
Originally Posted by
nina333
I've seen parents mortgage their future to pay for their kids' college education, sometimes a private college--four years at a brand name private college--when you count all outlays--almost $200,000 for four years.Even with financial aid that means not-rich people spending $100,000 PER CHILD. Even four years at a University of California campus, when you really add everything, is $100,000 for one kid. And the middle class is less likely to get financial aid at a public college, so that may be the same $100,000 per child.And the reality is - and I'm going to talk about this later -- most of them take longer than four years, so that $100,000 didn't cover it. Many students take five and six years.
Some students have financial problems and they have to work to continue going to school, so maybe they take five or six years or maybe they need to stop out or they decide to spend a semester in Europe or whatever. So, let's give them six years. What percent of students would you guess graduate from college within six years? Forty percent. Six out of ten never graduate. Again, to use the corporate metaphor, imagine a company that--out of every hundred products put on its assembly line--60 fell off the assembly line before it reached the end. How long would that company stay in business? Because we view higher education as an awesome institution rather than the rapacious business that it is, we don't think twice about it. We don't even ask that question.
Here are some of the things colleges do. Colleges are excellent at lying in statistics. They have more statisticians per square foot than anywhere else in the world and here is what they do. How many of you ever heard a college spout the following statistic: "We get twenty thousand applicants for four thousand slots in our freshman class." How many of you have heard that statistic? Nearly everybody. And what is the implication? The implication is what colleges want you to think -- they don't want you to think behind the ivy -- they want you just to think quickly. So you think, "Well, that basically means that the college admits 4,000 out of 20,000--it must be pretty hard to get into. Very deceptive and I'll explain to you why. Most students who get admitted to a college get admitted to many colleges. So they turn down most of them and only go to one. The typical college has what's called the yield rate of twenty to forty percent, that is, out of every 100 students they admit, only 20 to 40 show up. So if a college gets 20,000 applications, to get those 4,000 slots filled, they may have to admit 16,000 students. But most colleges don't want to give you that honest statistic: "We get 20,000 applicants and we admit 16,000. No. They use this very clever wording: "We get 20,000 applicants for 4,000 slots," to make themselves look selective.
Now let's take a look at statistics that colleges omit. Colleges, like any other business, realize that their product has to be commercial. And one of the ways that colleges make their product commercial is by offering majors that are in high demand by students, for example, journalism, art, and fashion design. If a student receives admission into a college's program such as journalism, it would seem reasonable for the student to assume that "If I major in journalism and I do a reasonably good job, I'll have a reasonable chance of making a reasonable living at it. Otherwise, why would the college offer such a major?"
Reasonable thinking, but not real. I was sitting on a top floor of the Time-Life building a couple of years ago with a number of the editors from one of the magazines, and we were talking about this question. One of the guys said, "It is unconscionable that colleges continue to allow students to enter the journalism major programs because only a tiny fraction will ever make even a subsistence living as a journalist."
There's nothing wrong with colleges doing that (admitting students into majors such as journalism) but there's everything wrong with not telling them what the odds are (of landing a job that pays at least a living wage.) Imagine for a moment that you went to a doctor and the doctor said, I'm going to prescribe a treatment for you and it will take you four to six years to complete, and it's going to cost you $65,000-$130,000, and the doctor did not tell you that the odds of the treatment working were one in eight. What would you do? You would sue and you would win in any court in the land. And yet, colleges routinely encourage people to take the medicine called a journalism major or a music major or a fashion design major and don't tell them that the odds are one in eight, thereby committing educational malpractice. Yet because it's college, America's revered icon, we don't even question it.
And how could colleges do that? What could be more important than choosing a college? It's the second largest purchase a person ever makes next to a home. Aren't prospective students entitled to decent consumer information? These are supposedly non-profit organizations, these colleges. I believe, instead of those glossy brochures that are the equivalent of new car brochures, we need to offer students the equivalent of a Consumer Reports evaluation on the college:
* With real statistics like candor about class size. Don't give me faculty-student ratio. Tell me what the real class size is likely to be for typical classes.
* Instead of B.S. statements about financial aid like, "We attempt to meet the full financial need of all students," let's have the facts: a chart that shows for every different income and asset category, how much cash financial aid you're going to get, how much loan you're going to get and how much you're going to have to pay out of your pocket. That way, families can really compare what it's going to actually cost to attend (College A vs. College B.)
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