This really is two questions. First, what is the intrinsic worth of a college degree? Second, what is it worth in the marketplace?
For students who have gone deeply in debt to finance their higher education, the answer to the second question has great practical significance. For all of us together, as a community, the answer to the first question has great aesthetic (and perhaps practical) signfiicance.
While, of course, there are certain fields that demand a high level of education (for example, you wouldn’t be able to apply for veterinary jobs without some serious study), personally, I think a college education is worthwhile independently of its cash value in the employment markets. (I’m sure this will be a very popular position among the academic-community readers of this blog, but I’m not saying this to butter up my fan base, even though I have nothing against being popular.) I remember, many years ago, someone telling me that going to college “teaches you how to think.” That’s useful even if you’re unemployed; and not only to yourself, but also to the people you affect (including nameless strangers) by how you think, act, and vote.
The pragmatic cash-cow aspects of a college degree are a pressing matter right now for the current crop of recent or about-to-be college graduates.
Painting with broad strokes, studies have shown that getting a college degree is almost always financially worth it in terms of enhanced lifetime earnings. But few things stay the same forever, and a current article in “The Economist” magazine asks whether this is changing:
“But is the past a reliable guide to the future? Or are we at the beginning of a new phase in the relationship between jobs and education? There are good reasons for thinking that old patterns are about to change-and that the current recession-driven downturn in the demand for Western graduates will morph into something structural. The gale of creative destruction that has shaken so many blue-collar workers over the past few decades is beginning to shake the cognitive elite as well.”
Technology is one of the drivers of this change. For example, “A plumber or lorry-driver’s job cannot be outsourced to India. A computer programmer’s can.”
The bottom line: “These changes will undoubtedly improve the productivity of brain-workers. They will allow consumers to sidestep the professional guilds that have extracted high rents for their services. And they will empower many brain-workers to focus on what they are best at and contract out more tedious tasks to others. But the reconfiguration of brain-work will also make life far less cosy and predictable for the next generation of graduates.”
http://www.economist.com/node/21528226
Here’s my question: Are you mentally and emotionally prepared for the Brave New Economy we’re all entering, whether we like it or not?