About 'an ms degree or a ms degree'|... to one or two, instead of 23 out of 28...hydrological year follows as a commentary as before. See the URL..._SHOW_DELAY_MS%20%3D%20300%3B%0Avar%20LEO...
I enjoyed reading Raymond Bureau's editorial " College Graduates and Unemployment: A Teacher's Perspective." Mr. Bureau cites recent U S Department of Labor statistics that the unemployment rate for college attendees now exceeds the unemployment rate for high school graduates. For this to have occurred is really amazing when you consider how many occupations over the last 60 years that government has put new college degree requirements on. In most instances the college degree requirement has been proved unnecessary as professional outcomes have not been improved after the degree requirement was instituted. This arrangement has set up a self-fulfilling prophecy where when government puts more unnecessary degree requirements on occupations-subsequently the government can truthfully state that the best way to insure employment was to obtain a degree (because government itself by putting unnecessary degree requirements on occupations where a degree requirement previously did not exist-reduces the number of employment opportunities for high school graduates). While there are many professions where the government has put unnecessary degree requirements on over the last 60 years-let's explore the profession Raymond Bureau is engaged in-teaching. In " A Short History of United States Education "-Page 14 described the credentialing standard for teaching in the 1950s "At least in the early part of the decade, almost half of elementary teachers had no college degree." The college degree requirement to teach came about after the 1950s with a government promise this would result in a more competent teaching profession yielding vastly superior student outcomes. This theory wasn't adequately challenged from "the get-go" because at face value it is an absurdity to think that requiring someone to pass college level algebra in order to teach elementary children to memorize multiplication tables is going to make them a better teacher. Do we have a way to measure student outcomes since 1950 today to verify whether the teacher degree requirement has improved student outcomes? We have such a measurement-the SAT. SAT scores have been in decline since the 1960's after a degree requirement became almost universal on the teaching profession. Some might argue declining SAT scores are tied to the fact that more students take the test that aren't as good of students-and there may be some truth in that, but what the people who make this argument will not accept is that this is tied to the fact that expanding the SAT to lower IQ students predicts this outcome and the teaching profession has been unable to insure that low IQ children aren't left behind (requiring a college degree to teach doesn't raise the IQ for those students on the left side of The Bell Curve). If all students have equivalent intelligence (the indoctrination imparted to students in America's public colleges Education Departments) and therefore equal opportunity to learn-then the argument that expanding the number of students taking the SAT is why scores have languished is defeated. Additionally-the argument that expanding the SAT participation rate is why SAT scores have fallen because more unqualified students are taking the test-itself is an admission that requiring a college degree on the teaching profession has not raised student outcomes. Albert Jay Nock started to see disturbing dogma being applied to education 80 years ago and predicted the mess we have today in his book titled " The Theory of Education in The United States ." In that book Nock wrote: "Our system is based upon the assumption, popularly regarded as implicit in the doctrine of equality, that everybody is educable. This has been taken without question from the beginning; it is taken without question now. The whole structure of our system, the entire arrangement of its mechanics, testifies to this. Even our truant laws testify to it, for they are constructed with exclusive reference to school-age, not to school-ability. When we attempt to run this assumption back to the philosophical doctrine of equality, we cannot do it; it is not there, nothing like it is there. The philosophical doctrine of equality gives no more ground for the assumption that all men are educable than it does for the assumption that all men are six feet tall. We see at once, then, that it is not the philosophical doctrine of equality, but an utterly untenable popular perversion of it, that we find at the basis of our educational system." Education Departments at public universities saw a great expansion with the new degree requirement on teaching after 1950. Prior to the degree requirement on teaching the public school teaching practices were centered on the science known by university Psychometric Departments. K-12 students were IQ tested and put on a curriculum appropriate for their innate intelligence. As Education Departments came to take over public education (strength in numbers) the science applied to the public schools previously by the Psychometric Departments was abandoned for flawed "feel good education ideology." Unfortunately this dogma has lead politicians and public college Presidents to not worry about the manufacturing jobs that provided the average IQ with a path to middle income status being outsourced overseas for foreigners to do instead of Americans-because the dogma presumes those with average IQ and lower can obtain the few degrees that pay