closely at what is happening around him, etc, etc. It lets them preserve the fantasy that they are really good people who are doing the best that can be done in a bad situation.

Re:education is only useful for jobs

[toadlife]

College is not more expensive today. It's just that the state has subsidized less and less of the cost over the couple of decades, making it appear to cost more.

This what people 40 and older don't get when they bitch and moan about students not being able to work their way through college like *they did* when they went to state school. It'd be pretty damn easy to work your way through college if tuition were still around $1000 a semester, but it's not 1980 any more.

Banks, of course, have stepped in and filled the gap. I've seen a few prognosticators predict that the next financial bubble to pop will be student loans.

Re:education is only useful for jobs

[houstonbofh]

Not really. Look at MikeRoweworks.com for a counterpoint. There are many people making very good money in jobs needing only apprenticeship or a associate degree. Unemployment in many skilled blue collar jobs is very low. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qo-cUZ2aRKc I can't say it better than this...

Re:education is only useful for jobs

[sco08y]

Anyone else sick of encountering this kind of thinking?

This is insightful? Even when we have thousands of people who were driven to march in protests because they're unemployed and saddled with tens of thousands of dollars of debt?

No one is saying education is "only useful for jobs." What people are trying to get across is that how you're going to pay the bills for the next forty years needs to be a significant factor guiding your major life decisions.

Re:education is only useful for jobs

[FoolishOwl]

No rigorous study, but my experience of work, and what I have seen of friends and family.

For instance, for several years I worked for a company that printed blueprints. Typically, an order would involve many sets of prints, each set dozens of pages long or longer, the paper typically 42"x30" or 36"x24". We would take the paper off printers, straighten the pages, count them, staple them, and ship them. There would be half a dozen or a dozen sets. Most of the architects and construction firms involved were regular customers. So, for a particular building project, we'd ship to a particular set of people. And the next day, we'd print and ship revised copies of the same blueprints of the same project to the same people. For a particular project, this would be repeated for several days in a row; usually, after a week or two, there would be another several rounds of revised blueprints. And those same people would receive blueprints for many different projects on the same day. So, one person would be receiving several hundred sheets of large, highly detailed diagrams, each day, each only varying slightly from those received the previous day.

Eventually, it occurred to me that it was extremely implausible that any of the people receiving these documents was actually going through hundreds of pages of documents and comparing them, in detail, to practically identical documents received the previous day. To make things worse, the blueprints were printed from PDFs -- anyone could read them without special software. I've been on job sites, and seen well-thumbed sets of blueprints, but the foremen generally had laptops, and could view those blueprints as PDFs, without the trouble of printing them. They may have good reason to prefer physical prints, but even so, that wouldn't require a tenth the number of physical copies we produced. The only way I could understand it was that there were legal or contractual obligations to produce physical copies of blueprints whenever a change to the blueprints was made. As I later found out, the company I worked for was a relatively small one in a crowded field of blueprint production.

So, from what I could see, I was working hard, tending machines and assembling tangible products, but I was producing nothing useful; instead, it was a near total waste of resources.

Re:education is only useful for jobs

[Barrinmw]

Networking? You network with your teachers who know plenty of people in industry. My physics professor said his friend was looking for a summer intern in geoengineering and it would pay really good money since it required you to travel the entire summer. Sadly, I had to turn it down because I need an actual REU over the summer.

Re:education is only useful for jobs

[jpmorgan]

College networking is not very useful. As an exercise, networking is about give and take; you need to be a valuable contact in order to attract valuable contacts. And as a college student, you are incredibly interchangeable and ultimately not very useful. Almost the only people you successfully 'network' with are the other college students you go out drinking with, and as far as contacts go, they're just as useless as you. It is absolutely not worth the tens of thousands in debt you seem to suggest. The only useful contacts you'll gain at university are professors and work related contacts from internships and jobs, and those are the contacts you'll gain from standing out from all of your 'networking' peers by working hard.

Now, it's possible that one of your drinking buddies is going to be successful 10-15 years down the road, but you're going to have plenty of opportunity to network usefully between now and then, when you have real experience and expertise you can market yourself with, instead of "that guy who was really good at beer pong back in college."

Justifying potentially tens of thousands of dollars of debt so that you can 'network' with a bunch of other college students is about the worst financial advice I've heard.

Re:education is only useful for jobs

[supercrisp]

An old story. You can read similar concerns in William James' "The PhD Octopus," and there's a good historical overview of this issue in US academic in Chad Hanson's _The Community College and Good Society_. Also there have been recent debates between people like Charles Murray (American Interprise Institute) and Christopher Caldwell (in the NYT). The one thing I think often goes missing in these debates is how effective a college education is, in the humanities or the sciences, in allowing people to climb up a social class or two.

Re:education is only useful for jobs

[jpmorgan]

The problem is that today most people without the formal education are inferior candidates to most people with the degree. If you are in HR and you've got a thousand applicants to a job opening, then a checkbox 'has degree' is an easy way to cull the pool.

Re:education is only useful for jobs

[Beetle B.]

College is not more expensive today. It's just that the state has subsidized less and less of the cost over the couple of decades, making it appear to cost more.

Yes and no. Both are true. In support of your second statement, read this article about the University of Illinois:

For the first time in the Universityâ(TM)s history, it now receives a larger portion of its operating budget from tuition than from the state appropriation. In 1970, U of I received $12 in direct state tax support for each $1 in tuition revenue; in 2010, it was 80 cents from the state for every $1 in tuition. Families are filling the ever-widening gap left by the state in the form of higher tuition payments.

