“I saw what people were doing in college. I know now how much I learned in college and how much I learned in other experiences in life and which is more relevant to me now at the age of 43. And, btw, it was much cheaper when I went to school than it is now. So when did I develop this theory? Almost immediately when I realized college had nothing to do with any successes or failures that I had in life (and I had A LOT of failure despite college). And also, it took me 8 years to pay back my student loan debt. Now it takes kids 30 years to pay down that debt. It’s not fair to the youth of our country.” James Alucher

" In the last 25 years, few prices have gone up as much as housing and college tuition. We know what happened to housing. So when will we hear the pop of the college-tutiion bubble?" Jeremy Bearer-Friend in SF Chronicle 12/26/08

Is college still worth the price?

Costs are soaring twice as fast as inflation, even as salaries for graduates are falling. Time to examine the old belief that college is worth whatever you can pay.

The high sticker price is actually part of many colleges' marketing strategy. For as counterintuitive as it seems, schools have often found that raising tuition attracts more applicants because families tend to equate high price with quality. Marketers call it the Chivas Regal effect.

In 2000, for example, Ursinus College in Collegeville, Pa. boosted tuition and fees by 17.6%. The following year the school received nearly 200 more applications than the year before, and within eight years the freshman class had grown 56%.

Says Hendrix College president Timothy Cloyd: "We are competing with schools that charge more, so it was hard to convince people that we were as good as our rivals when we charged so much less."  By Penelope Wang, Money Magazine senior writer

“You are an idiot. Your poor grasp of English grammar and spelling show just how incompetent you really are. To try to convince others to eschew an education in favor of so-called "better" post-high school alternatives, is both misguided and a misrepresentation of reality. Your guidance, while perhaps pertinent to you (I assume your intellect would not thrive in the University environment) should not be used to discourage others from making what is almost always a worthwhile investment. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.”
Claude Kemble
B.A. Latin, Greek, Archaeology, University of Michigan
M.Phil. Medieval German, Oxford University
Ph.D. Medieval German, Harvard University

“This gowned gaggle behind me is your faculty. You've heard the old saying that those who can - do. Those who can't - teach. That sounds deliciously insensitive. But there is often raw truth in insensitivity, just as you often find feel-good falsehoods and lies in compassion. Say good-bye to your faculty because now you are getting ready to go out there and do. These folks behind me are going to stay right here and teach.” Neal Boortz Commencement Address from his website but never actually given

“With 20+ years in the commercial banking industry, I have found that degrees are not nearly as valuable as the specialized training that can be obtained through various industry accredited training programs. If you come to me with a dual-major degree in both sociology and archeology, don’t expect me to be wowed, unless we are going to be digging up my backyard.” Glen Woerz

"College isn't the only place you can grow up. It's just the only place you can do it without holding down a job." A Lafayette College student The Case Against College Caroline Bird, David McKay Company 1975

“We need harder working students not more tax money.” Ben Stein on Kudlow & Company TV show CNBC 1/14/08

“According to The Chosen, an exhaustive study of college admissions, there's no measurable difference between the outcomes of education with the most exclusive schools and the next few tiers. Graduates don't end up happier. They don't end up with better paying jobs. They don't end up richer or even healthier. The whole thing is a sham (which costs a quarter of a million dollars a person at the top end).” Seth Godin

“People shouldn’t go to college just because they are suffering from a failure of the imagination. But in fact that’s what my son and I had. We didn’t know any better.” Linda Lee “Success Without College” 2000

"But a great majority of our nine million postsecondary students who are 'in college' are there because it has become the thing to do or because college is a pleasant place to be (pleasanter at least than the "outside," sometimes called "the real," world); because it's the only way they can get parents or taxpayers to support them without working at a job they don't like; because they can't get any job at all; because Mother wanted them to go; or for some other reason utterly irrelevant to the courses of studies for which the college is supposedly organized." Caroline Bird 1975“

As a seasoned recruiter, I find it to be a “turn-off” when I read a resume where the candidate proclaims their various educational credentials in the heading and first paragraph before they acknowledge a skill set or accomplishments. For me it is red flag that they are trying to hide mediocrity.” Glen Woerz

“Paradoxically, the quality of instruction at brand-name colleges is likely to be worse than at no-name institutions. Many professors interested in undergraduate teaching avoid places like Harvard or Stanford because teaching is all but ignored in hiring and promotion.” Marty Nemko

“College, you see, is a class issue, and where my son grew up, in Manhattan, all kids went to college. They felt entitled to college. End of discussion.” Linda Lee “Success Without College”

“It cannot possibly be stressed enough how important it is to choose a major with an aggregate earning power higher than the cost of tuition. If you pay more for school than you can possibly earn, you are wasting money on some “play time” and you are saddling yourself and your family with a debt that will last for the rest of your lives.” Beracah Yankama StudentsReview.com

