Originally Posted by
Mesabah
Wages have not kept up with inflation, however, college tuition has. This is the fundamental problem that has made the modern educational system very weak in my opinion. Obviously, education is very vital to personal development, however, spending more than $20K for a college degree is outrageous. A degree simply highlights a persons abilities; it exposes them to certain environments, and gauges a persons reactions to them. I have a bachelors in engineering, and I assure you, if I were to use any of the methods taught to me in college in the real world, the results would probably be disastrous.
So the question is...how much should someone pay to discover what they are good at? The answer is as little as possible, because paying anymore would be getting scammed. I paid about $20K for my degree and about $10K for all my pilot ratings. I took no student loans, and had no debt to pay off when I finished. I'm still working towards a higher degree.
Another great point! The wages and the tuition costs are way out of sync...
I can't believe I didn’t mention this before, but the very field I work in (IT)... Good luck understanding what you are doing with only a degree... It's the kind of thing you need to understand before even going to school for it... Same deal with what you learn in school barely (if at all) applying to what you really need to learn or know to do the job... I also learned more about life from working in a restaurant, auto shop, office environment than most kids know from just going to a campus with people all from the same age/income level...
It is this exact mentality that is the reason people are paid so low anymore and have so much debt. They are programmed to think at a young age that you need to pay for college to get a good job... Paying to become "qualified" for a job. Qualified being open to alternate meanings (you know, the whole pretense society puts on credentials in most cases). This is why people will fly for an airline for 8 dollars an hour in an "internship". For "experience." If college didn't cost as much as it did, I wouldn't be calling it a scam.
Most of you people have it backwards... Requiring a degree wouldn't raise the bar, it would probably lower it. Because now people that paid the extra money for the degree are getting paid less because they became the majority. And then they learn to accept debt as a normal part of life and teach their kids the same. It shouldn't be this way.