However, another factor is that the administrative staff at universities has grown at a much faster pace than the number of students. I wish I could find the link, but it was something like: Number of students has, say, doubled since the 1970's - number of administrative staff has increased six-fold. Universities now have more programs that simply have litle to do with education. The president's office now "needs" more staff to handle those bloated programs. Someone has to pay for those salaries.

Re:education is only useful for jobs

[khallow]

Banks, of course, have stepped in and filled the gap. I've seen a few prognosticators predict that the next financial bubble to pop will be student loans.

You're on the mark here.

Re:education is only useful for jobs

[bgeezus]

That's a rather uninformed point of view. Many graduate students go to school "for free" because it is part of their compensation for performing a job (research, teaching, etc.). Grad students who are being paid to do research are generally being paid out of faculty grants -- money that's coming from the federal government (i.e., taxpayers) or from private institutions, NOT from undergraduate tuition. Grad students who are being paid to teach or to grade assignments, etc., are playing an active role in your education. If the school doesn't have graduate students, then it has to hire someone else to perform those same duties. Not to say that there aren't advantages/disadvantages to going to a school without a graduate program, but it's quite myopic to think that most of your tuition was going to support grad students.

Re:education is only useful for jobs

[DogDude]

Wow. That's a pretty big chip on your shoulder. I'm not going to try to knock it off (not that I could), but I disagree completely. There's no organized system to create unemployed, in debt college graduates. You're taking a shortcut in that you're manipulating a very complex system in order to fit a story that only exists in your head that you have created out of your own anger and frustration. The requirements for being employed in this economy have changed, AND the US is in the middle of a big, permanent, unavoidable downward adjustment in standard of living. College educations are invaluable in teaching people how to reason and creating well-rounded human beings.

Re:education is only useful for jobs

[jedidiah]

This is probably just cumulative selection bias.

You usually can't get the first job without the "credential", so you usually end up at a disadvantage when it comes to gaining useful experience. In most fields, a fresh graduate is pretty useless and they need to complete some sort of apprenticeship before they're worth anything.

That leads to the next set of barriers in employment: "experience".

The entire process feeds upon itself.

Re:education is only useful for jobs

[TofuDog]

Having worked as a TA, autonomously conducting (and often writing) lectures and labs during my MS and Ph.D. for somewhere around $1K/mo. of pay (and state U. tuition waiver), I find your statement that undergrads "make up for grad students...especially if they teach," beyond ridiculous. Graduate students are the slave labor of the education system. I'm confident from your statement that you don't know where money for "expensive equipment" at a "research university" comes from -hint; it ain't from tuition -they're called research grants. That auto-sequencer was paid for by NSF and the U. took a 50-70% cut of the grant for "administration."

Re:education is only useful for jobs

[Glonoinha]

Agreed.

The sacrifices you made ten years ago, no matter how bad they sucked ... they are behind you.
The gains you made as a benefit of those sacrifices ... they are with you today, and will be with you tomorrow.

I'd rather be me now, than have been the quarterback in high school. What most people would call the greatest day of their life, I call Wednesday.

Re:education is only useful for jobs

[aaarrrgggh]

Someone reades every note on every page. The clouds make it easy to see what changed in this issue. At the Jobsite trailer, they have every revision of every sheet collated into one set.

Hard copies of large drawings are an order of magnitude easier to work with than PDFs, even with a 27" monitor.

Compared to 10 years ago, the industry is much more digital, but the hard copies in the trailer are still well worn.

We print about 2,000 sheets tomorrow for a throwaway set though.

Re:education is only useful for jobs

[MaskedSlacker]

No, that's how it works. US wages are falling because they were artificially inflated by the inability of most of the rest of the world to economically compete following the devastations of the two world wars and the collapse of the colonial empires in the 19th and 20th century. Those things left countries like China, India, all of Africa, even South America in economic ruin. The US on the other hand was made more powerful by all of those events. This resulted in the insanely high standard of living relative to the rest of the world that Americans have enjoyed for almost 3/4 of a century.

That period of history is coming to an end. Those countries devastated by war and colonialism are developing new infrastructure that allows their people to work at a level that formerly only Americans, Europeans, and the Japanese could previously work at. And the Europeans and Japanese were only at that level because the Americans paid to rebuild their countries after the war.

Suddenly the Chinese, the Indians, and others can all do the same work. However there isn't that much new demand for work, at least not compared to sudden increased supply of labor. Whether demand will eventually increase proportionally as standards of living rise in those countries (and their consumption of goods rises too) remains to be seen, but it hasn't risen proportionally yet.

The result? American wages will fall and unemployment will rise as other countries start doing some of the work. American standards of living must and will fall, but why would the price of college fall? There are more people trying to go (because wages are falling in jobs they'd have taken without them) than ever before with more money to spend than ever before thanks to the "generous" lending programs. Demand is up, and the supply of money to spend on it is up, so prices rise. It's fairly straightforward.

Degrees are about worthless

[ArchieBunker]

All they do is get you past HR filters. Most people who are good at their jobs also do them as a hobby or have a genuine interest. Although it doesn't help either when you have $100k in loans and employers offer you $12/hr jobs.

Re:Degrees are about worthless

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

err.

Sure, in IT.

You try to get a job in applied materials or life sciences or education.

Just try explaining to the nice HR person you like hanging around a lot of prepubescent boys as a "hobby."

