Whoops! That was a typo.
I was trying to say, “Don’t go to college without a PURPOSE.”
The conventional wisdom is, “Follow in our [parents’] footsteps, do it like we did it. Just take the next logical step, go to college, and you’ll be exposed to a lot of different experiences and new ideas. You will sort it all out, ‘land on your feet,’ and be on your way to a middle class, or better, financial future.”
When college was cheap and few went, this wasn’t bad advice. (Back in the day, when JFK was president, I knew of a family who sent their daughter to college to snag a husband.)
Today, college is too expensive and the competition for a well-paying professional job too acute for that to be a good strategy.
Camilo Maldonado, a senior contributor at Forbes, puts it this way,
“Thirty-five years ago, it made sense to make that investment to grow and learn about oneself at college, but at the current cost of a university degree, that no longer makes sense.”
You need to know why you are in college.
Otherwise:
- You will have a more difficult time getting offers for relevant internships.
- You will have a more difficult time finding relevant research opportunities.
- You likely won’t be able to graduate on time because your classes will be mismatched with your degree requirements.
Today, very few families have the luxury of sending “Little Joanie” off to college to “find herself” or land a husband. The best way to “find yourself” is to go exploring, and high school is the time to do it.
- Your local college has a “Science Camp,” where kids spend a weekend in a dorm, and attend classes where they learn all kinds of fascinating stuff, including extracting DNA from a strawberry.
- Your community college has “STEM Night.”
- The hospital has “Career Night.”
- Look for career fairs and “meet a professional” opportunities.
- Your parents can help arrange worksite visits and “shadow days.” (My dentist knew he wanted to be a dentist when he was twelve years old.)
- Volunteer.
- Join the Scouts.
- Check out a digital experience, ASA Futurescape.
- Get a job. Now that’s a novel way to build work skills and learn about work.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard a version of this story.
“I spent the summer black topping parking lots. I sure learned what I didn’t want to do.”
You don’t need to answer the question,
“What do I want to be when I grow up?”
You do need to be prepared to enter college with a game plan on how this expensive education is going to lead to your first real job, a job that requires a college degree. You also need to have a four-year financial plan, prepared by your parents, that doesn’t leave you buried in crippling student loan debt.
Your major matters—a lot.
Teenagers spend hundreds of hours agonizing over finding the school that is the “perfect fit,” but fifty percent of them show up at freshman orientation week without having identified a major—much less a marketable major.
New Snowflake Study Proves Kanye Right: The Major That She Majored in Don’t Make No Money… (wordpress.com)
Dr. Kevin Fleming describes the “College Decision Making Paradigm.” Typically, high school graduates choose a college and then a major. Then, at some point near graduation, they start thinking about a career. Dr. Fleming recommends flipping that paradigm by choosing a tentative career first, followed by a major, and, lastly, the college. This is the sequence that makes sense when it comes to financial planning.
Your major is extremely important. It impacts the ROI of your college degree and the probability that you will be fully employed upon graduation, i.e. working in a job that requires a college degree. (Depending on which study you believe, somewhere between forty to fifty percent of graduates end up under employed upon graduation.)
I recently came across an Associate Professor of Economics at Temple University who is doing some interesting work on the economics of higher education.
I’m going to paraphrase Dr. Douglas Webber’s advice:
Your choice of college major is the biggest financial decision you are going to make in your life. The difference in life-time income varies in the range of about $1.5–2.0 million depending on major.
Take a look at these majors:
The economy rewards smart people with skills that are in high demand.
A BA in Psychology, Puppetry, or The Beatles is unlikely to “get the job done.”
After you identify that marketable major, you’ll be able to shorten your list of possible colleges to those, strong in that major.
Conclusion
Only one in three who matriculate, graduate and get a job that requires a college degree.
For those who end up underemployed, or who dropped out, that is a major setback. If they have student loan debt (70%), it is a catastrophe.
Notes
Here is a reading list.
- Beth Walker, Never Pay Retail For College
- 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
These books should be in your public library.
Does College Still Pay? Seven New Rules For Making A Good College Choice
https://www.forbes.com/sites/tomvanderark/2019/06/24/does-college-still-pay-seven-new-rules-for-making-a-good-college-choice/#162fd08026c3
Underemployment for Recent College Grads
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/underemployment-for-recent-grads-worse-today-than-in-early-2000-s-180429491.html?.tsrc=daily_mail&uh_test=2_14
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