In this post I will once again be summarizing and responding to an article. The article that I will be using is, The Value of A Degree, written by Jenna Ashley Robinson. The article can be found on the pope center's website, the specific URL being http://www.popecenter.org/commentaries/article.html?id=2517. There are several reasons that this is a credible source. The first is the website that it appears on. The Pope Center, is, according to its about us page, a nonprofit institute dedicated to improving higher education in North Carolina and the nation. They state that one of their goals is to encourage cost-effective administration and governance. Admittedly, they are talking about themselves so I do need to be careful about believing everything they say. However, there are strong signs of credibility. One is that they are in charge of writing the higher education section for the Carolina Journal. Another sign of credibility associated with the article is that the author embedded several of her sources in the article. While providing the links inside of the article is probably not the best method, at least she does provide them. Some final signs of credibility are associated with the author. One is that if you link to her name, she does provide her email so that you can contact her. Another is that she does have good credentials. She has a masters degree and Ph.D. in political science. While it is not as good as having a degree directly associated with economics, it does qualify her to talk about economic matters. This article is useful to me because it will help me address what a college degree is worth. It will also help me address who a college degree is useful to.
Jenna Robinson starts her article by mentioning the million dollar number. That is, the fact that college graduates make a million dollars more than non college graduates over the course of their career. Unfortunately a study conducted by Mark Schneider, vice president of the American Institutes for Research, offers a rude awakening. Schneider found that once you factor in forgone wages, and the cost of a college education, college is nowhere near being worth the fabled one million dollars. In actuality, college graduates only make 150,000 to 500,000 more than non college graduates over the course of their career. He found that these differences varied depending on the type of college the person graduated from. Those who graduated from the most selective private schools enjoyed an earnings advantage of, on average, 500,000. Those who graduated from a minimally selective private college, on the other hand, only garnered an earnings advantage of 150,000. Naturally, these numbers are hardly consistent. According to the Census Bureau's 2009 Current Population Survey, 20% of those making less than 20,000 a year, hold bachelor's or master's degrees. Also, recent graduates have a jobless rate of almost 10%. Even worse than all this, gains from college are not growing over time. In 1991 young workers with bachelor's degrees earned an average of 1.48 times what high school graduates earned. That number peaked in 2000 at 1.68 times, and by 2009, had fell back to 1.54 times. Over the same period of time, tuition increased 300%. Compounding the problem, students are not learning much in college. The National Assessment of Adult Literacy says that only 29% of four year college graduates read at an advanced level. According to a new book, Academically Adrift, nearly half of university students show no academic advancement by their sophomore year. Another study says that students today only study for 14 hours outside of class, as opposed to 24 hours in 1961. While a bachelors degree is still a good option for many students, future students should consider their options carefully before making their decision.
We used to think that we knew what a college degree was worth. Studies showed people who graduated from college made a million dollars more than those who only graduated from high school, over the course of their career. However, more recent studies have showed that number to be flawed. As Mark Schneider, vice president of the American Institutes for Research, found, once forgone wages and the cost of college is factored in, college graduates only make 150,000 to 500,000 more than high school graduates. Schneider also divided that data up specifically, finding that what kind of school you graduated from also affected how much more you made. The information he found helps support my claim that college is not a wise choice for all people. He found that while those who graduated from a highly selective private college made, on average, 500,000 more than the average high school graduate, those who graduated from a minimally selective private school only made 150,000 more. That number, when considered over the course of an entire career, is relatively small. It is simply not worth it for a future plumber to spend four years in college amassing debt. There is nothing wrong with being a plumber. However, it makes more sense to gain on the job learning and experience, than to run up debt getting an unnecessary degree. While this may seem like common sense, the Census Bureau's 2009 report showed that 20% of individuals making less than $20,000 a year have bachelor's or master's degrees. It can be said, with a high degree of certainty, that those jobs do not require college degrees. Admittedly, many of those individuals are probably not employed in their dream job. However, that does show that they are not getting the job they went to college for. If going to college won't even get you the job you want, why would it make sense to go? Also, the gains that students are reaping from college, are going down. In 1991 college graduates made, on average, 1.48 times what high school graduates did. That number grew until 2000, when it peaked at 1.68 times. It then began to fall. In 2009, in was only 1.54 times. Not only that, over the same period of time, college tuition grew 300%. Students today are paying more, for less. It doesn't even stop there. College students are not learning much either. The National Assessment of Adult Literacy found that only 29% of college graduates read at an advanced level. Other studies have found that students show little to no academic progress by their sophomore year and that they only study outside of class for 14 hours a week. To put that number in context, college students studied outside of class for 24 hours a week in 1961. Like Jenna Robinson, I am unwilling to declare a college degree useless. However, students should carefully consider their options, in light of their career choice, before choosing college. If you are going to pay more, be sure that you are not one of those getting less for it.
You managed to find another engaging, thought-provoking source, and you build a good balanced case for credibility.
ReplyDeleteI'm concerned about the sentence structures in your summary. You started off strong and presented materials in the first quarter of the summary in your own voice. Then, you started overlapping significantly with the sentence structures of the original. Pull yourself out of this pattern, so you aren't walking such a fine line between plagiarism and paraphrasing. Remember that one good strategy to avoid sentence overlap is to summarize the original source by thought units rather than sentences.
In the response, you do an interesting analysis with the U.S. Census information that I enjoyed seeing. I think there's a good bit of wisdom in noting that jobs netting less than $20,000 a year did not require a college degree to begin with. I like that you recognize that 20% of the college grads working these jobs are probably doing so after stiking out in their chosen field of study, but either way, that income bracket certainly raises interesting questions about how those individuals should have been preparing for their career positions.
Those literacy stats were alarming (and, I'm sure that it's not much of a surprise that I'd especially think so given my field). The time spent outside of class is an interesting figure as well. I think it'd be interesting to see if that average went up as students who are perhaps coming to college with the wrong motivation prepared instead in alternative tracks, thus perhaps leaving a more academically minded student body. I definitely put the book mentioned in your source on my reading list.