Thinking and Linking by Joanne Jacobs
It’s better in to live in your mother’s basement, drink beer and play video games all day than to major in English or sociology, go into debt and then live in the basement, says Aaron Clarey, author of Worthless: The Young Person’s Indispensable Guide to Choosing the Right Major.
MOOCs aren’t disruptive — unless they lead to a degree. It didn’t take long. Georgia Tech will partner with Udacity to offer an online master’s degree in computer science for $7,000, reports Forbes. The on-campus program costs $40,000.
Georgia Tech hopes to grow its master’s program from 300 students now to as many as 10,000 within three years, but expects to hire only eight new instructors.
The Student Right to Know Before You Go Act would let the Education Department track students through college and into the workforce, creating a federal database of remediation and graduation rates, salaries by major and program and success rates for recipients of Pell Grants and veterans’ benefits. Policymakers and consumers want to know. Privacy advocates hate the idea and some colleges oppose it too.
Does college pay? It will for the Stanford engineering graduate, but not for the fine arts major from an unselective college — and even less for dropouts. “With unemployment among college graduates at historic highs and outstanding student-loan debt at $1 trillion, the question families should be asking is whether it’s worth borrowing tens of thousands of dollars for a degree from Podunk U. if it’s just a ticket to a barista’s job at Starbucks,” writes Jeffrey Selingo. Meanwhile, workers with community college degrees in technical fields are doing quite well in the workforce.
Most of the fastest-growing jobs don’t require a degree, but don’t pay well either. Personal care and home health aides average less than $21,000 a year and “helpers” in construction aides average less than $30,000.
Is online learning for steerage passengers, while only the elite actually meet their professors? MOOC madness is raising questions.
App Academy‘s nine-week course in software coding is free — till students graduate and find a job. Then the for-profit takes 15 percent of their first year’s base pay,
an average of $12,000 per graduate. Graduates who aren’t hired within a year pay nothing.
Southern New Hampshire University’s College for America has no courses, credits or teachers. Helped by an online academic coach, students complete assignments that show their mastery of 120 “competencies,” such as distinguishing fact from opinion or conveying information through charts and graphs. Students can move at their own pace to earn an accredited associate degree, paying $1,250 every six months.
“The recession convinced many young American high-school graduates to take refuge in college instead of try their luck in a lousy job market,” reports the Wall Street Journal. But, now fewer high school graduates are going on to college, according to the Labor Department.
On 2012, 66.2 percent of recent graduates enrolled in college: The share of female graduates enrolling in college declined from 72.3 percent the year before to 71.3 percent. Men, who are lagging in college attendance, declined from 64.6 percent to 61.3 percent.
Some graduates think they can find jobs, though unemployment rates remain high — 34.4 percent for high school graduates who aren’t in school.
I suspect young people are more wary of borrowing for college, especially if they’re not strong students.
Does college pay? A new web site called College Risk Report asks the collegebound to enter their prospective college or university and their major, then estimates how long it would take a graduate to pay for a bachelor’s degree and graphs lifetime earnings for a bachelor’s, associate degree and a high school diploma.
A proposed New University of California would award credits and degrees to people who prove their mastery of subject matter by passing exams, regardless of whether they attended a class, studied online, learned on the job or read a bunch of books.
“Financial literacy” training doesn’t help people make better decisions, reports The Economist.
Suppose you had $100 in a savings account that paid an interest rate of 2% a year. If you leave the money in the account, how much would you have accumulated after five years: more than $102, exactly $102, or less than $102? And would an investor who received 1% interest when inflation was 2% see his spending power rise, fall or stay the same?
Only half of Americans aged over 50 gave the correct answers. In another study, 21 percent of those surveyed said their best retirement strategy was winning the lottery.
Financial education doesn’t help, the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland concludes. “Unfortunately, we do not find conclusive evidence that, in general, financial education programs do lead to greater financial knowledge and ultimately to better financial behaviour.”
U.S. students who’d taken personal finance or money management courses weren’t more financially savvy than those who hadn’t, according to a study by the Jump$tart Coalition for Personal Financial Literacy.
In another study, students “who had not taken a financial course were more likely to pay their credit card in full every month (avoiding fees and charges)” than those who’d studied the subject, reports The Economist.
Cleveland Fed researchers recommended teaching financial literacy to adults trying to buy a house or pay of credit card debts.
But . . . consumer enthusiasm for learning about finance is limited. When a free online financial-literacy course was offered to struggling credit-card borrowers, only 0.4% logged on to the website and just 0.03% completed the course. Those who choose to be educated about finance may be those who are already interested and relatively well-informed about it.
Nearly every proposal for rethinking student aid calls for doing a better job of informing students and parents about what they’re getting into when they take out college loans. But it’s not easy. Is college tuition an investment in productivity? A lifestyle expense? It depends on the student.
Student groups aren’t happy with President Obama’s proposed change to student loan interest rates. Linking the rate to the government’s cost of borrowing means today’s college students would pay very little, but future students could pay much higher rates. That’s assuming the economy improves.
Recent Comments