well. This dogma itself is a substantial reason the middle class is in steep decline. The scientific knowledge contained in the Psychometric Departments at public colleges is course curriculum excluded from Education Degree Plans at most public colleges. This strongly suggests that teacher preparation in our public colleges is more about indoctrination rather than imparting scientific knowledge of sound education theory. In essence-the theory (and justification) behind requiring a degree to teach is the argument that knowledge gleaned in an education degree plan at a public college can educate a teacher to have the ability to take a low IQ demographic of students (commonly mislabeled by the education establishment as either "low performing" or "at risk") and obtain equivalent performance to a demographic of high IQ students. Efforts along those lines have always been-and will always be-a miserable failure. Most high school graduates don't believe this fallacy but after four years indoctrination in an Education Degree Plan at a public college most obtaining Education Degrees believe the fallacy (indoctrination of fallacies is one of the reasons a college graduate with an Education Degree is less competent to teach than a high school graduate who is yet to have been indoctrinated into a false belief set at a public college). This is not the only phenomenon which suggests that there is a problem with college curriculum making people less competent-research has found that a greater percentage of college graduates believe in ghosts than do the percentage of high school graduates. When it was learned that the degree requirement on teaching didn't improve student outcomes-but government wanted more Americans to go to college-the means by which government increased the per capita rate of college graduates was to dumb down the college curriculum. This was very easy to do because government runs most of America's colleges. The National Association of Scholars issued a scathing 1996 report about the historical dumbing down of curriculum in America's colleges that prompted Phyllis Schafly to write an editorial titled " The Dumbing Down of America's Colleges ." One of the reasons the college curriculum needed to be dumbed down was so that prospective teachers-most of whom have an average IQ (which is all that is necessary to teach K-12 curriculum) could get through the Education Degree Plan even though the degree they obtained didn't provide them with any more worthwhile education than the prospective teacher left high school with. The median level IQ required to be a teacher is lower than what is required to be in an administrative occupation . Some education professionals have the courage to speak out against current degree/credentialing requirements for teaching. Samuel Peavey, an emeritus professor of education at the University of Louisville says that " after 50 years of research, we've found no significant relationship between teacher certification and pupil achievement. It's just nil ." He continued, "We mislead parents to think their certified teachers will provide the education they want. We mislead the public to put its money on a preparation that is simply not paying off." Donald A. Erickson, professor of education at UCLA says, "Some of the worst teachers I've ever seen are highly certified. Look at our public schools. They're full of certified teachers. What kind of magic is that accomplishing? But I can take you to the best teachers I've ever seen, and most of them are uncertified ." C. Emily Feistritzer, director of the private National Center for Education Information, reveals that it is difficult to even find any link between teacher education and pupil achievement. She says she does not know "of a single study that says because a teacher has gone through this or that program, he or she is a better teacher." Proponents of training programs, she continues, "argue eloquently that teachers need to be grounded in all these things, but there has yet to be a study that shows that in fact is the case." Professor Erickson agrees with Ms. Feistritzer's assertion "We don't have evidence at all that what we do in schools of education makes much difference in teaching competence." He added, "We have this nonsense idea that schools of education have all this esoteric knowledge, which if we impart it to people, will work magic. There's no evidence for that at all." That the home schooled demographic of children taught by parents with only a high school education have equal to or superior SAT scores to students educated by degree holding teachers itself is yet another example that a degree requirement for teaching doesn't improve student outcomes. In 2008 the United States Department of Labor noted that there were 4.5 million public school teachers in America. It is one of the most common occupations for those holding a degree. If you removed the unnecessary degree requirement from this occupation-the unemployment rate for college graduates would far exceed that of high school graduates. Teachers throughout America raise all manner of complaint that they are underpaid for the level of education they are forced to attain. They are correct they are underpaid for the cost government mandates to become and remain credentialed (the college degree the most costly of the credentialing requirements)-but their solution is wrong. Teachers do not deserve to be paid more because they have an unnecessary college degree that should not be mandated by the government to teach-instead teachers should demand that the unnecessary degree requirement from their profession