Re:Degrees are about worthless

[DigiShaman]

But getting past the HR filters are in fact the most important part of getting a job in the first place. Fuck experience. That's just for nogotiating a salary in the last minute. Some companies these days think you can learn on the job depending on the industry. Some even prefer you do it their way only. Taking on massive debt is required just to get a living wage. For most, it's purely survival.

I got a well paying job now but plan on going back to college. I'm looking to upgrade my HR access badge. That's it. Pay now or pay later.

In some countries like Kenya, you need something of a masters just to clean toilets. It's that competitive. Getting a degree these days is a required scam for most.

Re:Degrees are about worthless

[fermion]

A degree can be useful to provide basic process skills and techniques in problem solving. While technical training and the like can provide targeted skills for immediate employment, however those skills may not long be in demand. For instance, it is one thing to know how use MS Office, it is another to have general skills in office applications and the ability to write an effective memo or technical report. It is one thing to complete simple assigned tasks with supervision, it is another thing to have advanced time management and organizational skills so one can plan and complete complex projects with minimal supervision.

In any case, the linked article did not limit itself to degrees. The evidence seemed to suggest that have a experience before graduation was important. That was the way it was during my time of graduating when the economy was not in great shape. Most people I know who got jobs had significant related experience prior to graduation, some paid, some volunteer. And I don't think we expected anyone to give us a job, at least not for a lifetime. Many of us created situation in which we were valuable, and if that value lapsed we created new situation in which we were valuable. This level of expectations, in which employers or the government was required to employ us simply because we existed, was not so much emphasized.

I don't want to come off as lecturing, but the current language in the presidential campaign seems particularly counter productive. Everyone is taking about a few select job creators being in control of out lives, which is not really the case. We can all be in control of our futures, at least to some extent. We don't have to wait for some Ayn Rand savior to give us a sense of worth. We can do it for ourselves, through work, through education, through creating of products. And that is products, not just taking a bit off the top in transactions.

Re:Degrees are about worthless

[trout007]

Here are two true stories.

I worked as a support contractor on a NASA center. A friend of mine was a PhD Chemist on the same contract and NASA wanted to hire him. They wrote a job description for what they needed which he was qualified for. He submitted his resume through the USAJOBS.gov website but didn't get through the HR filter. They actually didn't get any qualified applicants but it took 6 months to put the ad back up and by then they lost funding.

I saw a NASA job that was right up my alley and I knew the people who would be reviewing the resumes that got through the filter. I put my resume in and under the "other information" I copied and pasted the WHOLE job listing. I got through the HR filter and got the interview. The person I knew looked at my resume which included the copied and pasted job listing under "other information". When I interviewed he asked me about it and said it was a pretty clever way of bypassing the filter. I got the job.

Re:Degrees are about worthless

[mtinsley]

I keep hearing that, but all of the half-assed "hobbyist" code I have had to clean up in the past begs to differ. I'm sure there are plenty of people who have enough passion for what they do to learn how to do it as well or better than someone who studied it in school, but I really doubt that would describe "most people". Maybe I just lack the will power, but I wouldn't be half as good at what I do if I wasn't forced to learn it in college.

Re:Degrees are about worthless

[wytcld]

Unless you want your brain to still function well when you're older. Summary of findings: Those with 4-year degrees have brains which, in terms of capability, are 10 years younger by middle age, and beyond. So it's not just about getting a job right out of college. It's about still having a well-functioning mind when you're 50, 60, 70.

What would you pay to be ten years younger, in other words? Makes college education look cheap, at about any price.

Re:Degrees are about worthless

[HornWumpus]

Just a suggestion. I got most of my jobs by sneaking in the 'side door' (personal networking as you say, end run on the HR idiots.). Getting your jobs 'through the back door' means something else entirely (different 'interpersonal skills').

The value of college doesn't lie in employment

[brokeninside]

The value of a college education should not lie in the career opportunities it opens up for the graduates.

Sometimes it is the case that career opportunities is the only value offered by schools. Many colleges are little more than trade schools that replace apprenticeships with four years of studies. Some schools are so bad that they don't even amount to that.

But it seems to me that if one wants to learn a trade (even if that trade is a white collar one like computer programming) then apprenticeships have far more value in learning the requisite skills. Unfortunately, many HR departments do not see things that way.

The real value of a college education should lie in seeking education for its own sake. Not everyone needs to go to college to be well educated. But some people, perhaps most people, learn better in that sort of environment. Moreover, a well designed college program will stretch a student beyond what he or she would normally be attracted to in his or her studies and expose that student to ideas that he or she would not normally encounter. That sort of thing is difficult, but not impossible, for an autodidact to encounter.

Rocket Science

[datavirtue]

Study what interests you and inspires passion. If nothing inspires passion in you then you had better gain some type of technical skill. Everyone in my college is either pursuing a "business administration" degree or "computer technology." It is getting ridiculous. Business administration should be something you study along the way in any degree program. The demand for technical people is so high in the IT industry that most people following that degree path will likely get jobs, regardless of their skills. The amount of engineering students is microscopic in comparison to the rest. I haven't met anyone yet who is studying engineering to become a systems developer, it is a lonely path. During labs I spend most of my time tutoring people.

Narrow education is the new stupid

[gestalt_n_pepper]

I see the results of "engineering-only" education every day. I see co-workers utterly lacking critical thinking skills or any curiosity, passively accepting whatever the mainstream media or the software vendors tell them, and who get insanely defensive when you poke holes in the wet toilet paper of their core political/cultural/technical/economic/religious beliefs. I see walking, living proof every day that technical competence != global intelligence.

