One of the Worst Education Articles I've Read

[sanantone]

This is one of the worst education articles/rankings I have ever seen. There's no methodology mentioned, and there are few stats. The ranking seems random and based on one person's uninformed opinion. This person goes on and on about how awful he or she thinks some careers are and thinks that justifies the rankings. If you get a job that pays more than $50k per year, how is that a terrible ROI? He may think those jobs are too stressful, but some people want those careers. 

According to this person, a general social science degree has a better ROI than mathematics. I doubt that's true. But, it's easy to point out how illogical it is to think that psychology, human services and sociology have much worse ROIs than a general social science degree when they're similar subjects that lead to similar jobs. If that weren't enough to ruin the author's credibility, he thinks that philosophy is a social science. 

The dumbest part of this article is that the author thinks that earth science has a poor ROI because you have to read a lot and put in serious time in a lab.

https://self-made.io/degrees-worst-return-investment/

[mysonx3]

Let's not ignore the terrible grammar as well. Do people not proofread before they post things, or is written English a forgotten skill?

"...find difficult to work in their perspective branch..."

[dfrecore]

Dumbest article ever.

[Supermind]

‘A liberal-Arts degree is useless!’ (period) Going by this article, many of us in this forum are just wasting our time and energy. This article has probably been penned by a very depressed person, who has hasn’t found a job yet!

[Merlin]

‘A liberal-Arts degree is useless!’ (period) Going by this article, many of us in this forum are just wasting our time and energy. This article has probably been penned by a very depressed person, who has hasn’t found a job yet!

It is just a terrible article in general. It is full of disinformation, biased statements, and hyperbole. It just goes to show how you don't need any kind of credentials to post your ideas to a blog or website for the world to read.

That said, that article isn't written for us or the kind of students who frequent this forum. In fact, this article is probably offensive to anyone in academia or who has earned more than one degree.

On this forum, a lot of people end up with liberal studies degrees because they just need to a checkbox degree and the BALS is one of the fastest and cheapest ways to attain that degree. We have a few young folks, but the majority are working adults who are coming back for degrees because they want to make a career change or want to check off a life goal checkbox.

That article is intended to address high school kids and young adults who are preparing for college and looking for a degree to help them build a career. It is giving them a bad impression and terrible advice, but I suspect that is the target audience.

I assume the author is a 20-something who just graduated with a ton of college debt and now has a degree that they feel was a waste of time and money because it doesn't automatically get them into a high-paying job.

[sanantone]

Most of these majors do have higher underemployment rates and lower wages, but the justifications the author gives for avoiding these majors don't make any sense. The rank order also appears to be based on nothing.

I saw this article advertised on Facebook. While young people aren't using Facebook heavily these days, their parents are going to see this junk. It also came up at the top of a Google search yesterday for college degrees with worst ROI.

[jamshid666]

OK, I'm going to say one nice thing about this article: it is a good idea to realistically consider what future employment you will have when you complete you degree, since you will have to pay off those student loans.  And, everyone should have a realistic point of view that they will be starting out on the low end of the pay scale until they've built up experience within their career field.

Now on to the negatives: although the author criticizes the ROI of these degrees, most of them still end up with a positive ROI, so the student loans would be paid off eventually while earning a decent wage.  I question where she gets all of her financial figures from, and she makes a false assumption that people have to stay in the career field they studied for in college.  One of the interesting things I've found in business and information technology is the large number of people that have other degrees outside of these fields.  A lot of people end up in the current careers not because of their majors, but because of some elective or some other factor.

The only thing I really took from this article is that private colleges are way over-priced compared to public ones, but all of us in this forum are already aware of that fact.

By the way, she has written 69 articles on that site, and all of them are biased and lack real facts and information to back up what she is saying.

[dfrecore]

OK, I'm going to say one nice thing about this article: it is a good idea to realistically consider what future employment you will have when you complete you degree, since you will have to pay off those student loans.  And, everyone should have a realistic point of view that they will be starting out on the low end of the pay scale until they've built up experience within their career field.

The only thing I really took from this article is that private colleges are way over-priced compared to public ones, but all of us in this forum are already aware of that fact.

By the way, she has written 69 articles on that site, and all of them are biased and lack real facts and information to back up what she is saying.

Yes, it's definitely smart to think through your options when you get a degree, and to be realistic about the pay.

As for private schools, yes, they're overpriced, IF you pay full price.  The only reasons to consider them; 1) with discounts and other things, they may end up being the same price as a public university, but you may actually graduate on time; 2) you get tons of scholarships and it's free; 3) you're going into a field where who you know matters as much or more than what you know, or 4) you can afford to pay with no student loans.

For many schools, middle-to-upper-middle-class kids who don't qualify for any needs-based scholarships or grants, #2 is a huge factor.  Want to go to Harvard and your family makes $65k?  It's free (tuition, fees, room and board).  How about if they make up to $150k?  Then it's somewhere between 1%-10% of your family's income.  So a family earning $100k at a 2% rate could send their kid to Harvard for $2k a year.  Total.  Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Berkeley - all have programs that are similar.  If that's not a good ROI, then I don't know what is.

So to generalize about all private schools is just silly.

[sanantone]

It's hard to compare public and private schools because public schools are subsidized. Out-of-state tuition rates are a better representation of the true cost. I like to compare for-profit schools and private, nonprofit schools. For-profit schools are cheaper, but nonprofit students graduate with less debt. Private school students tend to be less impoverished, so they depend less on student loans, but nonprofit schools are also much more generous with institutional grants and scholarships.

[jamshid666]

So to generalize about all private schools is just silly.

In other words, we should ignore articles like this and do proper research.