be dropped so that future generations of Americans that want to teach aren't forced to choose a negative return on investment college degree in order to pursue this occupation. We would have a far better teaching demographic if new teachers simply were tested to prove they understood the curriculum they would teach and were placed in the classrooms of the most effective teachers for one full school year. This apprenticeship program would be far less costly to society (remember that most public colleges charge only about half the cost of tuition while the taxpayer picks up the rest of the cost-unnecessarily having a degree requirement on the teaching profession is a negative financial return on investment for not only the student-but the taxpayer that is subsidizing the education). I suspect that the unnecessary "hoop jumping" and "red tape" of the college degree requirement on the teaching profession helps to insure we have the wrong type of people entering the teaching profession. Those that make the best teachers have two primary traits-neither of which is a college degree. The two traits are: 1) A love of children. 2) The "ability to think outside the box." By obtaining a negative return on investment degree to teach-and not questioning the degree requirement, the teachers that believe in "the status quo" have proved their inability to "think outside the box." Scientific studies have recently shown a strong correlation between high IQ (uncommon in those who have obtained a degree to teach) and " the ability to think outside the box ." As noted earlier-even with a degree requirement the IQ required to be a teacher is less than the IQ required to be employed in an administrative occupation. If you want to significantly improve K-12 student performance you would: 1) IQ test students and put them on curriculum paths appropriate for their innate intelligence (have a college preparatory curriculum for the best and brightest and a vocational preparatory curriculum for the average IQ and lower). 2) Drop the unnecessary degree requirement for teaching. 3) Have a one year apprentice program for prospective teachers to watch teachers that have the best student outcomes. This is not radical new education theory I am proposing here-this is simply a description of how U S schools were operated when America had the best education/economic systems in the world. These education principles were tied to scientific knowledge about intelligence and education and not to dogma. In Massachusetts Legislators wanted to be sure all college graduates could pass high school level curriculum before they began to teach and required as the last step of credentialing that college graduates pass a high school curriculum exam (to make sure there weren't any Dexter Manley's going into teaching. Dexter Manley was an NFL player who admitted he graduated college without being able to read a lick). I am sure the Massachusetts Legislature was shocked to see 59% of college graduates failed the high school curriculum competency test . One of the reasons high school graduates make better teachers than college graduates is they aren't four years removed from the curriculum they've forgotten but need to teach.The most likely culprit for this miserable performance is Algebra-curriculum that used to be taught only in gifted programs for the high IQ but when it was seen that those that took Algebra had higher incomes later-Algebra became required of all (because the wrong cause/effect relationship was drawn. Those that had passed Algebra when it was only a gifted program were a demographic of high IQ and that is why their salaries are higher. Now that the Algebra requirement is placed on all students-predictably the dropout rates have soared in high school). Algebra is something only a very small percentage of Americans will ever use in a lifetime and should be a course most high school students should never be required to take as it will be something most will never use. It may sound as though I am coming down too hard on the teaching profession. Teaching is no means the only occupation where government has placed an unnecessary degree requirement-it is simply one of the most commonly held occupations that have an unnecessary degree requirement on the profession. We want our engineers, our doctors, and our lawyers to have education pertinent to their career. Even with those degrees plans-a lot of time is and money is wasted on courses that have no pertinence to the occupation. This is based on the "well rounding theory" that is easily disproved. Most of what is learned in college classes intended to "well round" a degree recipient is forgotten within a decade of college graduation as the information is not applied in a career or life in general. It's why 60% of Massachusetts college graduates failed a high school curriculum exam as the last step of credentialing-in just four to six years on a college campus they'd forgotten curriculum they knew to get a high school diploma! The vast majority of the conservatively estimated 17 million college graduates that are in high school equivalent jobs are individuals who are below the median average IQ rating by degree/occupation. So while someone with an IQ as low as 95 (just below average) can kill themselves in college pursuing an engineering degree and making barely passing grades-their reward for all the expense and effort in obtaining the engineering degree will be to wind up in a high school equivalent job because their intellect only allows them to barely skate through college but is not an intellect that will allow them to compete