Some of this is neurological, of course. I work in the software industry, an area filled with more than its share of mildly autistic souls. The rest, however, could have had their worldview drastically enhanced with a couple of courses in comparative cultural anthropology, a few philosophy courses discussing epistemology and some critical studies of human history, just as the liberal arts crew would benefit hugely from some significant study of math, physics and engineering.

Not surprising

[bmajik]

Having everyone go to college hasn't made Americans smarter.

It has made universities dumber.

Even though I had been coding since 5th grade, I didn't know what I wanted to go to university for until late into highschool, when ultimately it occured to me that I may as well get the paper that says I can do what I already enjoyed doing.

My dad called some larger IT and software employers' recruiting departments and asked what sort of degrees they screen for, and more importantly, what degree-issuing institutions they look for.

Their answer was, roughly, if you have a CS degree, it doesn't matter where its from (unless its from MIT :))

So I went through the Barrrons College guide and made a list of schools that had CS and separate compE programs; i ranked them by cost and by SAT score of average incoming class. I restricted my search to schools that were ranked above ... 50th or 100th? place in "engineering", however arbitrary that is.

Then I went and talked to those schools, got a rough idea of which ones would give me what kinds of academic scholarships, and then chose a subset of state universities to apply to.

Part of this process is being honest about yourself. I beleive that technically, I met all of the admission requirements to get into Caltech. I noted howeer, that their average incoming freshman had SAT and ACT scores around 5 to 10% higher than where I had tested. Additionally, tuition at that time was around $30k/year.

I figured that there was little sense in struggling to get into the bottom half of the Caltech freshman class, only to pay a six figure sum and to have to work my ass off just to keep my head above water and hopefully graduate. Certainly I expect I would have had a more rigorous experience, and networked with higher caliber professors and students, and perhaps had a better pick of employers for internships and eventual employment.

But honestly, while I have _some_ smarts and _some_ drive, there are obviously people who have more of _both_, and I see little reason to compete with them if I don't have to :)

I was accepted to UIUC (then a top 5 CS school), but they knew they were a competitive program and they offered me no financial incentives to attend.

Ultimately, I went to the University of Nebraska, which offered me a full ride, allowed me to coast in non-interesting courses, and allowed me plenty of 1:1 time with professors who were interesting. The more mid-pack freshman class allowed me to differentiate myself easily from my peers in areas where I excelled.

I left school with a good GPA, plenty of knowledge that I didn't have when I started, and a full time offer at a software company you may have heard of. And no student debt.

The point of this is that if we're not equipping American kids to do even a rudimentary cost-benefit analysis; if they have no idea why they are _going_ to a university... well, they probably have no business going, and it is abhorrent that US taxpayers are paying for them to go.

I am romantically in favor of the idea of the mysty eyed dreamer going to school for indian tribal botany or some other esoteric pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. That's actually probably closer to the original idea of the university. But that experience is something he or she needs to pay for privately -- asking me to help is ridiculous. Making it national policy and funding it at the federal level is suicidal.

The debt-treadmill of university is insidious. Making it easy to get the money to go means more people are going, and in response to the rising costs that are a natural consequence of more demand, the Feds loan out more money. And so the cycle continues, and we have more and more entrants with less and less ability to pay who have no idea what they are going to do once their 4-6 years of partying are over and they need to start paying off the debt they accured.

Re:Not surprising

[FoolishOwl]

I am romantically in favor of the idea of the mysty eyed dreamer going to school for indian tribal botany or some other esoteric pursuit of knowledge for its own sake.

Here's the thing that bothers me: the academic subjects that do not directly correspond to vocational skills shouldn't require much in the way of resources to teach or study. Liberal arts students basically need access to a library or a museum, and to meet each other and discuss ideas. That shouldn't be expensive, but I paid far more to study literature at a university than I did to study more practical skills in IT at community college.

Re:Not surprising

[timeOday]

Even though I had been coding since 5th grade, I didn't know what I wanted to go to university for until late into highschool, when ultimately it occured to me that I may as well get the paper that says I can do what I already enjoyed doing.

Stop right there. People like me and you have conservative path to moderate success, which is a good thing for the bulk of the population to do. But based on the sentence I quoted, have you ever stopped to think how lucky you are to be born with an interest and talent that also happens to be one of the more reliable ways to make a living? Seriously... imagine if the biggest sector of the US economy was ballet. Would your rational process translated into success for you as a ballet dancer? Or might you struggle?

Re:Not surprising

[evilviper]

I am romantically in favor of the idea of the mysty eyed dreamer going to school for indian tribal botany or some other esoteric pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. That's actually probably closer to the original idea of the university. But that experience is something he or she needs to pay for privately -- asking me to help is ridiculous. Making it national policy and funding it at the federal level is suicidal.

I agreed with you up to this point. While it doesn't work in the US, this "romantic" ideal of pure education works perfectly well in more socialist economies. Finland, in particular, comes to mind, where your education (and expenses) are completely paid for by the state, for as long as you want to take. The downside being, once you're working, the majority of your paycheck disappears in taxes.

And with all this, their test scores are among the best, their unemployment rate is low, and their economy is solid.

  http://blogs.indystar.com/education/2012/01/20/lesson-from-finland-everything-indiana-is-doing-is-wrong/

Well duh.

