For days now, the residents of my sleepy little town on the high desert of New Mexico have known that a new term was about to start at Enema U, the rather bad football team with a university attached to it like a barnacle on the Titanic. Almost overnight, our streets turned into racetracks, and it became impossible to drive anywhere without a four-wheeled proctologist six inches off your rear bumper.
The start of classes had the familiar feel—impossibly packed parking lots, lots of strange, leaflet-wielding people who are standing in the hot sun, telling you that their God was the only true God, and students wandering aimlessly around, trying to find the correct building that is represented by only two code letters on their class schedules. The latter task was made much more difficult because, for some reason, the names had been removed from the outside of several buildings.
After a few decades of being a faculty member, I enjoy being a student again. And why not? I hear good lectures on interesting subjects, I have the luxury of being able to use faculty parking, I do my studying in a well-maintained parklike setting, and most importantly of all, retired faculty are allowed to take classes without paying tuition. Currently, I’m simultaneously a senior in pursuit of degree in Economics and I’m a grad student in pursuit of a degree in Art History.
Taking a somewhat eclectic mix of classes means that besides being probably the only student to carry a graphing calculator into the art building, I get to talk to a wide variety of students. Perhaps one of the most frequent topics brought up is student loans. It seems that almost everyone has borrowed money to attend classes, but—interestingly enough—no one has mentioned the idea of the government’s forgiving those loans. Since these are students still in college, I assume they have confidence that their future careers will enable them to easily pay back those loans.
Regarding some of them, I have no doubt that they are correct, but as for too many others, I’m a little worried.
Most of the students majoring in business, accounting, and economics seem to have a well-thought-out plan of what they intend to do: whether they intend to go on to grad school, whether they intend to leave the state after graduation (depressingly, almost all of them do), and what kind of jobs they want. A surprising number of them have already made strong connections with their future employers.
One student had a very well-thought-out plan. Raised in Juarez—his home is literally within sight of the U.S. border—he was labeled a foreign student on a student visa. Perhaps one of the brightest students I have met recently, he had a double major in math and economics, he was graduating at the end of the semester, and he was already being courted by a number of prestigious companies. He confided to me that while he wanted to accept the job offer he had from a New York bank, he probably was going to accept the offer from a company in London. The reason? His student visa expires after graduation, and he is not assured of being able to secure a new visa that would allow him to work in the US.
In a time when millions and millions of people from all over the world just walk by that young man’s house on their way across the border, we allow one bright young man to come to America long enough to earn two college degrees at a college heavily subsidized by both state and federal tax dollars—then force him to work in Europe before he is able to pay income tax!
Perhaps equally heartbreaking was the young girl I met who was pursuing a degree in music with an emphasis on vocal performance. This was a very bright young lady who had excelled in school and had been told from an early age that she must go to college and “do something good with your life.” So, she went to college and for lack of any idea what to do, had ended up studying music. She’s a senior and has received absolutely no job offers from anybody. She is currently thinking about going to graduate school in education so she can teach school but is a little concerned about the mounting debts she is accumulating with student loans.
Please don’t misunderstand me: I am not advocating for turning universities into trade schools—and there is absolutely nothing wrong with vo-tech education. (And there is also nothing wrong with a liberal arts degree—Hell, I have half a dozen of them!) If the only way you can be happy is studying some obscure field with few employment prospects, then you should go ahead and pursue that career. What bothers me is how many students pursue college education without knowing anything about the cost or future benefits of a career in that field.
On the other hand, if I want to pursue a degree in philosophy (which nationwide leads to employment in that field a whopping 9.1% of the time), the university will never give me any information about my chances of future employment, the average salaries in that field, or even what the average monthly payments will be for the student loans I’ll be forced to take out to pay for my education. Give me at least the same kind of information you would if I were buying a fridge.
I’m not advocating that universities should stop teaching any particular classes. (Well, they could burn down the College of Education and the average IQ on campus would dramatically improve.). I just think that before universities help students take out large student loans, they should provide a little information about the likelihood of employment in that field and the average salary.
Do you want to know a staggering statistic that is NEVER shared with students? The average lifetime earnings of students who successfully received a college degree in Early Childhood Education, Fine Arts, or Human Services and Community Organization is, on average, lower than that of high school dropouts.
And high school dropouts don’t have any student loans to repay.
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Normally, I would never force comments to be moderated. However, in the last month, Russian hackers have added hundreds of bogus comments, most of which either talk about Ukraine or try to sell some crappy product. As soon as they stop, I'll turn this nonsense off.