in private sector real world engineering outcomes. To work in an engineering profession you had better have an IQ over 120 which eliminates about 90% of the population (it is the fact that innate intelligence excludes 90% of the population from reasonably expecting to become an engineer that is the reason that engineers make a lot of money). They key to making money is to have an intellect that allows one to pursue a degree which has a lot of scarcity in degree holders. When you hear a politician suggest that someone is poor because they lack an engineering degree-you can presume that politician is not grounded in "the real world" because the demographic of the "poor" is vastly over represented by the demographic of the "lower IQ" that have no business pursuing the degrees that require a high IQ to obtain and work professionally in. Jacob Hornburger is the President of The Future of Freedom Foundation, a graduate of the The University of Texas Law School and a former practicing attorney. Mr. Hornburger argues that the degree requirement and subsequent requirement of completion of law college is unnecessary. Hornburger specifically notes that Abraham Lincoln never graduated from a law school but instead apprenticed his way through a private employer to become an attorney. The most common occupation I've held is one that is now being targeted by the government for requiring an unnecessary two year paralegal certificate to be a legal assistant. When I worked for a law firm I was told by a Founding Partner "Guy, you have no idea how incompetent these paralegals come to us with Austin Community College paralegal certificates-you are far better prepared to do this job than they are." I find a lot of irony in that for a lot of government legal assistant/paralegal positions applicants are tested for typing ability but not legal terminology knowledge (which itself is a "real world" indication that typing ability is more important than the education sought). If Jacob Hornburger thinks a degree is unnecessary to be an attorney-one can fairly easily hypothesize that Mr. Hornburger would believe that preferring a degree or a paralegal certificate to be a legal assistant is an absurdity of far higher scale. Time Magazine journalist Ramesh Ponnuru when writing " The Case Against College Education " lists a number of occupations that currently have degree requirements placed on them where they should not exist. He has the courage to cite his own profession, journalism, as one of those. He writes "It is absurd that people have to get college degrees to be considered for good jobs in hotel management or accounting - or journalism. It is inefficient, both because it wastes a lot of money and because it locks people who would have done good work out of some jobs. The tight connection between college degrees and economic success may be a nearly unquestioned part of our social order. Future generations may look back and shudder at the cruelty of it." In the 50's when America had the most vibrant economy and the largest middle class the world has ever seen-it was presumed that training workers was the responsibility of employers through their apprenticeship programs. Business put the best and brightest through those apprenticeship programs. Business became anxious to offload the costs of worker training to the government-and government was happy to oblige by promoting public colleges as the means by which to replace apprenticeship programs. This became one of America's earliest examples of corporate welfare (what a "slippery slope" that turned out to be!). There is virtually nothing government does better than the private sector so where America had highly efficient operating apprenticeship programs to prepare workers in the 50's-today we have what has become a boondoggle of public colleges handling the responsibility of preparing workers. Whereas in private sector apprenticeship programs the "best and brightest" were selected for participation-with government running worker preparation programs through the public colleges the ideal has become that low/average IQ workers that never would have been admitted into apprenticeship programs are admitted to the public colleges at great societal expense and no benefit to societal outcomes. Government higher education subsidies for worker preparation slows economic growth. This "unintended consequence" is a reality exposed in the book titled "Going Broke by Degree." In "Going Broke by Degree" a study is included that shows that for every ten percent increase in government subsidies towards higher education a correlating negative 5.2% decline in economic activity occurs . When there are negative declines in economic opportunities because government has taken over worker training from business (corporate welfare) business profits are harmed. Corporate welfare in the form of government public colleges taking over the responsibility of training workers has proved to be the epitome of a "lose-lose-lose proposition" for business, college students, and taxpayers. The only winners are over-paid college professors who today have the gall in many instances to not even bother teaching in the classroom-assigning that responsibility to an underling student working to obtain their own advanced degree. If business could see the forest instead of the trees-it would recognize all the vast resources being wasted to train workers poorly in public colleges is money that isn't used to buy their products. Because government subsidies for this form of corporate welfare slow economic growth-business has slower profit growth. This is a form of