[jellomizer]

The only reason why I see medical and education with low unemployment is that the colleges have a strong working relationships with these organizations and a professor recommendation will get you far. Other majors colleges do little or less to keep professional ties with people who hire from these majors.
Engineering and tech is higher mostly because there is demmand for anyone with some real math training. Most of the highest unemployed majors treat math like one of those silly thing you never needed anyway, and is there to turture children.

Welcome to "Capability Tax"

[Elf Sternberg]

An old idea, floated in the 19th century by highly conservative economists, the capability tax was the idea that people should be taxed based upon what they were capable of earning, rather than what they earned. The idea was to discourage smart people from going into art, the humanities, liberal arts, and so forth, and encourage them to go into meaningful, productive fields, where their capabilities would be put to full use. Whether or not you enjoyed the work was irrelevant, and only liberals cared about that.

The paper is basically encouraging us to think in these term, to ask students to go into fields they may well hate, because that's where they have to go to (1) get a decent education, and (2) make enough to pay off their ultimate student loans.

Re:So, when did you go to school.

[Shining Celebi]

Unfortunately, to do what you were able to do cannot be done in 2012. It would take someone many years to do and if they're going for a techical degree where credits are only good for 5 years, you wouldn't be able to do it by working your through college - as soon as you had enough for tuition, you'd be retaking Chemistry, physics, and any other engineering class.

Uh. I worked through college and paid for it in cold hard cash, without a penny from loans or my parents, and I graduated last December. With my Master's. I graduated only a semester "late" because my advisor didn't want me to take 18 hours my senior undergrad year, so it took me altogether six years, but I came out with a 4.0.

So yes, it is quite possible, I did it. That's not to say that there isn't a problem with the cost of college tuition, and that I didn't do my fair share of grumbling about the tuition/fee increases that came nearly every year I was there (including an extra $250 a semester because my school decided it needed a football team and an extra $700 a semester when mean plans were suddenly made mandatory to pay for a new dining hall), but it's an overbroad generalization to say "nobody can pay for college without rich parents or student loans." Yes, you can. You can even do it on minimum wage, if you're willing to work overtime and save up before you get there.

The cost of college is a problem, and it's only going to get worse, but let's not exaggerate.

Meh.

[Ralph Spoilsport]

1. if you're in the Arts, you are in the Arts because YOU LOVE WHAT YOU DO - money has nothing to do with it.
2. If you want to make a good wage ASAP, then don't bother with university - get a job as a plumber or an electrician or one of those guys who repairs elevators. They make stupid amounts of money. IS the work intellectually challenging? No, but that's not the question.
3. If you want to really prepare for the future, just look at the splits. A classic example is energy vs. demand vs. technology. Most people heat their homes with oil or gas. Both are limited resources and both are "not good" for the world when burned. So, preparing houses for a world without oil or gas is a REALLY GOOD IDEA and if you make a business that can do a package on a home (insulation/windows retro/geothermal heating + solar electric on roof) at a reasonable price, You Will Make A Lot Of Money and be helping preapre society for the post-carbon future. Get in to it NOW while the field is sparse. When it heats up, clean up.
4. The split between the living and the dead. The boomers are set to go into die off mode. Mortuary services will explode over the next 10 - 20 years (esp. if the USA never implements national health - poor old folks will die off right quick without medicare). Start a funeral home. Print money.

If you're looking to be a slave to some giant machine - those jobs will become fewer and farther between. In the next world, you're on your own. You will need to INVENT your future. If you don't have the brains to suss that out, then don't bother with university.

Re:What's a college summer break?

[FoolishOwl]

As I recall, "spring break" was the period between when your term papers were assigned, and when they were due. I spent them in the library. I didn't have time or money to see my family, much less take a vacation anywhere. And I didn't know anyone for whom that wasn't true.

The sorted list

[Beeftopia]

Journalism has a lower unemployment rate than engineering? Wow.

1) Sorted by Unemployment rate, lowest to highest:

Major -- Unemployment Rate -- Starting Salary
Education -- 5.4 -- 33000
Health -- 5.4 -- 43000
Agricultural and Nat. Res -- 7 -- 32000
Comm. and Journalism -- 7.3 -- 33000
Business -- 7.4 -- 39000
Engineering -- 7.5 -- 55000
Science - life/physical -- 7.7 -- 32000
Law and Public Policy -- 8.1 -- 34000
Computers and Math. -- 8.2 -- 46000
Recreation -- 8.3 -- 30000
Social Science -- 8.9 -- 37000
Humanities and Liberal Arts -- 9.4 -- 31000>
Arts -- 11.1 -- 30000

2) Sorted by starting salary, lowest to highest:

Major -- Unemployment Rate -- Starting Salary
Recreation -- 8.3 -- 30000
Arts -- 11.1 -- 30000
Humanities and Liberal Arts -- 9.4 -- 31000
Agricultural and Nat. Res -- 7 -- 32000
Science - life/physical -- 7.7 -- 32000
Education -- 5.4 -- 33000
Comm. And Journalism -- 7.3 -- 33000
Law and Public Policy -- 8.1 -- 34000
Social Science -- 8.9 -- 37000
Business -- 7.4 -- 39000
Health -- 5.4 -- 43000
Computers and Math. -- 8.2 -- 46000
Engineering -- 7.5 -- 55000

Re:The sorted list

[PPH]

Journalism has a lower unemployment rate than engineering? Wow.

What happened to the 'story at eleven' meme?

