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Not for nothing - but with the logic of the OP I highly doubt you are getting into Furman, so you don't have to worry about it.
As for my opinion, it's wise to chose your major and schools carefully. Would it make sense to spend $30k a year to obtain a teaching degree and then work in the public schools? - Probably not.
The way that teaching is setup you need to hit the qualifiers for the position - you do that you're fine regardless of if you pay $5k or $50k. Make the most out of your student teaching, build a good portfolio, network - that is how you gain your employment.
In fact, most states have a state school that at one point was "the teachers college" - these are often better bets for placement than a private university.
If I were going to teach I would of went to CC for 2 years and then transferred to a state school with a good education program and network. I would of gotten out of it with minimal debt.
Even if it was $20k in debt when all was said and done and I was starting at $27k per year, it's not all that bad.
Four years out of highschool in a service job I would be lucky to make $13/hr (which would be $27k per year). That would be for a full year and with benefits well below what most teachers receive (healthcare & what not)
Then factor in that as an educator you can tutor, work summer school or find additional ways to earn money in your off time it's easy to separate yourself even further.
Also, that is your starting point - not your ceiling. Your salary is going to outpace that of a service worker or some other unskilled position.
So under this scenario you may have an additional $2,500 or so for the first decade to offset until you pay off your loan - but then you are debt free with higher income potential for the next 30+ years of your life.
Not to mention that once tenure is acheived you will have a decent amount of job security.
So while it may not be logical to attend a high priced private university for a standard teaching job, it doesn't mean it's not logical to intelligently select your education path or that you will end up worse than someone who skips college as a path.
Too many have the short run view on things and really don't understand how long this life is.
I prefer to make 200K being a corporate slave compared to 8 dollars per hour and still a corporate slave...
Also with a degree is much much easier to open your own business, especially a professional business, where the degree is actually needed (clinics, law firms, CPA firms, etc).
A degree is what you make of it, is useless if you don't know how to use it, is has a lot of value if you know how to use it...
Every degree has a value...
What about the guy down the street from me, who opened up his own flooring business right after high school, and now, after 15 years makes high six figures and has zero college debt to repay? face it, the majority of degrees are worthless and are just to make you feel good about yourself. Sadly, if it were just that it would be no big deal, but most of them put people in hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt. That is no way to start out your life.
what about the guys he employs for $10 an hour and little to no benefits? - unless everyone in that company is making 6 figures without a degree
I know owners of construction companies that do have degrees that pull in over 2X + that amount - so if we are using ancedotes the people I know in the flooring business with degrees make more than the people you know if the flooring business without
It isn't a scam unless the college promised you that your philosophy degree would earn you a high paid job.
You ever been to a high school? Counselors there still tell students to major in anything they want if they like it and the jobs will simply follow. They don't do a good deal of justice to kids when they use that scenario and don't tell students what degree is being hired right now and so forth. So the kids graduate high school, go to college believing what they were told by their counselors is true, get a degree in something that doesn't give them a lot of marketable skills yet they believe they can/should get a good paying job, and end up looking for jobs months later after their friends have jobs in fields that were hiring.
If you don't believe what I just typed, then go to a local high school. The counselors still say the same b.s.
College students who are 18-20 are naive little buggers who believe anything. It doesn't come back to bite them in the you know what until they graduate college and are now trying to compete in the real world.
You cite jobs that require a college or several college degrees in order to make good money. Of course college is worth it if you want to be in the medical profession or work in the computer industry. No one is going to argue with that. They'd be stupid if they did try to form an argument.
great...
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But look on the other side. Let's say you get a degree in one of the following: English, history, communications, philosophy, psychology, political science, sociology, or anthropology. What can you do with those degrees? What if you get one of those degrees and say you don't want to go to graduate school. Then what? The degree you have is a bachelors degree, but it has little value unlike a degree in nursing which can get you a job as a......................nurse.
We live in a free country, you pick what you want to study...
