College – Affordability and Job Guarantees
College – You Can’t Work Your Way Through College Anymore
New research shows that working through college isn’t going to make a dent in student debt and could ruin your GPA.
Tom McDonald’s Comments:
There are two highly significant issues going on here:
(1) The price of the service has exceeded the student’s ability to pay for that service, and
(2) The students desired outcome of the service, relevant job placement upon graduation, is no longer certain.
This is a marketing catastrophe for colleges, a perfect storm, if you will.
In the real world, when individuals buy services, they only buy what they can afford. Without students being able to access government guaranteed loans, college would certainly be financially out of reach for them.
Another issue, that gets right to the primary reason students go to college, is relevant, certain, job placement upon graduation. A student can meet each and every graduation requirement , graduate successfully and not be able to find a job, consistent with their education, holding, on average $30,000 of personal debt. The job that they do find, most likely won’t pay enough to support their living independence AND pay their debt. This is why college graduates move back home, after graduation AND large numbers default on their government loans.
Most purchases of this magnitude, have to provide a positive a return on investment. Without going into ROI details, the real money spent vs the real employment returns are not adding up for lots and lots of college graduates.
Have we really considered how out of whack this is?
New buildings, rock walls, reflection ponds, luxury dorms, mono rails, 52 million dollar student centers.
No one asks the question, prior to these misguided initiatives: how will these projects, as well as other similar projects we implement, Â empower our students to be successful; to stay in school; to learn what they need to learn, so it has real value to them and an employer upon graduation; to graduate; to get a relevant job, within their major, that pays a relevant wage; that results in their ability to be a sustained contributor to society.
Traditional educators have lost sight of their customers, their students. The reality is that students = revenue. If students don’t enroll and stay through graduation, that revenue stream is gone.
Why are they not coming and/or leaving? There are lots of reasons, which predictive analysis can tell the school.
But two primary deal breakers, for students, are excessive costs and lack of predictable job placement upon graduation.
What are your thoughts on these issues? Have schools lost sight of their primary reason to exist? What can they do to make the students experience more affordable and to better job placement outcomes?
Please let me know your thoughts.
Tom
Sarah Grant –Â October 27, 2015 â 11:01 PM CDT
College – Working to pay for college doesn’t work. Despite the fact that 40 percent of undergraduates work at least 30 hours per week while in college, tuition is too high for those hours to make much of a difference, a new report shows.
Even toiling away full time probably won’t yield nearly enough to pay for a traditional college education, said the report, released on Wednesday by Georgetown’s Center on Education and the Workforce. The average college student working full time at minimum wage earns $15,080 annually before taxes, the report estimates. “Working might eventually cover tuition at a two-year program,” said Anthony Carnevale, director of the Georgetown center and the report’s lead author. “But the earnings aren’t sufficient to even get close to covering a private, four-year school.”
Students have always had side gigs. In the decades leading up to 2008, as many as 80 percent of people who were enrolled in U.S. colleges were also active in the labor market, the report said. What has changed is the cost of tuition, which soared 46 percent between 2001 and 2012, to as much as $65,000 at some schools, which makes it unlikely that any job could cover the cost of school. The income from these vocations is largely supplemental: Students work to pay for books and living and travel expenses, said Carnevale. More recently, he said, they’ve also used college jobs as a way to acquire the skills they’ll need after graduation. “A college education used to guarantee students some kind of entry-level job, but that’s disappeared.”…
Read the rest of the article, here
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