Monthly Archive for April, 2011

By, Malcolm Harris, n+1

“The Project On Student Debt estimates that the average college senior in 2009 graduated with $24,000 in outstanding loans. Last August, student loans surpassed credit cards as the nation’s single largest source of debt, edging ever closer to $1 trillion. Yet for all the moralizing about American consumer debt by both parties, no one dares call higher education a bad investment. The nearly axiomatic good of a university degree in American society has allowed a higher education bubble to expand to the point of bursting.

Since 1978, the price of tuition at US colleges has increased over 900 percent, 650 points above inflation. To put that number in perspective, housing prices, the bubble that nearly burst the US economy,  then the global one, increased only fifty points above the Consumer Price Index during those years. But while college applicants’ faith in the value of higher education has only increased, employers’ has declined. According to Richard Rothstein at The Economic Policy Institute, wages for college-educated workers outside of the inflated finance industry have stagnated or diminished. Unemployment has hit recent graduates especially hard, nearly doubling in the post-2007 recession. The result is that the most indebted generation in history is without the dependable jobs it needs to escape debt.”

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By: Lynn O’Shaughnessy, NY Times

“Several years ago my daughter Caitlin told me that she wanted to major in business. I would have been depressed by her decision to pursue what I consider to be a slacker major, but she added that she also planned to major in Spanish.

Caitlin is graduating from a liberal arts college in Pennsylvania next month, and I emailed her today to ask which was harder during the past four years — her business classes or her Spanish courses. Her reply was “Spanish hands down.”

For four years she had to think, talk, write and read in a foreign language. In contrast to business (with the exception of accounting and finance), it’s far more difficult to coast if you major in the liberal arts or sciences. My son, who is studying math and physics at a college in Wisconsin, told me recently that he spent seven hours one day working with a friend on eight math homework problems. He wasn’t so much complaining as he was in awe that he could work so hard.”

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