Becoming a pilot requires vocational not professional training. You don't need to go to college and get a degree in golf course management to fly airplanes. Embry Riddle is an over priced joke. What an idiotic idea of shelling out 200k between the degree and ratings just so you can qualify to one day make 18k at a crap bag regional. You would be better off smoking pot all day and becoming a plumber. I know this because my plumber friend makes more than I do and he gets to smoke all the pot he wants.

I remember back when I was in high school,(early 1990's) the guidence counciler came to our class to show us charts on college grad pay vs high school only grad pay. The point of that pow wow was to convince everyone we must all go to college or become janitors. College was much less expensive then. It seems to me that too many people that didn't need to go to college went anyway. Many people that couldn't afford college financed themselves to the hilt with increasingly compliant banks help and went anyway.

My personal theory is this created two major problems. First, an increasing number of people paying for college (many with borrowed money) caused tuition to skyrocket. Why wouldn't it? If you are charging X amount and you get an increase in business no matter how much you increase prices year after year then you would be crazy not to keep jacking up prices.

The second problem created was the cheapening of a college diploma due to a couple of factors. It is my opinion that with private and public colleges competing for big piles of student cash that sometimes the curriculum gets watered down and standards get lowered. After all kicking out less qualified students doesn't pay the bills does it. Then there is the fact that there are many people whom graduate with useless degrees they have no intention of using professionally just because they thought they ought to go to school. Now you have increased the number of college grads in the marketplace needlessly. Jobs like being a pilot for example become more expensive to compete for because now a guy whom has all the neccesary vocational training and experience to be a pilot is competeing against people who wasted money on a African American studies degree then went to flight school when he realized he would never get a job in his degree field. Enough morons with useless degrees put here apps on a recruiters desk and viola, having any old diploma becomes the norm.

Cost of entry into the airline business has skyrocketed and the payoff has plummeted. In my opinion the juice isn't worth the squeeze anymore in this vocation. I am sure the market will sort it out eventually though.