Faking College Degrees to Feed One’s Family

Prostitution caused by degree desperation is hitting a new high in the 21st century. In 1980, when I finished my Master’s degree in English, there were no teaching jobs open for tyros like me, and the only job I could find was as a cashier for a downtown bookstore. The owner of that store had a sign for cashiers that said, “Must have a college degree.” After a few weeks of work I realized that having a college degree had nothing to do with being a good employee in a bookstore (just a few of my fellow cashiers read a lot or cared about the books), and the only reason that was a requirement for work, that I could see, was to keep the many urban minorities seeking work from bothering the owner.

 People with means can always buy a ticket rather than earn a ticket to the job market, promotion, or school entrance, and this sense of unfairness, of gaming the system, has caused many to question the value of college and corporate work over the years. In the August 2012 issue of Harper’s Magazine Thomas Frank writes a blistering essay (titled "A Matter of Degrees") about our worship at the altar of college and the residue it leaves upon the minds and spirits of the worshippers. He notes, “Choosing the winners and losers is a task we have delegated to largely unregulated institutions housed in fake Gothic buildings, which have long since suppressed any qualms they once felt about tying a one-hundred-thousand-dollar anvil around the neck of a trusting teenager.”

Frank goes on to list a number of high profile cases of fake degrees being used by deans and officials at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education, Bishop State College in AL, Texas A&M, and the dean of admissions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A background checker estimates:

40% of job applicants misrepresent in some way their educational attainments. And he reminds me that this figure includes only those people "who are so brazen about it that they’ve signed a release and authorization for a background check.” Among those who aren’t checked . . . the fudging is sure to be even more common.

I fear Frank’s call for more regulation of higher education degrees will lead to an even more byzantine system of credentialing; in education, in particular, where have we seen rules and regulations decrease in the past 50 years? Indeed, Frank ends this thought-provoking essay with these sobering thoughts:

Never has the nation’s system for choosing its leaders seemed more worthless. Our ruling class steers us into disaster after disaster, cheering for ruinous wars, getting bamboozled by Enron and Madoff, missing equity bubbles and real estate bubbles and commodity bubbles. But accountability, it seems, is something that applies only to the people at the bottom, the ones who took out the bad mortgages or lied on their resumes. The pillars that prop up the system, meanwhile, are visibly corrupt: the sacred Credential signifies less and less each year but costs more and more to obtain. Yet we act as though it represents everything. It’s a million-dollar coin made of pot metal—of course it attracts counterfeiters. And of course its value must be defended by an ever-expanding industry of resume checkers and diploma-mill hunters . . .

If College is About Making More Money, You Might Want to Reconsider, Part 2

I've decided to keep this headline and follow the number of stories and research about the value of college degrees. Interesting how the college discussion has moved from one of justifying college as a time for developing intellect, social awareness, and personal cultivation into a job training program that can be measured based on your return on investment.

Here's a great graphic that illustrates one of the large issues that politicians and educators who continue to push everyone into a 4-year college program refuse to acknowledge: earnings from a college degree have decreased over time while costs from a college degree have escalated.

Cost of a 4-Year College Degree versus Earnings

Recent Graduates: College Degree Isn't Worth It.

Most parents—homeschoolers or not—worry about their children being able to pass tests and have proper credentials to gain college entrance. However, as an increasing number of critics of higher education are noting, college is an overpriced and overestimated institution for most people.  This article from CNN Money puts the matter in contemporary terms as the Fall semester approaches.

The graduates portrayed have debts ranging from $185K for a bachelors degree in Industrial Engineering to $74K for a masters degree in public health;  none have found work that pays anywhere near what they need to repay their loans without great sacrifice. Part of it is the bad economy, of course, but that's also the point: the old "when the economy is bad go back to school" strategy requires a whole rethinking in our society. As recently as a decade ago a college degree was considered to be very important to gain middle to upper-middle class white collar employment. Now those white collar jobs are being outsourced to countries whose English-speaking, highly educated, and highly unemployed college graduates are willing to do college-level work for high-school student wages.

Homeschoolers have long-criticized the need for increasing the time children spend in elementary and high school, but since so many people rely on those institutions for childcare, I think it is hard to get popular traction for reform efforts that alter that model. But I think now we can find common ground with all citizens by openly challenging the perceived need for everyone to go to four years of college and, in doing so, begin to discover and document the different ways we express, develop, and use our knowledge for personal and work purposes throughout our lives.

