Quote Originally Posted by R2Dawg View Post
Dead on. My daughter is at MSU in engineering working her tail off and college is expensive but there are many majors that it is hard to justify the cost (engineering or medicine are not them). Many majors may have students get out making 25-35K a year. The model just doesn't give a return. While many are jealous of those kids who chose tough majors that make good money later, they don't want anything to do with the sacrifice it takes to get there. Just have the gov or someone give me the money.
A lot of those degrees still end up having a solid return because while the starting pay is not great, it allows them to compete for higher paying jobs as they move up. I know plenty of people that started out in the high 20's or low 30's fifteen years ago that are now making anywhere from ok money to really good money. What they are doing doesn't really require anything that they learned in college, but I think without exception, the employers require a degree as part of the job requirement. So for them, they end up getting an ok to really good return on their degree. Of course there are plenty of other people that started off there or even lower and didn't move up. Sometimes that's due to luck; sometimes that due to them not being good workers; a lot of times it's probably due to them not being somebody that should have been in college to begin with.

Of course the real problem is that we have so tightly tied college degrees to the job market. You get sued if you just hire based on tests showing generalized intelligence (or even particular intelligence/knowledge if you don't do it correctly), but you can hire based on degree and college GPA and be completely safe. Really messed up and inefficient system the government has managed to set up and support. And of course, per the norm, the government managed to inflict disproportionate harm on minorities while imposing rules and regulations ostensibly meant to help them.