Tag Archives: Degree

News

Is a college degree worth what you pay for it?

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Michael Barone writing in Human Events.

Excerpt:

We are still suffering from the bursting of the housing bubble created by low interest rates, lowered mortgage standards, and subsidies to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Those policies encouraged the granting of mortgages to people who should never have gotten them — and when they defaulted, the whole financial sector nearly collapsed.

Now some people see signs that another bubble is bursting. They call it the higher-education bubble.

For years, government has assumed it’s a good thing to go to college. College graduates tend to earn more money than non-college graduates.

Politicians of both parties have called for giving everybody a chance to go to college, just as they called for giving everybody a chance to buy a home.

So government has been subsidizing higher education with low-interest college loans, Pell grants, and cheap tuitions at state colleges and universities.

The predictable result is that higher education costs have risen much faster than inflation, much faster than personal incomes, much faster than the economy over the past 40 years.

Moreover, you can’t get out of paying off those college loans, even by going through bankruptcy. At least with a home mortgage, you can walk away and let the bank foreclose and not owe any more money.

Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal, is adept at spotting bubbles. He sold out for $500 million in March 2000, at the peak of the tech bubble, when his partners wanted to hold out for more. He refused to buy a house until the housing bubble burst.

“A true bubble is when something is overvalued and intensely believed,” he has said. “Education may still be the only thing people still believe in in the United States.”

But the combination of rising costs and dubious quality may be undermining that belief.

For what have institutions of higher learning done with their vast increases in revenues? The answer in all too many cases is administrative bloat.

Take the California State University system, the second tier in that state’s public higher education. Between 1975 and 2008, the number of faculty rose by 3 percent, to 12,019 positions. During those same years, the number of administrators rose 221 percent, to 12,183. That’s right: There are more administrators than teachers at Cal State now.

These people get paid to “liaise” and “facilitate” and produce reports on diversity. How that benefits Cal State students or California taxpayers is unclear.

It is often said that American colleges and universities are the best in the world. That’s undoubtedly true in the hard sciences.

But in the humanities and to a lesser extent in the social sciences, there’s a lot of garbage. Is a degree in religious and women’s studies worth $100,000 in student loan debt? Probably not.

As economist Richard Vedder points out, 45 percent of those who enter four-year colleges don’t get a degree within six years. Given the low achievement level of most high school graduates, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that many of them shouldn’t have bothered in the first place.

I think college is a good idea if you you don’t spend too much on it, and if you can make back the investment by getting a job in a good field. In general, no subject that is easy is worth spending $100,000 on, though. Engineering, science, medicine, law, etc. are worth it.

News

Recent college graduates realizing that Obama’s rhetoric doesn’t produce jobs

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From the Daily Caller. (H/T Right Wing News)

Excerpt:

A very large proportion of recent university graduates have soured on President Barack Obama, and many will vote GOP or stay at home in the 2012 election, according to two new surveys of younger voters.

“These rock-solid Obama constituents are free-agents,” said Kellyanne Conway, president of The Polling Company, based in Washington, D.C. She recently completed a large survey of college grads, and “they’re shopping around, considering their options, [and] a fair number will stay at home and sit it out,” she said.

The scope of this disengagement from Obama is suggested by an informal survey of 500 post-grads by Joe Maddalone, founder of Maddalone Global Strategies. Of his sample, 93 percent are aged between 22 and 28, 67 percent are male and 83 percent voted for Obama in 2008. But only 27 percent are committed to voting for Obama again, and 80 percent said they would consider voting for a Republican, said New York-based Maddalone.

That’s a drop of almost 60 points in support for Obama among this influential class of younger post-grad voters, who Maddalone recruited at conferences held at New York University and Thomson-Reuters’ New York headquarters.

The bad news for Obama was underlined May 19 with a report by a job-firm Adecco that roughly 60 percent of recent college-grads have not been able to find a full-time job in their preferred area. One-in-five graduates have taken jobs far from their training, one-in-six are dependent on their parents, and one-in-four say they’re in debt, according to the firm’s data.

Let’s see. These graduates voted for Obama during college, and now they’ve just finished going through many years of indoctrination from teachers who are typically isolated from real life, i.e. – isolated from private sector employment, military service, entrepreneurship, stay-at-home motherhood, and so forth. They parroted all of the secular left-wing views of their indoctrinators, got their diplomas in social work or English or peace studies, and now they are out on their own for the first time, looking for jobs from the people they have been taught to hate and despise. Imagine their surprise to find out that the world is nothing like they were led to believe, their non-quantitative degrees are useless, and that they are now $60,000 in debt, and they will never collect a dime from entitlement programs from Social Security.

Not to mention the $534,000 dollars that each household in the US owes because of  Nancy Pelosi’s $5.34 TRILLION dollar addition to the national debt. (H/T Doug Ross)

Obama Unemployment Stimulus Graph
Obama Unemployment Stimulus Graph

Image from Conservative Compendium.

Here’s another interesting article from the Washington Examiner, by political guru Michael Barone.