corporate welfare that doesn't even benefit big business in "the big picture." In the bad recession of the 1970's Eugene Garfield (PhD Stanford) started to see the unintended consequences of America starting to overvalue a college degree along with a glut of unemployed college graduates. Dr. Garfield addressed his concerns with an editorial in an early MIS trade publication titled " Degrees of Absurdity ." In that editorial Dr. Garfield questioned private sector employers "over-hiring" college graduates in occupations where a high school graduate was perfectly capable of doing the job and advised employers against the practice. One of the reasons he cited was that when college graduates are doing high school equivalent jobs they are usually "bored, restless, employees." The other problem he found was the effect of discrimination. More young people than old have degrees (in part because every year government increases higher education subsidies) and more Asians and Whites have degrees than African Americans. As government and private sector employers have put a lot of unnecessary degree requirements on occupations America has become a nation of "bored, restless employees" (Occupy Wall Street is a manifestation of this phenomenon) while the unemployment rate for older Americans and minorities has predictably soared. Some might argue that older Americans could take advantage of the more lavish government subsidies for higher education today but for recent high school graduates a college degree now provides a negative return on investment over a forty year working career. The fewer working years you have remaining the worse the investment becomes. Private sector employers that loathe unnecessary government regulations placed on them that produce more negative unintended consequences than beneficial outcomes-should not be a party to this bad economics/education over regulatory ideology that does the same thing. The next time you hear a politician or public college President tell you the reason we lack economic growth is that too few Americans have a college degree-ask them how that can be when every decade America has increased per capital college graduation rates and yet we are still struggling in the worst recession since The Great Depression? If education was the key to economic growth the 50s should have been a decade of terrible economic misery (only 10% of the population had a degree) while today we should be seeing the greatest economic prosperity the country has ever known (when more Americans than ever before have college degrees and long term unemployment is worse than in The Great Depression). Follow up that question by asking " when 17 million Americans with degrees are in occupations that do not require a degree how can you claim that too few people having college degrees is the root cause of our economic problems unless you put even more unnecessary degree requirements on even more occupations?" The 17 million Americans in occupations that do not require a degree vastly understates the problem because over the last 60 years the government has put a lot of degree requirements on occupations where they don't belong. Do not let politicians and public college Presidents misplace blame on Americans-most the fault of our economic problems lay with their policies (bad education policy where occupations have unnecessary degree requirements placed on them, bad trade policies, and bad energy policies-are the root cause of America's economic problems). The next time you hear a politician or public college President citing China (Communist nation) as an example for their higher college graduation participation rate and suggest we need to emulate that-ask them if they fail to recognize that government worker preparation in China through government colleges has resulted in a glut of college graduates there that can't find jobs . Politicians are wrong when they say the jobs in demand require a degree-as The Economist reports the jobs that are in demand used to be jobs that students learned to do in high school in occupational classes and apprenticeship programs (electricians, plumbers, sales people). Those high school occupational classes tied to apprenticeship programs were abandoned for the foolish dogma that all Americans should go to college instead. The next time you hear some politician or public college President blaming an American for their lack of occupational success because they chose not to obtain a college degree-consider that it is those two occupations (politician and public college President) who are engaging in the cruel "status quo" arrangement that unnecessarily inhibits a lot of Americans from being able to engage in "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Government mandates to obtain unnecessary degrees in occupations has now glutted the market with college graduates who can't find jobs in those occupations. Congress should find a way to write legislation that circumvents the Supreme Court Ruling in Griggs vs. Duke Power that effectively made IQ testing by employers of prospective applicants illegal as IQ testing used to help employers identify what employees made the best prospects for promotional apprenticeship programs. Two college professors-Bryan O'Keefe and Richard Vedder-wrote a research paper titled " Griggs vs. Duke Power-Implications for College Credentialing." They conclude that the unintended consequence of Griggs vs. Duke Power is that the ruling effectively made a college degree the pseudo IQ test of our day. As an IQ test-a college degree is the most expensive, burdensome, and least effective