Look at the list from the point of view of ease of outsourcing and it will start to make sense. Education, health, agriculture, natural resources and journalism are all thing you have to do on location. Engineering, computers and math can be done anywhere. And they command higher salaries, so the motivation to seek cheaper labor is higher.

Re:So, when did you go to school.

[exploder]

In this day and age, if you want to get through college in 4 -5 years, you need loans or rich parents - and that going to a cheap state school.

Not necessarily. I was getting paid pretty well as a code monkey in the late 90s/early 00s, but without a degree I knew my prospects were limited (and I just didn't want to do it anymore, either). I swallowed my pride and moved back in with my (not rich) parents and spent two years at the local CC taking gen-ed classes. With Pell grants and, after the first year, a merit-based SMART grant, I was able to afford books, tuition, a modest contribution to the household, and some spending money, without borrowing a dime. (I had not saved money during my previous employment--not something to be proud of, but relevant to my anecdote.)

I did borrow some after I transferred to the flagship state university to finish my BS, but we're talking maybe $10k over two years. I had a work-study position that didn't quite make ends meet, but essentially I was paid to sit behind a counter and spent 90% of that time studying. I made the choice to take on that debt rather than find a part-time job, but if it had been important to me not to borrow anything, I know I could have made that work.

From 2005 to present, I've done a BS, MS, and am about two years from a PhD, borrowing a total of $10k (the graduate work was all funded, including a stipend). I did get (crucial!) support from my parents when I was getting started, but it was room and board, not a huge wad of cash. I had to be willing to do my first years at the CC (since my parents don't live near a university), and I had to get my BS from an in-state public university (luckily mine was pretty good). And I am fortunate to be in a STEM field, which let me get that SMART grant and good funding for my graduate work.

Having said this, I feel like I need to add that I am 100% for student loans and especially grants. I'm just pointing out that if you're willing to work and compromise a bit, it's by no means impossible to get a degree (or several) without burying yourself in debt.

No, you can't

[rsilvergun]

to get your master earning 45 to 60k/yr then your bachelor's at $13k/yr. A 60 hour work week at $7.25/hr (current federal min wage) is $20,880 GROSS. If you don't have kids you pay about 12% of that in taxes just to state & fed, to say nothing of sales tax (Phoenix AZ taxes food you know).

You also probably had a supervisor happy to be supportive because he/she is looking forward to getting someone with a Masters Degree w/o having to engage HR. Oh, and my local University's science & engineering curriculum specifically states you should not be working even part time while trying to pass them. Try taking compilers or operating systems while working 60 hours a week. Yes, people do it. Rare geniuses for whom this stuff comes naturally. A certain percentage of the population is fully energized after a 4 hour sleep. These people have a natural edge. Maybe you're one of them. But if that's the case you're where you are today because of good fortune, dumb luck and the roll of the die. The other option is you went to a diploma mill that doesn't teach anything. I've got a few of those at my job. It's weird. Ask 'em what they learned and they can't tell you...

This is something I just can't get the right wing (who are the ones that bring this argument up the most) to get: The lives of People who make minimum wage are a never ending wave of problems. Life is different when you can't just fix stuff when it breaks, buy ice cream for your kid when they get hurt. You end up trying to make up for the lack of money with time and effort. If you're one of those rare people whose genetics makes it easy for you, well then bully for you. If you went to a diploma mill then all that happened is you got fleeced (wait till you get out of school with that 'Masters' degree. You think HR departments don't know a diploma mill when they see one :) ). It's like those stories about people cutting back and paying off $200k of debt in just a few years. They always neglect to tell you that the family that did it had $70 or $80 k/year coming in. You can only cut back so much before life becomes impossible. I don't care what Will Buckley's telling you...

Re:No, you can't

[Shining Celebi]

A 60 hour work week at $7.25/hr (current federal min wage) is $20,880 GROSS.

Time-and-a-half.

If you don't have kids you pay about 12% of that in taxes just to state & fed, to say nothing of sales tax (Phoenix AZ taxes food you know).

I don't remember how much I worked out that I paid in taxes - my state also taxes food, though - but you can deduct college expenses.

You also probably had a supervisor happy to be supportive because he/she is looking forward to getting someone with a Masters Degree w/o having to engage HR.

My primary job was working at a pizza place. I don't think he really cared about my computer science degree. The owner was very supportive, though - I didn't write my own schedule, but close enough to it. To some degree the owner was supportive of that in general since he mostly hired kids and to some degree I earned it by doing my best.

Later on I worked two jobs, the other one being an assistantship. Technically, you weren't supposed to have another job if you were given an assistantship, but I didn't tell.

One thing that did save me a significant amount of money in the long run was attending a community college for the first two years, though, and making sure that I was taking classes that would transfer and count towards my degree at the "real" university.

Try taking compilers or operating systems while working 60 hours a week.

I was only working 40 during school, and it went fine.

Maybe you're one of them. But if that's the case you're where you are today because of good fortune, dumb luck and the roll of the die. The other option is you went to a diploma mill that doesn't teach anything.

Well, I need 9-10 hours of sleep a night, personally, so I didn't luck out there. But yes, I got a lucky roll of the dice. I was born in America, and not North Korea. I won the genetic lottery to some degree. I was raised in an environment conducive to learning and education. But these are largely social issues that wouldn't be fixed if we could wave a magic wand and make college free.