“Yes, Ivy graduates are disproportionately represented in top positions, but that doesn't mean the college was causal. On average, Ivy-caliber kids are smarter, come from better schools, and have brighter, better-connected parents. You probably could lock Ivy-caliber high school in a closet for the four years of college and, on average, they'd end up with much better careers than other students.” Marty Nemko

“Go to college with a purpose or postpone it until you have a better idea of what you want to do.” DC

“If you think a year off will loom like a giant void, ready to suck your child down into the nether regions of drink, drugs or lassitude, exactly what do you think what same child will do when she is five hundred miles from home and on a campus that stopped practicing in loco parents about the same time that young ladies stopped ratting their hair and wearing crinolines?” Linda Lee

“Those who enjoy studying for its own sake should get no more subsidy for this amusement than those who like to ski, nor should this choice confer on them any special fringe benefit of power or prestige.” Caroline Bird

“College students tend to be optimistic, which is a good thing, but occasionally there needs to be a dose of reality (aka 'life').” Beracah Yankama StudentsReview.com

“As a sociologist explained to me, you don’t have to have a reason for going to college – it’s an institution. If I understand him correctly, an institution, sociologically speaking, is something everyone accepts without question. The burden of proof is not on why you go, but why anyone thinks there might be a reason for not going.” Caroline Bird

“It’s a good thing for colleges that students think they are getting something more out of their education than increased income. For if students hoped only for money, and each student had a banker with a computer at his elbow, enrollments would drop much further below expectations than they did during the enrollment recession of the mid-1970s.” Caroline Bird

"Going to Harvard or Duke won't automatically produce a better job and higher pay. Graduates of these schools generally do well. But they do well because they are talented." Robert J. Samuelson, Newsweek November 1, 1999 "The Worthless Ivy League?"

“The anatomy of success is the same now as it has always been. People who make it big in money, power, prestige, or achievement have always educated themselves in what they need to know, and they are still doing it today, whether they go to college or not.” Caroline Bird

“Sociology was a favorite major on the socially conscious campuses of the late 1960s and early 1970s, but graduates found that social reform was hardly a paying occupation. Among male sociologists gainfully employed a year after graduation from the University of Wisconsin, there were a legal assistant, sports editor, truck unloader, Peace Corps worker, publications director, a stockboy – but no sociologist per se. None of the men graduated in social work that year was in any profession, and the highest paid worked for the post office. A few of the women sociologists were in youth work, but among the rest were a claims adjuster, a swimming instructor, a library aide, a utility worker, a camping instructor and the usual scatter of factory workers, waitresses, and secretaries.” Caroline Bird

“Many of our best and brightest skipped the deal on state schools and paraded towards the Browns, Dukes and Emorys, believing that your education was only as good as what you paid for it.” Ian Williams

“It may well be that college attracts large numbers of those who are predisposed to change and learn – and that they would score high on all the test whether they go to college or not. If this is so, if college selects rather than creates ability, the diploma has become what Christopher Jencks of Harvard calls “a hell of an expensive aptitude test.” (Fortune November, 1970 page 100) Caroline Bird

“Of course, part of the reason Americans think everyone should go to college is for its noneducational uses. Anyone can benefit from them. Colleges are the country’s most effective marriage brokers. They are also assuming you don’t study too hard — a means of redistributing four years’ worth of leisure time from the sad stub-end of life to the prime of it.” Christopher Caldwell, New York Times February 25, 2007

“The best thing about college was also, in other aspects, the worst thing: you could get away from home and live on your own without having to support yourself financially.” Caroline Bird  

"In spite of the initial boost honor students enjoy in getting into professional schools and management training squads, there is no proof that successful men were better-than-average students in college or that better-than-average students climb higher on the career ladder.” Caroline Bird

“College students selecting a college and a major are not unlike a new couple buying a house – what they really care about is what are the down payment and monthly payments (in other words can they do it from a cash flow perspective for a few years).” SH

“Today you don’t have to go to college to read the great books. You don’t have to go to college to learn about the great ideas of Western man. If you want to learn about Milton, or Camus, or even Margaret Mead you can find them” Caroline Bird

“People born to be ballet dancers, baseball players, violinists, composers, poets, novelists, painters, and singers – all those whose work comes out of a special talent of mind or body – are far better off practicing those arts, with or without a private tutor, than they are sitting in a classroom – and most of them know it.” Caroline Bird

“As one of the two million students who unfortunately have had to default on a student loan, it's something I'd only wish on my worst enemies.” Ian Williams

“Actually, I think in the US a college is viewed more as a right first and an investment second. That’s part of the problem.” MEM

“In your school search, you'll hear similar statements all the time. People who could not possibly have any personal experience with a school will adamantly assert that a school is 'good'. They may not have a well formed idea of why they think so, but they will passionately defend the validity of their belief.” Berach Uankama

“No longer constrained by rational economics, colleges and universities suddenly saw the government as this giant wobbling teat just waiting to be sucked, and started a spastic race towards Who Could Charge the Most Ludicrous Tuition for Four Years, a pathetic charade usually led by our fine friends at Bennington and Swarthmore.” Ian Williams