So I really don't understand your point... People study things because they decided to study that, if it was a bad choice it was only his bad choice not the college or the system. History is good for law and teachers, including college level prof, I know a lot of people making a lot of money making money in psychology.
People that study anthropology is planning on staying on research and universities all of their life. Same goes with sociology, and they also go into government jobs and politics.
With all of your degrees you can find something to use it, communications, you can work in a radio or tv station, etc...
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If you're not sure what you want to do and end up getting a degree because you believe any degree is better than nothing, then you're not going to be successful as the other person who ended up getting a degree in nursing who is now working in a hospital while you're at home applying to whatever kind of jobs you can.
I mean come on, people know what they are studying, nobody thinks they are going to study anthropology and become a CEO of a company...
People study the subject because they like the subject or think they are going to make money or both. People that study anthropology might be studying something that they love and necessarily for the money.
Also all univ. have adviser that almost nobody uses..
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Then you can say that the college degree you got was a scam.........
It was not, you picked it, why should be a scam??
If you invest money on the apple and tomorrow apples stock goes down 20 dollars, would you say it is a scam because you lost money??
If you go to college and pick a useless degree for what you wanted, why is that a scam.. I went to college knowing that I wanted money, so I found a degree that i liked and at the same time made money..
If you want money don't pick weird degrees with no demand.
What you can say is that people scammed themselves, by picking the wrong degree and expecting something else.
I'm not going to get too long winded, I'll give the cliff notes version of my points. I live in SC, the starting pay for a teacher with a bachelors is around 27K.
College isn't a scam it is a commodity you purchase with your money. Whether a student loan or savings from summer jobs it is still your money so spend wisely knowing you will have to pay it back.
No. You are correct. It is a scam. Here is the proof: No Sucker Left Behind by Marc Scheer, Profscam by Charles Sykes, Weapons of Mass Instruction by John Taylor Gato, and Empire of Illusion by Chris Hedges all prove it is a huge scam.
I'm not going to get too long winded, I'll give the cliff notes version of my points. I live in SC, the starting pay for a teacher with a bachelors is around 27K. Depending on where I would go to school, I could pay as much as 27k a year for my education, or more (Furman), thus leaving me hundreds of thousand of dollars in debt, which will take me decades to repay because the field pays so poorly. But it's not just education, almost all fields pay much less then it took to earn a degree in said field. So how is it logical to pay so much money with such a poor return on my investment? College is illogical.
What about the guy down the street from me, who opened up his own flooring business right after high school, and now, after 15 years makes high six figures and has zero college debt to repay? face it, the majority of degrees are worthless and are just to make you feel good about yourself. Sadly, if it were just that it would be no big deal, but most of them put people in hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt. That is no way to start out your life.
Like I said, about 80-90% in my neighborhood have a degree not 100%
This is about odds, what are your odds of making 100k+ with or without a degree?? Sure there are plenty of people making money without a degree, and there are millions of that don't.. if you pick 100 of people with masters degree and 100 people with no degree, what would you get?
Maybe 1 or 2 at the most would be making 100k+, while 50% with the degree would be making more then 100k, the other 50% would be above 50k, unless they are recent grads.
I have no classmate making less then 85K, and most of them are above 100K.
Just look at the median earnings of people with degrees and people without. That tells you that the majority of people making money are people with degrees, not the special few that really worked to get a business going without a degree.
A real experience is supposed to be an experience, not a means to an end, and like most experiences, the person having the experiences will determine how much they get out of it. If you finish college and feel like you only have a piece of paper to show for it, it's because you spent your college journey focused only on the endpoint and failed to pay attention to the journey.
What experience? You mean getting so hammered out of your mind you probably wont remember it anyways? That is pretty much what the "college experience" amounts to. You get four free years to party your arse off without any real consequences, because if you do in the real world it can permanently damage your life and career. Most people who go to college for the "experience" go because they are spoiled and want to delay real adulthood i.e. have the freedom of an adult without the responsibility. The rest go because it has pretty much become a necessity for all but the most basic of career fields.
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