Category: Politics, Religion & Money

The Opportunity Cost of College

Since the recession began in early 2008, a college degree hasn’t necessarily led to a good paying job, or any job at all. There are now five graduating classes of unemployed or underemployed college graduates. To make matters worse, some grads have almost as much debt as their parents did when they bought their first house. As an article in The New York Times explains, collecting money owed by students with government-backed loans is now a booming business.

Forty years ago, when I was a senior in high school, it made some sense to enter the job market rather than head off to college. This was especially true for boys, because the military draft was ending (thank you, Richard Nixon!). Before then, for a lot of young men the value of college was that it meant getting a draft deferment and avoiding, or at least delaying, being sent to Vietnam. By the time I graduated from college, jobs were few and far between, and pay scales were depressed, thanks to the huge numbers of us Baby Boomers looking for work. I remember reading about Harvard grads driving cabs. I know a couple of guys my age who did very well by not spending four more years sitting in class after high school, and they got a jump start on the rest of us.

In the decades since then, the idea of getting a college education for its own sake has pretty much disappeared, but I feel strongly that college shouldn’t be seen solely as a place for vocational training. Getting a college education helps people to become informed, thoughtful citizens and voters. I think there’s a lot of value in taking college-level courses in Philosophy, History, Sociology, Psychology, and Economics, which is what my degree is in. Economics is an academic major that has much more vocational potential than it did in my day.

Having said that, I have to wonder what sort of a liberal arts education students get at The King’s College. Note: this isn’t King’s College, the Catholic institution in Pennsylvania, it’s a tiny (~400 students) Evangelical Christian school in New York City. Since 2010, The King’s College has been headed by Dinesh D’Souza, who to me appears to be a right-wing crackpot. D’Souza seems to have a President Obama fixation, in the same way the “birthers” do, and he makes some strange assertions. His latest is that Obama is an “anti-colonialist,” which I think says more about D’Souza than it does about Obama, because D’Souza was born in India, the last stronghold of the British Empire.

http://youtu.be/gRbqMGtvQD0

D’Souza’s claim that Obama is, as President, trying to help other countries at the expense of the United States is nonsense. The best thing to do about about guys like D’Souza is to let them talk all they want, because the more they say, the more obvious it is that they shouldn’t be taken seriously. NPR recently featured D’Souza. An edited audio interview with him is on the player, and the full interview is at this link.

[audio:https://s3.amazonaws.com/dogratcom/Audio/2012/09/dineshd%27souza.mp3|titles=NPR interview: Dinesh D’Souza]

Follow-up: Here are a couple of related items – The Washington Post does a cost/benefit analysis of college in general, and Infoworld asks about the value of Computer Science degrees in particular.

The Economy, Frontline and center

Since the collapse of the credit markets in 2008, the PBS documentary series Frontline has been producing an outstanding, if perhaps overly dramatic, series of programs explaining the causes of the crisis and what’s been happening in the Great Recession since then. The latest is Money, Power, and Wall Street. It borrows a lot of interview video from the earlier programs, but there could have been more from the show about Brooksley Born and her warnings about the dangers of high-risk betting with borrowed money masquerading as “investing.”

Watch Money, Power and Wall Street: Part One on PBS. See more from FRONTLINE.