ABC 20/20: Bachelors Degrees May Not Be Worth the Money???

[barcotta]

There was a great segment on 20/20 Friday night. Maybe some of you were watching. I thought it was great because it called into question one of the great unsubstantiated claims of our time--one that has been blindly accepted by everyone, including me.

Personally, I love when the cold light of day shines down on some rather murky beliefs. A few that have fallen in my lifetime:

• You can catch a cold if you go outside with wet hair in the winter (or wet feet--or if you sweat and then go into the cold outdoors... all nonsense)
  
  
  
• Violent behavior as an adult can be traced back to televised cartoon violence viewed as a child (The RoadRunner, Tom and Jerry, etc.)
  
  
  
• Homework is necessary for learning (there's a great book called something like "The Homework Myth" which blows the doors off of this one).

The latest myth to fall is the alleged + one million dollars in lifetime earnings of an employee with a bachelors degree vs. an employee without a degree. Please see this link ABC News: Some Debt-Laden Gradutes Wonder Why They Bothered With College which provides a basic transcript as well as the actual video--which I strongly recommend. Highlights include:

• Marty Nemko, an education consultant and career counselor, said he believes the bachelor's degree is America's most overrated product. Nemko is one of many who says there are some ugly statistics the education establishment doesn't like to talk about. But what about that $1 million bonus for getting a bachelor's degree? "There could be no more misleading statistic that I could possibly tell you about," he said. Misleading, Nemko said, because it includes superearners, billionaire college grads who skew the average. Additionally, he said, the students who attend college are already more likely to be successful than those who don't.
  
  
  
• Economics professor Sandy Baum, author of "Education Pays," a College Board study promoting the advantages of higher education, said it is the education that makes the difference. "On average, people benefit much more from going to college," Baum said, agreeing that the $1 million figure is inaccurate. Her study estimated that graduates gain half that.
  
  
  
• "If you're in the bottom 40 percent of your high school class -- and today, colleges are recruiting lots of those kids -- you have a very small chance of graduating, even if you are given 8½ years," career expert Nemko said. "And the immoral thing about it is that the colleges do not disclose that."
  

The article includes examples of folks who went deeply into debt and then never found jobs in their field. There are a whole bunch of comments at the end of the article which add a lot to the conversation as well.

The article doesn't address the use of a bachelors degree to get your foot in the door and meet a qualification which, if not met, means you cannot even get an interview. However, I think this is all supportive of the big three method of obtaining a bachelors degree--although, of course, there is no mention of alternative methods of obtaining accredited bachelors degrees for less than the poor shmoes paid in this clip.

Check it out and let us know what you think.