method yet devised by man to predict intelligence. They also note that if ever challenged-unnecessary degree requirements on occupations should be considered as discriminatory as IQ testing for the same reasons. One government entity has rejected current education dogma for the proved science of psychometrics. The Department of Defense when providing written testimony before Congress of the value of psychometric testing said: "Research has proved that cognitive ability or general intelligence, is the single greatest predictor of job success -- for any position. More effective than resumes, education, references or interviews, cognitive-ability testing gives objective information to aid hiring decisions." The Department of Defense IQ tests all 11th graders in America with the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) even though this testing by the Department of Defense may be in violation of The Supreme Court Ruling in Griggs vs. Duke Power. The ASVAB is so recognized for its IQ predicting prowess that it is the control model scientists in the field of psychometrics compare other tests to. The SAT for example, has been found to be 82% as effective at determining intelligence as the ASVAB. As The Christian Science Monitor and Wall Street Journal have reported-businesses finding themselves confronted with a lot of college graduates with high school equivalent educational outcomes-have started to ask prospective applicants for their SAT scores as a way to get a measurement of intelligence (thereby bypassing The Supreme Court Ruling in Griggs vs. Duke Power because the employer isn't conducting the IQ test). Given that the ASVAB offers an 18% better measurement of intelligence-one has to wonder how long it will be before business figures out they should ask prospective applicants to acquire their ASVAB scores from the Department of Defense and include those with their employment applications. The Department of Defense is the government department most Americans believe does its job well. The Department of Defense is more worried about IQ than education . Prospective recruits that score in the bottom 30% of the ASVAB today with high school diplomas are rejected from serving while a high school dropout that scores in the top 50% on the ASVAB will be accepted into service. When high school drop out Edward Snowden was revealed as the leak of the NSA surveillance system of Americans-Congress and the mainstream media were beside themselves as to how a high school dropout could obtain a GED and become a $200,000 a years Systems Analyst at the NSA. They obviously didn't pay attention to the Department of Defense when they testified they get much brighter employees with IQ testing than a college degree requirement. It has served them well historically but may not have served them well here because the high IQ that don't put much faith in "education" are notorious "outside the box thinkers." One might hypothesize a college graduate would be more conditioned to accept the bureaucracy without contemplation. Forbes editorialist Dan Seligman when writing " College-A Reality Check " said "The U.S. armed forces, where reality cannot be lightly dismissed, has long had a rule excluding the lowest 10% of the IQ distribution. (In recent years, as the military has been downsized, recruiters have raised the bar and now screen out the lowest 30%.) The forces' experience with low-IQ recruits, exhaustively documented, has shown that they cannot handle the military's routine training tasks. An instant absurd result of the current Clinton proposal would be to open the gates of college to hundreds of thousands of teenagers not smart enough to get into the Army." Dan Seligman two years later wrote an editorial that called US education dogma "The Big Lie." I scored in the top 8% of the population in the "Academic Ability" component (IQ) of the ASVAB. I believe it is innate intelligence that has allowed me to win national horse racing handicapping contests and create a fund ranking #81 of 65,000 in The Marketocracy Investment Challenge. I participated in The Marketocracy Investment Challenge after reading an article in Forbes that the Stanford PhD who created the site thought some of the best stock analysts might well come from people who thought outside the box and therefore had avoided higher education. He found his hypothesis to be true. The top 100 performers had their stocks put in a load mutual fund and the top 100 performers were paid from the load fees-but I found the pay inadequate for the effort to obtain that result and only participated the first year. Government requiring unnecessary degrees on occupations , government colleges dumbing down the curriculum so the average IQ can obtain degrees, and businesses that were too quick to outsource to government their in house apprenticeship programs to train the brightest workers for promotion-have now created one gigantic grand fiasco where Businessweek, Forbes, MSN Money and a multitude of other financial media sources have written editorials expressing the truth-that college has become a terrible investment for the taxpayer and for most Americans that are obtaining a degree (Businessweek correctly concludes that for just about every American who has graduated from college the last 30 years-their financial security would have been much better obtained by simply putting every dime they put into higher education into the stock market instead). The Wall Street Journal in their editorial titled "What's a Degree Worth?" in essence found that Federal Government Accountants-with Accounting Degrees-had erred