@Creditplz wrote:
Joe8185 i don't think school is a scam, I've had job offers that pay up $120,000+, due to my degree and qualifications (school cost my parents $180,000).
My good friend has $100,000+ in student loans from medical school mainly and its paying off for him.
I DO however think school is getting ridiculously overpriced! It's getting unfair for those getting master degrees to be a teacher making a honest $60k/yr give or take.
Indeed.
We have to remember the original purpose of the university. It was a center for acquiring and developing knowledge. For example: In the 1300's, the huge majority of people did not go to university, and did not care. Most of them could not even read. The people who did, were genuinely interested in things that they were studying. It was like being on a sports team where ever play is a star-player. Few of these people thought, I hate being here, but this will get me a good job when I graduate.
Fast-forward to the present, and that is exactly what is happening. Most people who go to college do so to secure their careers. And a career today depends highly on the utility of what is studied. What company wants to pay someone for knowing Plato?
Then, when considering utility, where some knowledge is not very useful to a corporation, such as philosophy, and some knowlege, if you are good enough, might get you a few million $ sign-on bonus/retention bonus, one must ask the following question:
Are all degrees equally worth $50,000 in debt?
The answer is: NO.
And therein lies the problem. The university does not distinguish between types of degrees when specifying tuition costs. They present one fixed cost, and all students pay that.
So you are both right.
If you major in engineering mathematics to work on Wall Street as a quantitative analyst (stock-trading programmer), then yes, $50,000 debt is probably worth it, because your starting salary will probably be $140,000 or more. If you major in Comparative Literature, then it is probably not, at least not beyond its use as proving that you have the discipline and determination to suffer through something distasteful, a virtue that you can prove in much less expensive ways.
And don't believe all that non-sense about the Humanities degrees giving people critical-thinking skills. That's a crock, cooked up by people who studied Humanities, to make themselves feel better in the face of a flip-flop-wearing engineer driving an $80,000 Lexus. To add insult to injury, whereas a Humanties major might hate working at Starbucks "for the time being", that flip-flop-wearing engineer actually likes his job.
I do agree with you, though - college is getting to cost WAY too much. The student loan in question, for law school, totaling $25k for law school in the second half of the 1980's and that would be cheap these days.
