I see this question a lot.

The answer is a resounding, “NO!”

That a bachelor’s degree of today is equivalent to a high school diploma of yesteryear is an overly simplistic and dangerous analogy.

In the US one hundred years ago only ten percent graduated from high school. (Neither of my grandfathers finished high school. They had to drop out to work.) With a high school diploma you could get a job at a bank, work your way up the ladder, and become bank president after thirty-five years.

Fifty years ago, with just a high school diploma, you could get a pretty good job:

www.quora.com/Why-are-there-Americans-that-wanted-or-expected-to-be-able-to-work-in-a-factory-for-life/answer/Thomas-B-Walsh

Fifty years ago, when only seven percent of high school graduates went on to college, you could major in anything and get a great job if you managed to graduate. (See note.)

I graduated with a bachelor’s in philosophy and a very modest GPA. I answered a newspaper ad on a whim, and had a job with the Google of the day before I laid hands on my sheepskin.

The situation has gotten much more complicated. The market and the economy have changed. The job market began to undergo a restructuring around the turn of the century. The Great Recession of 2008 was the tipping point. Ninety-four percent of net job growth in the past decade has been in the “gig”/independent work category.

With forty-five percent of high school grads going on to college, half of the graduates are going to end up under employed because of the lack of suitable jobs. (There are a record number of minimum wage jobs being held by college grads—25%. Based on 2014 data fifty-one percent of recent college grads are making $35,000 or less.)

Way too many young people (a legion of which are academically marginal) are going to college. It costs too much, and it is not going to pay off for most.

Plus you can’t ignore the return on investment, or rather, the lack thereof. K-12 education is free. College tuition has gone up 200% in the last twenty years while wages have been relatively flat. Many degrees have little or no ROI.

What we have now is that your post-secondary education decision is an exercise in “threading the needle.” Get the right associate’s degree, and you can be working full time (with benefits) for $50-70K, after two years of schooling at a cost of $10,000. Choose the wrong bachelor’s degree and you’ll end up working at Starbucks after six years of schooling with $35,000 in student loan debt.

http://www.businessinsider.com/h…

The Law of Supply and Demand was working one hundred years ago, and it will be working one hundred years from now.

Becoming financially self-sufficient in today’s economy is really tricky. The rules of the game have changed. You are not likely to be getting good advice from your high school guidance counselor, and many parents and students don’t give the matter enough careful thought.

Notes

My roommate got a degree in French Literature. His GPA was worse than mine because all he did was chase 19 year old girls. He got a better job ($$$) than I, working for P&G. This job didn’t turn out to be to his liking. He went back to school to get a PhD and teach. He was still chasing 19 year old girls the last time I talked to him.

Anything Degree

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.”