And while I don't think my college was super-duper rigorous, it's definitely no diploma mill. It was maybe more theoretical than technical, but we still wrote compilers, and doing a "real" project for a client in industry or in the faculty was a prerequisite for graduation. The program was ABET accredited and declared a CAE by the NSA - though for all I know, diploma mills can get all that too, I just know they liked bragging about it. ;)

This is something I just can't get the right wing (who are the ones that bring this argument up the most) to get: The lives of People who make minimum wage are a never ending wave of problems. Life is different when you can't just fix stuff when it breaks, buy ice cream for your kid when they get hurt. You end up trying to make up for the lack of money with time and effort. If you're one of those rare people whose genetics makes it easy for you, well then bully for you.

I don't think anyone has ever suggested that I was right wing before. I'm a proud big-government tax-and-spend liberal.

I agree with what you're saying. If my parents had made minimum wage, chances are things would have worked out so that I never went to college, even though they didn't directly financially support my education. If I had been kicked out at 16, I likely would have never gone. Going to college is too hard and too expensive, and I think everyone should have a college education even if it has nothing to do with their job.

But the claim was that "nobody could pay for college without loans or wealthy parents" and that was flat-out wrong, because I did. Is it much harder than it needs to be? Yes. Does the difficulty and cost present a barrier to entry for huge swaths of the population?

Re:No, you can't

[drsquare]

You'll find that the top universities actually ban you from working because it will interfere with your studies. And it's pretty optimistic to think you can get 40 hours a week whenever you want them, when millions with degrees and work experience can't get any work, or only part time work.

Re:No, you can't

[Ihmhi]

=

Time-and-a-half.

hahahahahahahaha...

You haven't had to look for a job for a while, huh?

A ha ha ha ha ha ha ha...

Companies all over the place are violating labor laws left and right. Even if you could afford to bring suit against them (which most people who are impacted by this stuff can't), you're disposable.

Re:No, you can't

[musth]

The "college experience" has and should continue to include things like campus extracurricular activities, clubs, sports, informal contact with professors, research opportunities, and cultural and academic events. All that takes free time. But increasingly, now, we have students who are proud - actually BOASTING - of their workaholic schedules, which creepily mimics the serfdom gradually being accepted by the 90% or so of US citizens who aren't owners or inheritors. I'm surprised I haven't seen anyone in this discussion bragging about all the free internship time they've been giving away to build their budding All-American Success Story.

Guess what: in many civilized countries, and previously in this country, education isn't seen as a morally inferior alternative to work work work work work, nor have the citizens been so sadly brainwashed into accepting such a situation.

Re:No, you can't

[rsilvergun]

so you get paid for 70 hours of work instead of 60. You do know time and a half doesn't kick in until after 40 hours, right? That's a whopping $3480/year more. You managed to get your income up to about 25k. Oh, and that's assuming you can get the over time. Most people in that situation just work 2 jobs (because the bosses don't want to pay time and a half). The point I was (admittedly poorly) trying to make was, even if you can somehow scrap it together to pay for college on that kind of money all it takes is one very minor problem (broken down car + poor public transportation, sharp rise in the price of gas/food, having your apartment robbed) to bring down the whole house of cards. And if you're poor the odds of that happening are much, much higher.

I think the claim should instead be 'no one can pay for college without wealthy parents, a loan, or the kind of good fortune that normally wins lotteries'.

I wasn't suggesting you're liberal or conservative, I was just pointing out that the argument that everything would be fine if we'd all just work harder for less is a right wing construct. If you're liberal, then why the hell aren't you furious over how you've been taken advantage of? Don't you see you were? It's like Stockholm syndrome otherwise...

Finally, and you have a CS degree, and you're working at a pizza place. Dude, unless your Dad owned the pizza place there's something not right here. Even at it's worst I've never known anyone with a CS degree that couldn't do better than delivering pizza. Plus there isn't a single employer who wouldn't fall all over themselves you help you get your Masters. Google is buying up whole companies just to get to people that can code (there's a story of them shutting down a photo editing software they bought and absorbing the programmers into Picasa). None of this makes sense.

I hate saying this, but the whole thing stinks. Are you an Astroturfer? Anyone got the time/skill to trace back this guys comments and ids? I hate to say it, but it wouldn't be the first time I've tangled with an Astroturfer on /. ... If you're really not, you need to start getting pissed off. You've been taken advantage of. You're being oppressed. Things have been getting worse for you for 30 years, and it's just beginning. You need to get fsckin' mad.

Re:No, you can't

[Shining Celebi]

Finally, and you have a CS degree, and you're working at a pizza place. Dude, unless your Dad owned the pizza place there's something not right here

Was. I quit the pizza place my last month of school, went job searching, and now work for a consulting firm.

I hate saying this, but the whole thing stinks. Are you an Astroturfer? Anyone got the time/skill to trace back this guys comments and ids? I hate to say it, but it wouldn't be the first time I've tangled with an Astroturfer on /. ... If you're really not, you need to start getting pissed off. You've been taken advantage of. You're being oppressed

Who would I be astroturfing for? The Man?

I never said the situation was ideal or even good. I don't think it is. My point was only that it isn't impossible to pay for college without being amazingly lucky (relatively lucky I will accept), having rich parents, or getting loans. I think the whole system needs dramatic reform. But the original claim was an exaggeration of the (bad enough) reality.

The problem is borrowing for a leisure activity.

[trout007]

What you are missing is that the value of your education is revealed when you are trying to sell your labor or products of it. So the value of your education is only what other people are voluntarily willing to pay for it. This doesn't mean you shouldn't study French Poetry. But it would be a bad investment to pay alot of money to do it when you could find places on the internet to learn and discuss it for free. This is something many people do for leisure.

