College, college life, life, all that and all those memories
- Peter Lorenzi
- Mar 21, 2022
- 8 min read
From SW:
Florida Helps Families See Behind the College Curtain
Tarren Bragdon
Wall Street Journal March 18, 2022 2:22 pm ET
Naples, Fla.
College is looming. Our eldest son, a 10th-grader, is already thinking about which (actually, whether) college will help him become an entrepreneur. Our daughter, a ninth-grader, has already told us she wants a “return on investment” for whatever path she picks postgraduation. Then there are our twin boys, in seventh grade. Their high-school graduations may be five years off, but my wife and I already dread the college tuition tab for potentially all four kids at the same time.
So we’re grateful that Florida is helping us. Last year Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a “student right to know” bill, making it easier for high-school students and parents to find more-affordable college paths and financially rewarding degrees. Because of this law, the state university system now maintains an interactive online database, My Florida Future, that lets students and parents see average actual earnings for degree programs one, five and 10 years after graduation; average student loan burdens; comparisons of earnings across all 12 state universities; and other helpful information.
This wealth of knowledge—previously all but impossible to find—is already shaping our family’s thinking. Our son now knows that majoring in business administration and management at Florida Gulf Coast University, which is closest to our home, will mean roughly 10% lower earnings within a year of graduation than pursuing the same major at Florida State University. After five years the gap would be $7,900. But he can also see that 42% of business and marketing majors graduate with loans, and more than 20% walk away with more than $20,000 in debt. He’s now considering other options, like marketing, that could help him learn sales and succeed more quickly as an entrepreneur.
It’s a similar story for our daughter. She’s interested in everything from fashion to the science of cooking but given her desire to pay little and make a lot, she’s leaning more toward the latter. Across the state university system, a graduate in food science could be making $100,000 a year a decade after graduation—nearly twice as much as a fine arts major, which is apparently how you get into fashion. (I’m learning, too.) And then there are the loans. Almost 1 in 3 students who major in the arts have more than $20,000 in debt, compared with 1 in 5 for biological sciences.
Thankfully, none of our kids are interested in public administration. They’d be all but guaranteed to make less than the average major, and there’s only a 38% chance they would graduate with no debt. Across all major groups, only two other majors have a higher percentage of graduates with significant student loan debt, and one of them is legal studies, which at least comes with higher incomes.
Florida’s new law is a blessing for my family and millions of others, including out-of-staters who may be considering going to college here. And we aren’t the only ones who are benefiting. Before the pandemic, hardly any states had student right-to-know laws, much less publicly accessible databases. In the past two years, 10 states have enacted such measures, and some have gone further.
States like West Virginia, Kentucky, Arkansas and Missouri take an even broader approach than Florida to providing families with useful information about college outcomes. Most states are still building their databases. When finished, they will list their states’ most in-demand jobs and required education levels, the average cost of every college and vocational school, and the average monthly student loan payments and default rates for each school. Additionally, some states will extend the transparency to both public and private schools.
The best state databases will also give students the typical starting salaries for graduates of trade schools, as well as a breakdown of the benefits of apprenticeships and technical education programs. Students will also get details about military base pay, along with completion rates for military-first enlistments, colleges, vocational schools and a variety of training programs. And most states with student right-to-know laws require that high-schoolers be informed of such information annually, while also making it available online year-round.
More states are likely to follow suit this year, starting with Virginia. Yet it would be best if Congress enacted a national student right-to-know law, covering not only colleges but also vocational schools and other post-high-school tracks. Ignorance isn’t bliss. It’s expensive and often comes with a pile of student debt and poor returns. Our kids aren’t the only ones who will soon make one of the biggest decisions of their lives. And we aren’t the only parents who want our children to pay the lowest tuition and graduate with the fewest student loans possible, while finding a rewarding job and living a happy life.
Mr. Bragdon is president and CEO of the Foundation for Government Accountability
*****
From ML:
I am generally in favor of publishing this information/data. However, I suspect that there are a large number of people with liberal arts degrees who have very successful lives in a wide range of professions. There is value in the liberal arts!
*****
From PL:
The first point, that liberal arts majors do worse than STEM yet better than high school graduates, is not much of an argument. I think California lifeguards make more than liberal arts grads. And HVAC grads of the community college down the road from Berkeley do better than their liberal arts majors — and are much happier.
Much of today’s social unrest can be traced back to disgruntled, deep in debt, poorly educated, miserable, woke, AOC acolytes, under/ and un- employed liberal arts grads working at Starbucks or marching with Antifa and BLM. Happy they’re not.
BTW, where do business majors fall in the STEM v liberal arts majors contrasts?
From ML:
There are happy HVAC graduates and lifeguards and there are unhappy HVAC graduates and lifeguards.
There are happy liberal arts degree graduates and unhappy liberal arts degree graduates.
Happiness is an example of an intangible that SW mocks, ridicules, disdains, derides so mercilessly.
