Depends on the region you work, what you do and what the degree is in.
I think we all recognize some degrees are invaluable and some less than worthless in the sense you can't get a job paying more than $12 an hour and you got $60k in debt that needs to be paid off in ten years.
Off to college so many go not realizing education is just a business like any other business. 19 years old not knowing what they want to do but unknowing of so much that is available.
We know a young lady that graduated a number of years ago with a degree in dramatic arts from a well known school that put her in debt to the tune of $80,000. The councilor went on about Broadway, lights, fame and fortune without bothering to mention the great majority of graduates never got a job in their field much less on Broadway. But the councilor was in the business of selling the degree and sell the degree he did.
I've often made fun of jobs at Starbucks but working at Starbucks was the best job she's been able to get in a number of years. Paying off her debt she'll be living with relatives until she is 35 years old. If she applies and works hard she can get a volunteer job decorating stage sets. Yippee!
Meanwhile a classmate attended a 2 1/2 year community college getting her AS as a X-ray tech for a third the cost the degree in dramatic arts cost. After 2 1/2 years she had a job making $40k to start and has since gone on to get certified in MRI's and makes near $50k with overtime and on call pay she gets.
Starbucks for $10 an hour or a hospital for $24?
At 19 we're supposed to be full of visions on a perfect life which often centers around having an education figuring with any education success will come but so often, we're sure seeing it now, it doesn't. What is important at 19 turns out not to be important at 30 while the little things, like spending $40 a week on Pampers for the baby, take center stage in your life.
Education is a business like any other business. They are in the business of selling their product so they can eat.
When I was 16 more than anything in the world I wanted to be an archeologist. This dream wasn't a passing fancy I have a a bookshelf full of scholarly books on Egyptology among them
Egyptian Grammar by Alan H. Gardiner spending $50 for it in 1964. You have any idea how much $50 was in 1964 for a 15 year old?
Using Gardiner's book I got to where I could translate middle kingdom hieroglyphics... it was slow and painful but I could do it. This was my dream and it went on for years. I would ride my bicycle around the bay area, from the
Rosicrucian museum in Santa Clara to the Stanford Museum in Palo Alto (the old one) to as far as I could peddle looking for something I could decipher.
We all have dreams but sometimes the best advice would be to enjoy them but not to follow them.
Luckily life got in the way and not having a trust fund I had to find something to support myself. Breasted and the rest, I got a lot of books.
The primary question today's student must be able to answer in the affirmative is "Can my field of study provide me with an adequate living?" Seems a number of students never think to answer this question. When you are 19 why worry about something four years away when four years is a lifetime. To us who are older appreciate four years is but a blink of an eye.
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