Does College Still Offer a Good Return On Investment?

The answer to this question has more to do with the current economy than anything else. While reading the numerous recent articles and books on this question I stumbled upon a gem from the September 1933 (Volume 90) of Forum and Century, A periodical published between 1930 and 1940. Both the Editorial Foreword entitled A Challenge To The Colleges and a lengthy article entitled Is College Worth While? Question the value of a college degree.

The authors of the foreword and article bring up exactly the same questions that many writers, politicians, college and university presidents, students, and parents are asking now. The most striking aspect about these articles is that, aside from the outdated words and the elegant typesetting of the publication, these articles could have been published yesterday. Much like our current economic and political climate, these articles were written immediately after the Great Depression when citizens lacked confidence in our nation’s ability to recover and were cautious about the possible risks of funding a college education.

The same people who now claim that college isn’t worth the financial investment due to low graduation rates are also some of the same people who claim that unless you attend an engineering school or an elite university in the Northeast, you might as well not attend college at all due to a low return on investment. I have to disagree with these folks. I work with college students and recent college graduates everyday, and I can tell you that most of them are graduating on time with no to low student loan debt, and are getting good, if not great, jobs upon graduation.

The cynics claim that college simply doesn’t offer a good return on investment, but once again, I think their data is incomplete because they’re only looking at one’s financial investment. Since it is hard or impossible to measure a student’s own personal investments of time, industry, motivation, and emotional and intellectual energy, those investments go unnoticed and unmeasured. But, they are the most important investments that can be made in higher education and they have a greater impact on one’s college and future success than how much tuition costs.

There’s been a lot of talk over the past few years about what many researchers call “grit” and how having grit is a key factor in student success at all levels.  This is something that parents, college faculty, and administrators have known about for a long time, we just never put a name to it.

Simply put, grit is determination, focus, and to some degree, resiliency. People of our generation may call it gumption, or tenacity, but usually it’s something we can spot in a student after talking with him for about 30 minutes. It has little to do with IQ or intellectual ability and a whole lot to do with attitude, perseverance, and work ethic. Students with grit tend to perform well in class, but not necessarily great, and they are also campus leaders and involved in organizations and service. They have clear goals and find ways to achieve them on just about any campus. But, the big question is, can a student learn grit, or is it an inherent personality trait? The general consensus is that yes, students can learn to be more focused and deliberate in their actions giving credence to the earliest assertions of Aristotle “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”

Will My Child be Prepared to Get a Job Upon Graduation?

This is usually the second question that parents ask me about academics. In other words, “Will he be moving back into his old bedroom at 22 years of age? Because honestly, we were going to turn it into a home office.”

When we were graduating from college this wasn’t really a concern. Students graduated with little or no debt and the economy absorbed us into jobs with decent salaries and benefits. If you moved home at all it wasn’t because you didn’t have a job, it was just to save money for a car or your first home. Today’s students’ prospects are still upbeat, but their pay and benefits have dropped considerably. So, yes, he will be prepared to get a job after graduating from college, but whether his first job will pay enough for him to move out on his own depends on a number of factors including what he studied and where he chooses to live.

As I write this article, I am sitting in a coffee shop in Stillwater, Oklahoma, USA. Many of you have never heard of Stillwater, so I’ll tell you a little bit about it. It is a lovely college town of approximately 48,000 year-round residents, not counting college students. It contains everything you need and most of what you want in a small city. In Stillwater, and in many small to medium cities like it, a single person can live quite comfortably on a $26,000.00 to $30,000.00 per year salary.

Rent for a nice, safe one bedroom apartment costs about $600.00 a month, you can buy a week’s worth of groceries for $55.00, attend concerts and sporting events nearby for little to no cost, and a gallon of gas hovers around $3.30 even though you can commute by bus or bike. Consider a similar lifestyle in Boston, D.C. or San Francisco and you would have to earn between 54-80% more to maintain an equivalent lifestyle.

Now I know, mid-western college towns aren’t for everyone, but this example just goes to show that your child can be employed and live on his own, if that is his goal and he’s willing to move to a less expensive part of the country or even another country as is the trend for recent graduates who want to live abroad before they settle down. A college degree doesn’t guarantee anyone a job, but it does open up considerable choices.

Will My Child be Able to Make it Through College?

I get this question from parents a lot and According to IPEDS, or the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, say that five times fast, the average 4-6 year graduation rate for bachelor’s degree seeking college students across the United States in 2011 was 59 percent. So, it is fair to say that yes, according to assumptions we can make from this data, more than half of students who start this year as freshmen will graduate in 4-6 years. But, I know you; you’re more concerned with that mysterious 41 percent of students who don’t graduate in 4-6 years, and you’re worried that your child will be among them. Well, as you probably know from reading numerous conflicting news reports from various media outlets each day, data can mean different things to different people depending on why you’re reading them how you’re using it.

The unfortunate truth about the data used by IPEDS is that it’s incomplete, but it’s not the IPED System’s fault. Tracking every single one of the approximately two million students who enroll in college each year, for 4-6 years, regardless of whether or not they stay in school, drop out, stop out, transfer colleges, or simply disappear from the data, is impossible. IPEDS only tracks students who enroll full-time, for the first time, in the fall, at any given institution and then continue at that same institution until graduation. As you can imagine, many students, in fact most, simply don’t fit into this criteria and are therefore left out of the data. But, nevertheless, there are plenty of folks predicting doom and gloom for our nation’s higher education system based on this incomplete data.

They claim that a college education isn’t worth the financial investment if only 59 percent of students even graduate from college in the first place. Unfortunately, plenty of people believe them and instead of reading and digesting the data for themselves, which is readily available at: http://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/ they worry about the sky falling on higher education. To ease your fears about college completion, I’ll tell you a story about a student who, like many other college graduates I’ve worked with, never technically graduated from college.

Vincent has a bachelor’s and a master’s degree, but according to IPEDS, he didn’t graduate from any college. How is this possible? Because IPEDS only tracks students who enroll as first time, full time students each fall semester. And while Vincent did that, he transferred to another college after his first semester and switched to part-time status. He worked full-time, attended college part-time and graduated after 6 years. He then enrolled as a fulltime graduate student, but IPEDS doesn’t track graduate students either. Vincent graduated with a master’s degree two years later. As you can see from this example, this well educated and now gainfully employed man didn’t even meet IPEDS criteria as a college graduate, but he still graduated from college – twice!

The truth is that if your child was admitted to the college or university in which he is enrolled, he is very likely to succeed academically.