College education used to be the obvious choice for those with the means — complete college and the world will fit squarely into your hands. You will make more money, quickly move up the corporate ladder and secure your job against recession layoffs.
Or at least, that’s how it used to be.
Over the past few decades, this constant push for post-high school education has driven prices and application requirements up around the nation as would-be CEOs and Nobel laureates enter the schools of their dreams. Unfortunately, it comes with a hefty price tag.
Take any reputable MBA program — we’ll use Berkeley’s. The cost for nine months of tuition, not including food, transportation or living expenses, comes out to a lowly $52,328 — for one year. So, feel free to double that price before you have the sweet, income-increasing sheet of paper.
Berkeley’s website also lists a “conservative” estimate with these extra expenses included — $77,054 for a non-California resident. So, for a two-year, reputable program, we’re looking at around $150,000.
No big deal, right? We’ll make the cash back up later with those massive pay increases.
It isn’t that simple, though. School’s like Berkeley’s full-time MBA program would almost necessitate leaving a full-time job for a part-time position, if not leaving the workforce altogether, and therein lies the dilemma. If you had just stayed working for the two years, you wouldn’t have the degree, but you wouldn’t have the massive amounts of debt, either. In the end, you can’t be sure you won’t just break even.
So, doctors with notoriously high debt from top medical schools make around the same over their lifetime as plumbers do, given the cost of repaying student loans. The only caveat? If someone else pays for your education, all bets are off. You can clearly win out.
The benefit of additional education are marginal at best, given the cost of repaying massive loans.
According to an April 2011 article in The Economist, Peter Thiel, cofounder of PayPal and “legendary investor,” is famous for identifying bubbles in the market. He claims education has all the traits of an economic bubble.
Essentially, education is like housing — it’s about safety and security. Housing prices rise consistently and are thus a good investment. If you’re educated, you’ll always make more money.
When compared with reality, however, these axioms of investment just don’t hold up.
 
Paul Krugman, opinion writer for the New York Times, aptly points out that technological advancement, rather than promoting high-tech jobs, may reduce society’s need for “high-brow” mathematicians and engineers, since many of the tasks that used to require a well-educated background can now be handled by computers. In other words, your job may actually be substantially safer as a plumber or carpenter than an engineer or computer programmer.
As the demand for these degrees fall, schools will have to cut back on programs and services in order to lower costs and make it worth students’ time.
According to data from the Law School Admission Council, applications for law schools have been falling at record-breaking rates over the last decade.
Apparently, people are becoming less excited about piling up massive debt for law school just to become one of the many unemployed lawyers working at Starbucks.
Cheaper online alternatives are quickly growing in popularity, not least of all because of the substantially lower price tag, though employers still prefer four-year degrees for management positions. Low-cost, Wal-Mart styled universities may very well follow suit in order to capture the growing number of students unimpressed with big-name university degrees.
All things considered, I’m not dropping out, and you shouldn’t either — but I’ll definitely be looking for hefty scholarships to foot the bill.
Devin Graham is a 22-year-old economics senior from Prairieville. Follow him on Twitter @TDR_Dgraham.
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Contact Devin Graham at [email protected]