Perhaps this will open your minds a little.
Is College a Scam? : Franchise Pick - Picking the Perfect Franchise
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Is College a Scam?
July 6, 2007 by Sean Kelly
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(FranchisePick.Com) My post Wise Up! Skip College. Buy a Franchise! provoked some strong reactions, most notably from those whose meager livelihood depends on the perpetuation of the myth of the college diploma as a good investment. Few scam victims are willing to come forward, so the myth goes on.
Benjamin Welch wrote an earnest, though misguided, response to my post called College Degrees: What’s Their Real Value? Since Ben “has been a college instructor in writing and composition for nearly six years,” he knows the myth better than anyone. Ben, I was a “college instructor in writing and composition” too. I was teaching 130 students during the week and playing drinking songs at an Irish pub Fridays & Saturday nights. Guess which job payed more?
Ben claims “any pundits who claim, sarcastically or not, that a college just isn’t worth the trouble or the money, are in error.” He uses two common fallacies to support this contention: that “some people have succeeded without degrees, but they belong to a small minority,” and that those with college degrees earn more than a million extra bucks because of their magic diplomas.
A small minority of successful people lack college degrees? Who’s been “smoking doobies down by the river” Ben? In 2003, the percentage of Forbes 400 members without college degrees was 33%. That’s a small minority? The average net worth of a Forbes 400 member without college degree: $2.27 billion. With a degree: $2.13 billion.
But the real sleight-of-hand parlor trick is the statement that those with college diplomas earn “$30,000 more annually than someone with only a high school diploma. Over the course of a working lifetime, that’s more than million dollars.”
Hmmm… If the average income of Beluga caviar consumers is $500K annually, does that mean that if I eat whale eggs weekly I’ll earn $500K? Where’s proof of cause and effect? College-goers are more likely to be white, privileged, better-educated and probably (as a group) smarter than those who don’t go to college. They’d be no less white, privileged, better-educated and probably (as a group) smarter without their degrees. Can diploma apologists contend, with a straight face, that people like Warren Buffett, Ralph Lauren, Steven Spielberg, Donald Trump, Oprah, and Martha Stewart would not have achieved their success without their degrees?
To correct Mr. Welch’s well-crafted, but misguided, conclusion: ”In the final analysis, the grounds for [defending] the worth of a college degree are based either on poor math or logical fallacies — two errors, ironically, that a college education is supposed to correct.”
WHAT DO YOU THINK? IS A COLLEGE DEGREE NECESSARY FOR SUCCESS? ISN’T A FRANCHISE A BETTER INVESTMENT?