College degrees are worthless in a failing economy. The New York Times recently reported that the American system of higher education is failing. The harsh reality is that only 60 percent of students entering four-year colleges in the United States graduate.
Cal State Long Beach alone had a six-year graduation rate of 46.8 percent in 2007, according to the College Results Online database built by the Education Trust. In comparison to the top three of 25 most similar institutions, Long Beach is at the bottom despite making the jump to 54 percent last year.
Temple University has a graduation rate of 59.4 percent, the University of Kentucky is at 61.1 percent and Washington State University has a grad rate of 62.9 percent. If the American education system as a whole was to receive a grade, I think those percentages average out to a big fat “D.”
It’s no wonder economist Mark Schneider referred to colleges with such dropout rates as “failure factories,” which are now becoming the norm as we push into the year 2010.
The reason graduation rates are in such decline is because college degrees became virtually worthless during the onset of the Great Recession. We “Millennials” have been lied to our entire lives.
We actually bought into a system that brainwashed us into believing that our education was worth the money and if we worked hard enough to get a college degree we would make enough money to pay back our student loans. In fact, the motto of 2003 was “live now, pay later.” Oh, how times have changed, with the motto of 2009 being “pay now, live later.”
Go to school, get a degree, earn a starting salary of $35k a year. That was the propaganda shoveled into our heads during our youth. Growing up, I had such faith in this seemingly simple and clear system that I invested my whole heart into it, only to discover that the system would fail me and every other recession grad — miserably.
I can’t believe we ever had faith in such a system. Now, we are left to fend for ourselves as student loans creep up behind us during the hardest economic times since the Great Depression.
We recession grads — those of us who graduated college amid the recession — accomplished a major feat in our lives only to be spoon-fed straight to the wolves of a money-hungry “corporate America.”
Is anyone bailing us out? No. Do we get leeway for the student loans we can’t afford because we can’t get the job that’ll pay us what our college degrees were supposed to make us worth? Not to my knowledge.
Recession grads will quickly find that their college degrees are worthless in comparison to practical work experience. When it comes to work experience, employers don’t typically consider college degrees as experience at all, which puts us in a Catch-22 bind.
When it comes to employer demands, how are new college grads supposed to compete with 3-5 years of practical work experience when all we have under our belt is a measly 3-5 years worth of course work experience? Without any work experience applicable to our degree majors, we can’t get a job. But without the job, we’re unable to get the experience we need to get the job in the first place.
The system screwed us over real bad and now we have to fight harder than we ever did in college to create a new system that will do us right; a system that we can call our own.
It’s time to take our futures into our own hands, even if it means dropping out of college for a year, maybe two, to get that much-needed hands-on experience. If you’re lucky, you’ll find an employer who will pay for you to go back to school.
If you’re not so lucky, well, who really needs college anyway when Google University is only a mouse click away?
Niki Payne is a CSULB journalism alumna, a contributing writer for the Daily 49er and currently writes as the L.A. Singles Examiner for Examiner.com.