From SW:
Isn't that a little like saying not all rap music is crap? (Said the man who went to the National Museum of African-American Music yesterday, so he's an expert.)
The data from Strada show that most Lib Arts grads overcome their degree rather than capitalize on it, usually by switching jobs and/or going to grad school. So they "hit their stride later in their careers, experiencing rapid wage growth in their late 30s and early 40s—the fastest among majors."
It's not that they're dumb -- it's that they've been trained to be useless. Or, if properly woke, counter-productive.
From ML:
Maybe. There are the intangibles that have to be considered. If these individuals have happy, fulfilled, contented lives, isn't that what matters most?
From SW:
Absolutely.
So the question is in the percentages. If a large proportion need to change jobs frequently and/or get grad degrees (in "applied" fields), and only see their careers take off after they've done so and in their late 30s and 40s, it appears that contentment and fulfillment was not delivered by their choice of major.
Again, these are smart people. They got into good colleges. They got good grades. They eventually figure things out. The question is how well their courses in post-modern bullshit helped them do that -- or possibly delayed that.
"Intangibles" are the last refuge of scoundrels.
Happened a lot in baseball, too. A player would be wickedly over-paid, and there'd always be some old scout claiming how the data overlook something only they see, something intangible and unmeasurable. Uh huh.
I submit that postmodern bullshit artists are largely responsible for the West "losing its mojo," and recommend this tomorrow:
*****
From PL:
I used to be adamant about telling my best students to consider a PhD in business but they saw great opportunity cost, did not want to delay employment, or thought they had to be "really smart" to get a PhD. I 'stayed in school' after B.S. not for love of learning but rather for the love of the academic lifestyle. And the undergrad degree was inexpensive, left me debt free, and then they PAID me to go to grad school, when I thought I was doing fine on $2,400 a year salary in 1973. I would recommend AGAINST pursuit of a business PhD today.
When I got out in 1978, the general wisdom was to get hired by the most prestigious school possible -- basically one with the best faculty in your discipline -- and accept that you might have to -- or want to -- work your way down the prestige ladder if the "publish or perish" pressure you deemed to be too great. And 'prestige' was usually best measured in salary and teaching load. In time, you'd find an equilibrium but it was unimaginable that you'd fall out of the bottom of the market.
Same thing was true when I was considering employment after my B.S. A job with IBM in 1973 was the golden ticket, if only that you could land softly if you crashed or chose to leave IBM after a year or two. Same with what was then the "Big Eight" accounting firms.
I'm just happy and blessed to have entered the business faculty job market at the time I did, when it was all grow, grow, grow for business schools. B-school undergrad enrollment share increased from about 10% to over 25% within ten years and I am sure that they are down a bit by today. In any case, GTBG.
My final reflections on college, life and the life of the mind
In all fairness, my six years spent at Binghamton were probably the best years of my life. Even though in those six years I earned less than $10,000, with three large chunks coming from a two-year assistantship and the summer of 1970 in the steel mill.
The first four years, my undergraduate years, were unlike the last two years. And the final year was unlike the prior year.
Undergraduate days had some of the best elements of pending adulthood, relative independence, living on little, almost no responsibility and only fleeting thoughts or worries about life after college. There was some terror in the thought of failing to make progress and to do well in classes and there was a constant, unspoken but pervasive sense of mate-seeking behavior or, more likely, finding strong social acceptance by a member of the opposite sex.
The following two-year MBA pursuit meant a small income, more work, a different peer group and more career concern. Yet it was accompanied by a very busy schedule, a slow separation from the college life I only then realized was already behind me and was not to be re-created simply by staying at and in Binghamton. Sure there, was some pleasure and occasional solace in leveraging the hacks acquired over the preceding four years and, especially in my fifth year still living in campus, in having a pretty distinct and positive brand in my Hinman College residential role and life and even that had some pitfalls, being the “old man” at 22 among a thousand 18-to-21 year olds.
Today, that pronounced nostalgia persists, in both my daytime thoughts and my recurring if at times disturbing dreams which, despite any bad feelings they might briefly generate, usually leave me with a strong longing for those days gone by and the people and events that constituted my college days.
In many respects, Hinman College was more my classroom than the classroom buildings of Harpur College, SUNY Binghamton and today's Binghamton University. Today I explain some of this by noting that attending and passing classes were my cost of living, where living meant touch football on the quad, movies in the Student Union, hours in the campus pub, intramural, and just hanging out in the dining hall for maybe two hours many nights of the week, eating my fill.
The dining hall was a wonderful combination of abundant, adequate food, hundreds of relaxed people, a good number of attractive girls -- "young women" -- and the opportunity to float from table to table, spending relatively personal time with a lot of people over those two hours.
A character in some show I saw in the past few days -- it might have been Billions -- made the claim that most of one's life is a relenting but impossible attempt to relive, revive or repeat one's college days.
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