One thing I never get about our country is why we don't make kids and teenagers truly know what things really cost. When I grew up -- and I don't think I was anywhere near alone -- I'd get thrown a $20 or something on a Friday night and told to 'go have fun.' Some summers, I may have taken a job, other summers I may have been too busy with sports and camps and the like. We certainly keep our teenagers and children busy, and fill their heads with lots of important things, but very little of what we do as a culture and nation provides them with the what they really need to know as they go about making what could be the most important decision of their entires lives... where to go to college.
Parents... you need to save your children from a disastrous mistake: Don't let them mortgage their futures away. Make sure they have a real plan and keep college affordable and options open.
I wrote a blog today on my personal site about how vastly expensive a college education could be, in relation to a great NYT article from today about how Law Schools are very much a way to push a product on people who can't use it (because only a few of them can actually find a good-paying job) in order to make lots of $$ for the schools -- Law School enrollment is fast exceeding the needed numbers for the profession. What is happening there, as the NYT points out in detail, runs counter to the very ethics Law Schools pretend to teach about. In my blog, I called Law Schools puppy mills -- and like most puppy mills, they don't care about the dogs. However, the dirty little secret is you could apply the same critiques to much of academia.
Then I read Tasini's diary on the death of the American Dream, currently on the Rec List, and had to bring what I wrote today to the rest of you -- because it's very much in vogue. Tasini wrote that really stuck with me:
We treat poverty as a way of doing business in America. The minimum wage is a poverty-level wage. We say people who work full-time for the minimum wage are "employed" but, for a family of four, that puts them below the federal poverty line. The minimum wage should be above $19 an hour if we factored in productivity over 30 years--how hard people have worked.
Now, let's be clear about a few things.
First, this has NOTHING to do with education. The "Field of Dreams" strategy and claiming that we would all be just fine if we were smarter and we were all "symbolic analysts" was just malarkey. The chief purveyor of that discredited theory, Robert Reich, was among a cadre of people who were too afraid to speak out in the 1990s--and earlier--about the vast class warfare that was underway.
An example from the story:
Others, like Mr. Cronan, the Starbucks barista in Massachusetts, take whatever work is available. He lost his job in January 2009 at a Boston money-management company, where he says he earned a $100,000 salary and $50,000 annual bonus in recent years. Mr. Cronan, 40, enrolled in adult-education courses and tried to wait out the downturn as he saw other people with MBAs take entry-level, $40,000-a-year jobs.
But once his 19-month severance period ended, Mr. Cronan needed health insurance and decided he couldn't limit his search to only his field. So, in August, he got a job at his local Starbucks—the one he'd visited daily since losing his job—even though he expects to leave once he finds employment in his field.
He says he's now earning $8.85 an hour for about 38 hours a week of work.
Getting education is fine. But, it is not a national strategy to increase wages.
Speaking as someone who went to college not too long ago and is today struggling to make ends meet, this is absolutely right. If someone had told me what having $50k in debt -- all from going to public school no less -- would be like, I would certainly have gone to community college first. It is an albatross that keeps me from doing what I really want to do, and keeps me bound to my childhood home when I'd love to be able to get out of the nest and spread my wings. When I was 17 or 18, I thought college debt was something easily manageable -- I literally thought my loans would be something like $50 or $100 a month -- but it turns out it's less a nuisance as it is rent.
We really need to examine our system of education in this country and ask just who it benefits, because it doesn't seem to be the students. Far from empowering students to do what they want, our system of endless and easy college loans in this country is a system of neo-indentured service -- and the only people it empowers is colleges and universities to grossly inflate the cost of a college education and catch more people in the scheme. For students, those who graduate or not, they get giant loan payments that force them to sacrifice what they want to do for what they have to do -- killing entrepreneurship, creativity and even happiness.
So, what should we do?
As a simple matter of protecting young students who don't understand what the real world is like and making sure we get as much bang for our buck in terms of government investments, any student who takes a government loan to go to college should first have to go to a two-year community school before going onto a bachelor's program. Would it really hurt anyone doing that? For students, they'd still get all the same opportunities, as well as
- Two more years to learn what they really want to do, so they can avoid disastrous mistakes (like my friend who spent 2+ years studying Biology before he realized his passion was English),
- A greater likelihood of obtaining at least some kind of degree, rank or training in a specialized field requiring a two-year course,
- Get the first two years of their education at a greatly reduced cost, saving millions from a crushing debt some may never truly be able to afford.
Parents should also be weary of private schools: Private schools will cost twice as much or more in almost all cases, but they certainly won't make you twice as likely to get a job or even get into grad school. No where close. Your experience and, most importantly of all, networks, are far more likely to help in the job department -- and your GPA and field-appropriate grad-school test scores are the tickets into further academia, should you be foolish enough to choose it.
This is particularly the case in states like Massachusetts, where I'm from, where we suffer from HarvabuMIT-tus, a bug in which infected students somehow think it unseemly to go to public university or community colleges. Luckily in the vast majority of states in this country, where public schools are by far the best institutions and receive their fair share of public funding, this bug hasn't reached epidemic proportions. Yet, parents should absolutely beware the child who says, "I want to go to a private school," and won't be getting a full scholarship.
At the end of the day, no one wants to take away opportunities from their kids, and kids usually don't want to hear it. The last thing a high school student really wants to talk about is the big, 'where do you want to go to school,' question. Parents who attended the school of their choice don't want to take that choice away from their children, and parents who didn't graduate from a college want desperately for their children to do so. However, we can't let our biases get in the way of sound fiscal advice -- because we don't really know if the American Dream is coming back, like it used to.
You may have been able to easily afford your loans after graduating, if you graduated in the 70s or 80s, but that's not the same for many -- if not most -- of today's college students. Wages have stagnated over the past 30 years, and they're actually going down -- and may not recover -- as we speak. We, the college students who took massive debt without knowing what we were doing, are increasingly bound to a new system of indentured servitude, and the outlook is it's probably going to get worse. Parents, please spare your children -- who haven't yet lived this -- from this horrendous and suffocating experience, when there are other options out there to get educated without taking on massive debt.
Parents have a duty to look out for their kids. Saving then from $50-100k -- or more -- in debt is quite possibly the most important thing you could do as a parent, even if your kids may hate you for it. My father's family always had a rule: Public school or get thee a scholarship, which has long worked -- but even that may not be enough anymore for many families who go week to week with their paychecks. If and when I have kids (which will be if and when I can ever afford them given the economy and my debt), I'm going to amend that rule: Two years of community college, and then public school or a big, fat scholarship. And I'll know someday, should I have kids, they'll thank me for it -- even if it's not the day I may have to say "no."