Often I get chided for being too premonitory about college planning. I’m told, “My parents [high school guidance counselors] aren’t all that worried as long as I can get accepted into a good school.”

Maybe your parents went to college twenty-five years ago. Can things be that different today? Let’s roll back the calendar sixty years and review “The History of College 101.”

Employability

The employment outlook for college graduates is a function of supply (graduates) and demand (suitable jobs).

1957— Seven percent went to college. The unwritten rule was that college was for the academic elite—the top 10%. The post-war economy was humming along. Any grad, with any degree, was snapped up in a heartbeat.

1977—Twenty-four percent went to college. The Carter economy was characterized as a malaise. :<(

1997—Thirty-five percent went to college. The Clinton economy was strong. Happy days were here again.

2017—Forty-one percent now go to college. We have a lot of students choosing college who are marginal academically. The job market began to undergo a restructuring at the turn of the century. The Great Recession of 2008 was the tipping point. The post-Obama “part-time/gig” economy is a disaster. Half of all recent grads end up under employed or unemployed. (Twenty-five percent of minimum wage jobs are held by college grads.) Colleges are happy to accept your parents’ money, but employers, who have a lot of options, will only hire the best and the brightest.

Risk of Debt

Sixty years ago student loans were nonexistent. Your tuition at a state university might have been $250. You could earn that working at minimum wage in six weeks. In the last twenty years tuition has skyrocketed two hundred percent. Now it would take six months to earn your tuition for a state college. Understandably, the average student loan debt tracked the rising tuition, exploding from $14K to $37K—a 164% increase—in just two decades.

Given the shortage of good jobs and flat wages, this makes college very risky.

Major Marketability

Sixty years ago a student could get a degree in anything and be assured they could find a good job.

Two decades ago in his book, Another Way To Win, Dr. Kenneth Gray coined the term “one way to win.” He described the OWTW strategy widely followed in the US as:

• Graduate from high school.
• Matriculate at a four-year college.
• Graduate with a degree in anything.
• Become employed in a professional job.

Dr. Gray’s message to the then “academic middle” was that this was unlikely to be a successful strategy in the future. The succeeding twenty years have proven him inordinately prescient and not just for the “academic middle.”

Students have to be very careful to choose marketable majors.

Return on Investment

About a half-century ago I graduated with an “anything” degree. On a whim, I answered a newspaper ad and was offered a job with the Google of the day. My modest starting salary was more than twice the cost of my degree. Two decades later I was making more in a week than the cost of my degree.

Over sixty years the ROI of a college education has changed dramatically.

https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/current_issues/ci20-3.pdf

We are reaching the point where some degrees just don’t make any sense financially.

Summary

I have sympathy for your besieged and overworked high school guidance counselors. However, the “cultural tides” are sweeping them further and further out to sea. They will be stretched even thinner to address their traditional college planning role. (The model they use was always incomplete. Now it is obsolete.)

This is a “whole different ballgame” from when your parents went to college. Making a success out of college is difficult today. My suggestion is to get these three books from the library, read them with your parents, and begin to make a plan.

• Frank Palmasani, “Right College, Right Price.”
• Kalman A. Chany with Geoff Martz, “Paying for College Without Going Broke,”
• Bonnie Kerrigan Snyder, “The New College Reality: Make College Work For Your Career,”

Yes, if you expect to “land on your feet,” it is this complicated.

Notes

What I mean by “cultural tides” is that their role is being expanded beyond planning for college as the schools take on a broader mission, e.g. child abuse, obesity, bullying, etc.

I would be willing to place a small wager that your high school guidance counselor does not have any of those three books in her office.