Excerpt:

Barack Obama and the Democratic congressional supermajorities of 2009-10 raised federal spending from 21 to 25 percent of gross domestic product. Their stimulus package stopped layoffs of public employees for a while, even as private sector payrolls plummeted.

And the Obama Democrats piled further burdens on would-be employers in the private sector. Obamacare and the Dodd-Frank financial regulation bill are scheduled to be followed by thousands of regulations that will impose impossible-to-estimate costs on the economy.

[…]It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the threat of tax increases and increased regulatory burdens have produced something in the nature of a hiring strike.

And then there is the political posturing. On April 13 Obama delivered a ballyhooed speech at George Washington University. The man who conservatives as well as liberal pundits told us was a combination of Edmund Burke and Reinhold Niebuhr was widely expected to present a serious plan to address the budget deficits and entitlement spending.

Instead the man who can call on talented career professionals at the Office of Management and Budget to produce detailed blueprints gave us something in the nature of a few numbers scrawled on a paper napkin.

The man depicted as pragmatic and free of ideological cant indulged in cheap political rhetoric, accusing Republicans, including House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan who was in the audience, of pushing old ladies in wheelchairs down the hill and starving autistic children.

The signal was clear. Obama had already ignored his own deficit reduction commission in preparing his annual budget, which was later rejected 97-0 in the Senate. Now he was signaling that the time for governing was over and that he was entering campaign mode 19 months before the November 2012 election. People took notice, especially those people who decide whether to hire or not. Goldman Sachs’s Current Activity Indicator stood at 4.2 percent in March. In April — in the middle of which came Obama’s GW speech — it was 1.6 percent. For May it is 1 percent.

“That is a major drop in no time at all,” wrote Business Insider’s Joe Weisenthal.

After April 13 Obama Democrats went into campaign mode. They staged a poll-driven Senate vote to increase taxes on oil companies.

They began a Mediscare campaign against Ryan’s budget resolution that all but four House Republicans had voted for. That seemed to pay off with a special election victory in New York’s 26th Congressional District.

The message to job creators was clear. Hire at your own risk. Higher taxes, more burdensome regulation and crony capitalism may be here for some time to come.

Corporations do not hire workers or expand their businesses when there is uncertainty and looming tax increases.

Commentary

Carrie Lukas does the math on the male-female pay gap

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Carrie Lukas
Carrie Lukas

A popular article by Carrie Lukas, writing in the Wall Street Journal. (H/T Mary)

Excerpt:

The unemployment rate is consistently higher among men than among women. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that 9.3% of men over the age of 16 are currently out of work. The figure for women is 8.3%. Unemployment fell for both sexes over the past year, but labor force participation (the percentage of working age people employed) also dropped. The participation rate fell more among men (to 70.4% today from 71.4% in March 2010) than women (to 58.3% from 58.8%). That means much of the improvement in unemployment numbers comes from discouraged workers—particularly male ones—giving up their job searches entirely.

Men have been hit harder by this recession because they tend to work in fields like construction, manufacturing and trucking, which are disproportionately affected by bad economic conditions. Women cluster in more insulated occupations, such as teaching, health care and service industries.

[…]The Department of Labor’s Time Use survey shows that full-time working women spend an average of 8.01 hours per day on the job, compared to 8.75 hours for full-time working men. One would expect that someone who works 9% more would also earn more. This one fact alone accounts for more than a third of the wage gap.

Choice of occupation also plays an important role in earnings. While feminists suggest that women are coerced into lower-paying job sectors, most women know that something else is often at work. Women gravitate toward jobs with fewer risks, more comfortable conditions, regular hours, more personal fulfillment and greater flexibility. Simply put, many women—not all, but enough to have a big impact on the statistics—are willing to trade higher pay for other desirable job characteristics.

Men, by contrast, often take on jobs that involve physical labor, outdoor work, overnight shifts and dangerous conditions (which is also why men suffer the overwhelming majority of injuries and deaths at the workplace). They put up with these unpleasant factors so that they can earn more.

Recent studies have shown that the wage gap shrinks—or even reverses—when relevant factors are taken into account and comparisons are made between men and women in similar circumstances. In a 2010 study of single, childless urban workers between the ages of 22 and 30, the research firm Reach Advisors found that women earned an average of 8% more than their male counterparts. Given that women are outpacing men in educational attainment, and that our economy is increasingly geared toward knowledge-based jobs, it makes sense that women’s earnings are going up compared to men’s.

My favorite book on feminism, economics and marriage is Carrie Lukas’ “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Women, Sex and Feminism“. If you don’t have the book, then please go out and buy one for you, and one for a young, unmarried woman in your life. Books like this one are for women who are serious about making their marriages last. And men can read them, too – so that we’ll know what to look for in women. There is nothing more attractive to a marriage-minded man than a fiscally conservative woman.

Here’s an interview of Carrie Lukas conducted by famous men’s rights activist Bernard Chapin. The next time you see men reading the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue, take a closer look. On the inside of that magazine we are often concealing a copy of Carrie Lukas’ book. When Carrie Lukas talks about economics and policy, men think about marriage.