“Having disparaged (somewhat) liberal arts, music and art, let me say that a successful society needs all these things. Imagine a society that doesn’t have music, art, poetry, novels or journalists. This would not be a successful society.” PM

"College doesn't make people intelligent, ambitious, happy, liberal or quick to learn new things. It's the other way around. Intelligent, ambitious, happy, liberal, quick-to-learn people are attracted to college in the first place." Caroline Bird

“When someone else pays the bill, you are not really worried about price.” George W. Bush December 17, 2007

“The economic value of college graduates is so massive, so widespread and so long-lasting that we tend to take it for granted,” Bill Drummond, Professor Georgia Tech’s City and Regional Planning Program

“Most colleges value peace over efficiency." Lawrence R. Ladd, who heads Grant Thornton's higher-education practice

“The humanities seek to answer the fundamental question: what does it mean to be human? By awakening a sense of what it might be like to be someone else or to live in another time or culture, the humanities tell us about ourselves, stretch our imagination, and enrich our experience. The content of the humanities arises from our need as human beings to supply ourselves with a world of common meanings that stretch across time and across human societies. The humanities are vital to American society-to our self-awareness, our culture, and our vision of the future.” From the purpose statement of the Humanities Programs at UC Santa Cruz

“I just think that we need more of our kids going to school,” said Representative Roscoe Bartlett, a Maryland Republican

“You can go to college to get civilized (in the sense that your thoughts about your triumphs and losses at the age of 55 will be colored and deepened by an encounter with Horace or Yeats at the age of 19). Or you can go there to get qualified (in the sense that Salomon Brothers will snap you up, once it sees your B.A. in economics from M.I.T.). Most often, parents must think they are paying for the latter product. Great though Yeats may be, 40-some-odd thousand seems a steep price to pay for his acquaintance. The timeless questions that college provokes — like “What the hell are you going to do with a degree in English?” — must get shouted across dinner tables with increasing vehemence as college costs rise inexorably.” Christopher Caldwell, New York Times February 25, 2007

“Historian Oscar Handlin put it straight to the graduating class of Brooklyn College in 1972. ‘Prolonged detachment from life deprives many of you of the opportunity for experience. Nothing real happens to those lapped in comfortable dependence and shielded by beneficent institutions against exposure to the elements. As a historian I cannot but contrast your lot with that of your ancestors, who were men and women at thirteen of fourteen and had tested their powers well before they were out of their teens.’ New York Times Caroline Bird

"One of my life-long pet peeves is the American insistence that every clod who stumbles out of high school with a B average be sent on to a taxpayer-subsidized college career." Michael Graham on The Corner

“No, I have become an advocate of Arrival of the Fittest. Mediocre students do not belong in college. Nor do kids (like mine) who wantonly throw their parent’s money around. Do they know how much money plumbers can make? Are they aware than one hair colorist in New York Citymakes $500,000 a year? And she is no Harvard grad.” Linda Lee

“In my opinion someone who hates his job is not a success no matter how much money he is making.” PM

“My son has now graduated from college and has a fancy French title for someone who roasts coffee beans at a knock-off of Starbucks.” GW

“Boomer parents have bought into the marketing hype at a level rarely seen in any other form of marketing. They push school districts, teachers and their kids to perform pointless tasks at extreme levels just to be admitted to the 'right' school, even though there's hardly evidence that the right school does anything but boost their egos.” Seth Godin

“We go to college because we can go to college.” Linda Lee

“Although it's easier to make connections at a prestigious college, it's far from certain that you'll make connections that will actually help your career. As you'll see below, many, many students, having mortgaged their family's financial security by attending an expensive private college, graduate feeling disillusioned, even ripped off.”  Marty Nemko

“Because we have a pluralistic society, and because prejudice reigned for much of two centuries here, parents of low-income and minority children will often stand in the way of their kids getting practical educations, because of their fear of tracking, or of shutting doors. For all of our respect for the differences between people, the one difference that is hardest for us to accept is that some people are smart and deserve to go to college and that others are better destined to vocations and trades.” Linda Lee

“Bennington College is grounded in the conviction that as a college education develops students' professional capacities, it should also prepare them to be deeply thoughtful and actively engaged citizens of the world.” Philosophy and Abiding Principles

"Some of the best waiters I've ever known had great college educations." SH

“As the father figure in a blended family of four girls and one boy, I want all my girls to attend college so that they can meet and marry Mr. Right, whose parents brain washed him with the idea that he must go to college before he can inherit dad’s business.” GW

“So it's no surprise that the definitive review of the literature (Astin, 1997) finds absolutely no relationship between a college's cost and the amount of learning that accrues. Perhaps more surprising, a number of major studies (summarized in Pascarella et al, 1996) found that students, even high-ability students, learn as much at a community college (where teaching is Job One) as they would have had they spent their first two years at a four-year college.” Marty Nemko