Do college degrees really get you a better job?
It depends on what you study. If you study really hard stuff that is in demand, then it will help. But if you study easy stuff and don’t come out in the top 1% of those easy programs, then going to college is a huge waste of money. It’s also a huge “opportunity cost”, because you could have been working instead of going to college – which would get you not only a salary but a lot of experience, too. Instead of having $50,000 in debt, you could have $50,000 in savings, over four years.
Take a look at this article from the Chronicle of Higher Education. (H/T Hans Bader at the Competitive Enterprise Institute)
Excerpt:
“60 percent of the increase in the number of college graduates from 1992 to 2008 worked in jobs that the (Bureau of Labor Statistics) considers relatively low skilled — occupations where many participants have only high school diplomas and often even less.” This means that the great push to increase the number of college grads has apparently come to very little — only a minority of the additional grads are in occupations regarded as requiring a bachelor’s degree. Of the nearly 50 million U.S. colleges graduates, 17.4 million are holding jobs for which college training is regarded as unnecessary. The number of waiters and waitresses with college degrees more than doubled from in the years 1992-2008, from 119,000 to 338,000, and cashiers with college degrees rose from 132,000 to 365,000.
We should not be taking money from working individuals and businesses to provide grants for immature students to study basket weaving. Providing money for so many people to study things that are not practical and that they are not even that good at is a waste of money. We are not getting a good return for this money if graduates just go on to do jobs that they would have done anyway. The real questions that should be asked by students is “is this worth the money? Will this help me to find a job?” And the real question that taxpayers should be asking is “do we need to stop wasting money on grants for useless degrees and leave the money in the private sector to create more good jobs instead?”.
It’s not good to be sending young people to universities that are run by leftists in any case, because it insulates them from real life and puts them at the mercy of perpetual adolescents (professors). For many students, college is wasted on partying and “studying” impractical and counter-factual areas like feminist studies, peace studies, black studies, Marxist studies, queer studies, etc. We do not need to be sending so much money into the pockets of unqualified leftists like Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, who bash capitalism while living off of the wealth produced by it.
Hans writes:
In “The Great College Degree Scam,” expert Richard Vedder points out that “[s]ome in higher education KNOW about all of this and are keeping quiet about it because of their own self-interest. We are deceiving our young population to mindlessly pursue college degrees” they don’t need.
Hans also talked about the problem of rising college debt here.
WINTERY KNIGHT 
I think the main problem with college is that it’s an expectation of every middle class child. Because of that if you’re middle class and don’t go to college and waste time on a degree people wonder what’s wrong with you. It also creates a desire for those who are not middle class to work hard to get into college because that is one of the things that middle class people do. It’s all about the signalling effect of having a degree. My music major, while really fun to get, has done me no good in itself. However, I’d hate to try to compete in the job market without a college on my resume regardless of what my major was.
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Given your criteria theology degrees would be a possible candidate for ditching. Not something I would like to see.
Personally I have employed many people in the technology field over the past 15 years. I do not limit my searches to just comp sci degrees, but have had great staff who have had degrees or doctorates in English, chemistry, physics, commerce, history and teaching. Reading a candidates transcript combined with an interview gives a clear idea of what type of aptitude they have, whether they can apply themselves and if they will be a suitable fit for the organization. Degree type matters little as the course content is likely out of date quickly, the skill of “learning to learn” is hopefully the vital outcome of an education.
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I am talking about people who borrow tons of money, get subsidies from government, and then go into basket-weaving and come out with a grade of B- or below, or worse, who drop out completely. In your country, there is also a MASSIVE student loan abandonment problem because of the government subsidies. Make people pay their own way. Make them apply for loans from private companies that they have to pay back.
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Sort of on topic, here is a half-baked theory I have. Perhaps one day I, or someone else, will test if the numbers back it up:
The increase in atheism and humanism among professors most likely correlates with:
a) More useless degrees
and b) Universities becoming places for lower living, rather than higher learning.
But this is only a theory.
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Could not agree more with this theory. Atheism is basically the pastime of thinking up theories that justify recreational sex (evolution) and avoiding the consequences of recreational sex (abortion is needed for “global warming” to reduce population). It’s not a theory, It’s fact. That’s what these people do – they bully and indoctrinate anyone who tells them that self-centeredness is wrong in any way, and tells them that the consequences of their sin are grievous – e.g. – AIDS, abortion, fatherlessness, etc.
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