Degree Not Worth The Debt

Some Straight Talk About College and Costs

"You can never have too much education because it is the key to economic success." I have challenged this notion for decades, following in the large footprints left on this topic by Illich, Holt, and others. However, when Paul Kruguman, a liberal op-ed writer for the NY Times and an economist writes, as he did on March 6, 2011:

The belief that education is becoming ever more important rests on the plausible-sounding notion that advances in technology increase job opportunities for those who work with information—loosely speaking, that computers help those who work with their minds, while hurting those who work with their hands.

Krugman then notes how this belief flies in the face of technological reality: "...any routine task—a category that includes many white-collar, nonmanual jobs—is in the firing line. Conversely, jobs that can't be carried out by following explicit rules—a category that includes many kinds of manual labor, from truck drivers to janitors—will tend to grow even in the face of technological progress." This is borne out by U.S. Department of Labor statistics: Among the top 10 occupations with the largest employment growth, 2008-18, only 2 require 4-year college degrees—accountants and post-secondary teachers. Overall, among the 30 jobs listed on this chart, I see just 8–10 out of the 30 jobs listed as requiring 4-year college degrees or higher.

Krugman notes how going to college is no longer a guarantee for a good job because "high-wage jobs performed by highly educated workers are, if anything, more "offshoreable" than jobs done by low-paid, less-educated workers."

The article also discusses how the middle-class is spending more and more money trying to get their children into, and graduated from, college at the same time the U.S. market for college graduates is probably shrinking. This is hardly news—in 1971 Dr. Ivar Berg's Education and Jobs: The Great Training Robbery (Beacon Press) warned about growing numbers of disgruntled college graduates who were overeducated, underpaid, and underemployed (sounds like Egypt today where 83% of college graduates are unemployed and have been well before the recent unrest)—but now that college debt has become a major source of income instability and disappointment for many it is finally being discussed in the mainstream media.

Homeschoolers and unschoolers have long questioned going to college as the primary goal of learning and perhaps now the time is emerging when our various reasons for not going, and the different paths we take to employment and learning instead of the conventional college path, will no longer be considered extreme reactions but sane responses. As Krugman notes, "So if we want a society of broadly shared prosperity, education isn't the answer—we'll have to go about building that society directly." I urge you to read Krugman's opinion piece, Degrees and Dollars, and to start a conversation with your friends and neighbors about what college is really worth today.

It's Time to Homeschool College

For decades I've been carrying a message from John Holt that has really come home to roost now that my children are college age: Our oldest has graduated college; our middle child hated college, left, and is working instead; our youngest starts college this fall. Plus I've been advising and consulting parents about how to get their nontraditionally educated children into college since the eighties. A popular speech of mine that we turned into booklet in the early nineties was titled: "Teenage Homeschoolers: College or Not?" wherein I argued against going to college just because you are 18 and can do so. I argued there must be better reasons for going than "because I can." But the message of John's that echoes more today than ever for me is this: college is among the chief enslaving institutions of America.

When Holt said this I believe he was thinking about graduates who spent time and money on degrees to work in fields they no longer enjoy but are now trapped by their mortgages and loans into staying. Now this critique is gaining traction outside the circle of alternative schooling, probably because the cost of higher education is so out of alignment with its benefits. Nonetheless, the conventional wisdom is we must send our kids to college so they can make more  money than high school graduates do. James Altucher, a Wall Street Journal writer, claims: "in my view, the entire college degree industry is a scam, a self-perpetuating Ponzi scheme that needs to stop right now." Here are two of the seven reasons not to go to college that Altucher makes that take the money argument on directly:

3. The differential in lifetime income between a college graduate and a non-college graduate over a 45 year career is approximately $800,000 (read on).

4. If I put that $200,000 that I would've spent per child to cover tuition costs, living expenses, books, etc. into bonds yielding just 3% (any muni bonds) and let it compound for 49 years (adding back in the 4 years of college), I get $851,000. So my kids can avoid college and still end up with the same amount in the worst case.

There are other good reasons not to go to college that he presents and I recommend reading the full article.