Is a Rolex worth full price? Clearly not- because if you try to sell it a few days after you buy it, you’ll get 50 cents on the dollar. Is it “worth” putting a fancy chef’s kitchen into a $300K cape home in a modest neighborhood? Clearly not, because when you put that house on the market, your buyers will pay an extra 5, 10, 15K for a fancy kitchen, but not the 80 or 100K you spent on it last year.
So worth is the wrong term. People spend money on lots and lots of things every day that might not be “worth it” to YOU but is meaningful to them.
There are jobs for kids who didn’t attend college. There are terrific jobs in the trades (many of which DO require higher ed- just not a Bachelor’s degree) but there are wrinkles to those. In some places, getting on track for a union job means your dad, brothers and uncles are already in that union. It makes legacy admissions at Harvard look like a cakewalk. And many places where being a non-white male makes union admissions many degrees of more difficulty.
There are always entrepreneurial opportunities- I wouldn’t describe them as jobs upfront, but an enterprising kid could figure something out.
But “tons of jobs”? What is a ton? The shift from a manufacturing base to a service base in the US means that many of the aircraft maintenance roles (a relatively high paying, skilled job which required an A&P license but not a degree) have been moved overseas.
Heck, my radiologist is in Mumbai. If there was ever a profession that nobody thought could be off-shored it was medicine. And yet…
I can’t see kids getting priced out of higher ed as being a win for anyone. Especially not the kid.
I would love to see these colleges take a hard look at slimming down some of their ever increasing administration costs to help try to keep tuition somewhat stable.
But if they demote the Vice President for Sustainability (for example) and cut their staff the students will complain and protest that the administration does not care about the environment.
Radiology is a small part of medicine. Foreign radiologists are used for speed and convenience because they can read non-urgent scans taken at 5 pm and deliver results by 9 am the next day without pulling all-nighters. Most medicine still involves hands on work. Can’t look down a sick Seattle child’s throat from Mumbai… at least not yet.
I have always looked at college as an investment in your future. The caveat is some students have access to funds and don’t need to worry about the cost. Whereas others borrow funds and become leveraged and need to make money. Like in business the more leveraged a company is the less room for mistakes/bad outcomes.
Kids who are smart and can problem solve and have the motivation to work will turn out fine. Maybe not the richest people around but usually can support themselves.
True! The worst though is the parents who monopolize the conversations and go on and on about their kids and never ask about you or your kids.
$90,000?! My gosh! We didn’t/aren’t spending that much! But to each their own!
That reminds me of the HL Mencken aphorism that wealth is any income that is at least one hundred dollars more a year than the income of one’s wife’s sister’s husband.
In our circle of friends I don’t think anyone expects their kids to be more successful than they were, since we were all lucky enough to be working in tech in Silicon Valley during a three decade long tech boom (and most bought their houses early in that period).
But do you ever get the impression that other forms of “success greater than the parents” are being pushed? For example, sometimes there are parents who attended some college which is generally respectable but was not all that selective when the parents attended but who seemingly would be disappointed if their kids attended the same college they attended, even though that college is now much more selective than when they attended.
Not at all. Many of these parents went to Stanford, Berkeley, Caltech or other elite universities that there’s no chance of their kids getting into. Even the ones who went to UCLA, UCSB or CPSLO which were not very selective 30 years ago realize that’s unlikely for their kids, especially in CS.
Success is obviously redefined away from being more financially successful than parents, but generally it now just means earning enough so you don’t live at home after college. There are way too many failures to launch amongst our wider circle of acquaintances.
I have one kid who I expect will be more successful in terms of earning more than me through his career (though it’s much less likely that he’ll accumulate more in assets due to our enormous house price windfall). But he’s a very rare exception (which was evident even in high school when he was class president and was voted most likely to change the world by his classmates).
Dang, I’d save a lot of money if room and board was $12,584. My room alone is like $17 or 18K with utilities, etc… Wish my kid went there (wherever that is) and lived on campus all four years !!
Most medicine still involves hands on work. Can’t look down a sick Seattle child’s throat from Mumbai… at least not yet.
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