in the most basic of cost/benefit analysis when it came to calculating the return on higher education investment. Despite the Wall Street Journal ridiculing the notion that there is a $1 million wage premium for degree obtainment, there is virtually no day that goes by that some politician isn't on television citing that college graduate income premium advantage (fallacy). After reading the Wall Street Journal editorial I wrote the author and told her she had missed something when the Wall Street Journal did their own analysis. They didn't pay attention to how the Census Bureau calculated "synthetic life earnings" as explained on Page 1 of their report titled " The Big Payoff-Educational Attainment & Synthetic Life Estimates of Work Life Earnings ." The Census Bureau started wages comparisons at 25 years of age. Proper cost/benefit accounting has to consider "lost opportunity costs" for investments. The incompetent Census Bureau Degreed Accountants didn't account for the earnings the high school graduate made at 18-24 that must be in lifetime earnings calculations (the average time it takes today for a student to graduate college is six years. The wages they sacrifice while in class and studying and not working full time need to be considered as part of the cost to attain a degree). The author of The Wall Street Journal story wrote me back and admitted the calculation error. Although I have never taken an accounting course in my life I can do better cost/benefit accounting than either the Accountants at the United States Census Bureau or the Accountants at the Wall Street Journal as it pertains to the return of higher education. The National Center for Education Statistics indicates that as of 2009-2010 the average annual cost of tuition, books and fees to attend college in America is about $15,000 . This means the average degree costs about $60,000 (even though the average student graduates in six years it's the cost to obtain the credits to obtain a degree). Census Data indicates a high school graduate earns on average $30,000 per year over a working career. Let's presume early in a working career it's just $20,000 (what you can earn as a cashier at Walmart). Working the six years the average person takes to get a degree the high school graduate has earned $120,000 and saved $60,000 in college tuition costs. There is virtually no income tax on those low of wages so let's say the high school graduate invested the $180,000 at age 24 they'd have otherwise spent on college and let it compound the next 38 years at the 8% return that the stock market has returned historically. That high school graduate would have a nest egg at age 62 retirement of $3,752,172.10. Additionally that high school graduate would earn on average $30,000 for those remaining 38 years for a total of $1,140.000. $3,752,172.10 + $1,140,000 = $4,892,172.10. To cost/benefit analyze what a college graduate must earn for a degree to provide a positive return on investment you simply take that $4,892,172.10 and divide back by the 38 year working career of the college graduate. $4,892,172.10 / 38 = $128,741. In their report the Census Data calculates the average wage for an undergraduate degree holder to be $52,200. So doing proper cost benefit analysis a college degree offers a negative 50% return on investment for the vast majority of Americans. Many Americans think the worst advice the government ever gave anyone was to buy a house in 2007 using an adjustable rate sub-prime mortgage. At least people who made that bad financial investment can get out of that government promoted boondoggle with a bankruptcy filing. Student loan debt can't be discharged in a bankruptcy filing! Given that this is a terrible return for the student, the taxpayer who through subsidies is forced to pay for this nonsense, and even for business who doesn't understand these mis-allocation of costs that gives Americans fewer dollars to buy their products-the new societal standard should be any job that pays under $75K a year is a job on which a degree should not be required and a presumption should exist that the worker should be trained with an in house apprenticeship program rather than a college degree requirement. When I see government job postings paying as little as $1,800 a month with "degree preferred" or "degree required" on them it convinces me the world has gone mad. How can government on one hand promote that higher education is the key to economic prosperity but at the same time prove that's not true by posting jobs that pay so little? Today a lot of intelligent people have concluded college isn't worth the cost, that the education/employment system designed with collusion between big business and big government education interests is exploitative of college students-and they're right. America has a lot of economic problems. Our false belief set that government can provide better worker preparation through public colleges over the much more efficient employer provided apprenticeship program is one of the major causes for those economic problems. |
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An Ms Degree Or A Ms Degree - Blog Homepage Results
...pulangnya langsung donlot deh, makasih ya Mia.. Reply Ms. Plaida 27 May 2011 at 2pm Lol… ya karena...Wahahahha Reply Mia 27 May 2011 at 4pm Leave a Reply Cancel reply Enter your comment here...
... her Master’s degree in Clinical Nutrition at New York University and is a graduate of the New York-Presbyterian...Hospital Dietetic Internship Program. Ms. Madden spent her undergraduate...
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