Many people in today's Pop culture confuse leisure and labor because there are some exceptional artists and athletes that are able to make considerable amounts of money doing what is in essence a leisure activity. Playing the guitar and singing is something most people do for fun. But if you are exceptional at it some people will pay money to watch you have fun. The same with sports. Most people play for fun. There are a few that are so good at it others will pay to watch them play a game.

Borrowing money is only reasonable if you are building your productive capacity. Borrowing money is smart if you are building a factory, buying capital equipment, or learning a marketable skill. Borrowing money to learn a leisure activity is not a smart use of your time or money. So where you are confused is you should only borrow money to learn a job skill. But once you have that skill and are earning a higher income you can use that money to learn a leisure activity. Borrowing money to learn a leisure activity leaves you with no way of every paying back your loan.

For Comp Sci degrees are useful ...

[perpenso]

The "HR filter" does have a rational idea behind it. The college degree does demonstrate one important thing. That the holder can *finish* a long, sometimes boring and somewhat bureaucratic process. Many people can start a "project", only some of them can finish a "project".

In computer science the university program does offer valuable training. While it is possible to be self taught in these topics very few individuals will actually do so. People who are self taught tend to only study those topic they are interested in. They tend to have obvious gaps in their knowledge compared to the university trained. I only know one self taught person who had the discipline, initiative and ability to read and understand university level textbooks on the full range of topics covered in a university program.

I would agree that some levels of debt seem insane and make it hard to justify the university education but to be honest the problem seems somewhat exaggerated. If one goes to a state university and works part time when class is in session and full time in the summer one can still graduate debt free or with minimal debt. IIRC the average tuition+boarding cost for a 4-year school is US$13K per year. Even without working at all the debt would be about half what you cite.

A Culture That Devalues Culture

[rueger]

Perhaps the problem is that our corporate profit driven economy and government have created a culture that only values - read: hires and pays well - careers that directly benefit the bottom line. If, as many expect, we're diving into both global warming and a global financial crash, we may regret that choice. We may need people who can think creatively and tangentially, not a thousand more MBAs.

Mod parent up

[Paul Fernhout]

One of the most insightful posts I've seen on slashdot.

You might like the related links in this comment of mine, btw:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2629450&cid=38756882

College vs. Small Business/Trades

[Paul Fernhout]

Hard to say where might you be now by putting all that energy, intelligence, and creativity into your own small software business or an apprentiship in a trade instead of college?
http://lifeinc.today.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/05/25/6717536-the-entrepreneur-whos-paying-kids-not-to-go-to-college

But either way is a roll fo the dice...

Make sure you get enough vitamin D, omega 3s, and vegetables to keep going at that pace.
http://www.changemakers.com/discussions/discussion-493#comment-38823

It is a SLOW trend not noticed

[bussdriver]

People do not notice long slow trends in part because you have to be old to have seen it; if you noticed it at all-- and if the trend was within a single lifetime.

College was something different in the past. It was not for everybody either. People who went into college already had status because not just anybody could get in but also not just anybody would even want to get in. Completing college was another level of status. It was this status, this prestige that gained which was beneficial later one in multiple ways. Gradually, more and more people saw it as a way to get ahead, especially the ones who started out from behind. Now we've past the point where many jobs have nothing to do with the degree and only seriously consider people with a degree for jobs that do not require one or perhaps even benefit from the worker having one. My local weatherman is not needed, they can go back to the models they used to have because for many decades now they just repeat the national weather service. The news readers suck at everything besides news reading so they do not need a journalism degree either.

So now days we are coming AFTER the colleges because these degrees we as a society overvalued and misunderstood are not fitting our expectations. College was NOT about job training. Trade schools and Apprenticeships are designed for that.

WashPo owns Kaplan

[wdavies]

Why is there no warning about conflict of interest here? Everytime the Washington Post opens its mouth about Higher Education Policy of any kind, it should be known that they are owners of the $2.3 billion business Kaplan, a major profiteerer in the War on Poor Students...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Washington_Post_Company

Re:So, when did you go to school.

[man_of_mr_e]

I have to call BS. Working a minimum wage job in most areas of the country isn't enough to pay for rent and food, much less college tuitition and books. You make about $1200 a month, with takehome of about $1000 a month.

With the average rent of $600 a month, $200 a month in food costs, $200 a month in transportation costs, that's pretty much it.

Could you live more cheaply? Possibly, but a number of things would have to happen in order to make that feasible. You'd have to live within walking distance of both work and school (highly unlikely, unless you get really lucky). You'd have to be able to survive on Ramen or get free food from work (possible, but even ramen isn't as cheap as it once was). You could have roommates, but that means a larger house which raises the overall rent, and thus the average cost.

But even if you got your costs down to $500, that only leaves $500 left for tuition and books, and in many cases books alone can cost most of that.

Ok, so maybe you get two part-time jobs and work 60 hours a week (most minimum wage jobs have strict no-overtime rules in my experience) that's only going to give you another $400 a month, which gives you a total of $900 for books and tuition (that includes lab costs, fees, etc..). $2700 per quarter, $11,200 per year. I don't know of any accredited school with tuitions that low.

Ok, so that means you need to live at home, have your parents pay all your food costs, and live within walking distance of school and work.

Most aren't that lucky.

Re:Not being vocational doesn't mean it's for `fun

[Hognoxious]

I, for one, would like to see more of the voting public exposed to collegiate level political theory, comparative religion, and science.

In Texas that's all the same course!