College in America Blog

Everyone loves “free” stuff. The Wall Street Journal published this article on 7/28/16: wsj.com/articles/lets-agree-on-free-community-college-1469748121 You are probably going to need post-secondary education to get a good job in today’s fragile economy. Over forty percent of high school graduates rush, like lemmings, to four year colleges. No one has ever bothered to tell these young people […]

My local newspaper—USA Today section—had an interesting article depicting the sorry state of four young female college graduates saddled with crippling student loan debt. All four ladies went to in-state schools in the same state on the eastern seaboard. I thought it might be useful to deconstruct this piece, but I’m not going to give […]

I took a mini Spring Break. Part of the itinerary was a one day guided fishing trip using belly boats on a small lake. The target was bass and panfish. After lunch I met my guide, a young man fifty years my junior, at the appointed spot—a small “fisherman’s” parking lot in the middle of […]

I waste a lot of time on Quora answering various questions on post-secondary education and politics. However I must have hit a hot button because my answer to the following question got over 25K views. Why are there Americans that wanted or expected to be able to work in a factory for life? Fifty years […]

My local newspaper ran a front page story this morning, “Applications Flood Colleges.” The story cheerfully describes how the three major colleges in southwestern Ohio had drawn applications from 60,000 students. It prompted me to fire off the following letter to the editor: If national averages hold up in five or six years only about […]

If you look around on the Internet, you’ll find some postings by students and even parents crowing about how they avoiding filling out the FAFSA, i.e. the Free Application for Federal Student Aid. My advice is that that is probably a dumb decision. Admittedly, when you approach the task for the first time it can […]

If you follow my postings, you are aware that I view enrolling your student in college as a risky business. There is a high probability that your student will waste years of her life and thousands of your dollars with little or nothing to show for it, and some young people will end up burdened with unmanageable debt. […]

I have taken a serious interest in post-secondary education as three of my grandchildren approached high school graduation. I would like to share two experiences I had recently that highlight the widely disparate outcomes that can result from post-secondary decisions. Earlier this fall I visited Ohio University in Athens, Ohio where one of my grandsons […]

It is ironic that politicians in the presidential race are touting “free college” and student loan debt relief to buy votes. (Let’s put aside the fact that anything free is undervalued—the students would have no “skin in the game.”) The harsh reality is that there are not nearly enough suitable jobs. (Since the year 2000 […]

Cincinnati has plenty of jobs paying a living wage without a college degree contrary to what was reported in, “No degree? Just 1 job has a living wage for you.” In the report prepared by multiple branches of the Federal Reserve Bank, “Identifying Opportunity Occupations in the Nation’s Largest Metropolitan Economies,” an opportunity occupation is […]