The Patriot Post® · Higher Education's Broken Promise?
Getting a four-year degree used to be the ticket to at least an upper-middle-class job. Indeed, if you wanted to move up the career ladder, a college degree was a nearly unquestioned must.
This idea of higher education being the ticket to realizing the American Dream caused Congress to expand the availability of low-interest loans for students. In this way, even students from poorer socioeconomic backgrounds could afford to go to college with the promise of rising up that economic ladder.
Well, as often happens when government do-gooders step in to “solve” a “problem,” their actions serve to make things even worse. A case in point: Thanks to low-interest loans, the cost of college has gone through the roof. Students are graduating with mountains of loan debt and are finding it difficult to get a good-paying job with which to pay off that debt.
For nearly four million lucky lottery winners, Joe Biden has stepped in to transfer $138 billion in student loan debt to the backs of taxpayers. That’s illegal and an unconstitutional usurpation of power, but even the Supreme Court “didn’t stop me,” he boasted recently.
Other college grads have a tougher slog. A recent survey of 60 million American workers found that a whopping 52% of college graduates within a year of finishing school are working jobs that don’t require a college education. To make matters even worse, 88% of these college grads are still working in jobs such as food service and retail even five years after graduating.
These are the growing numbers of the so-called “underemployed.” Ten years after earning a college degree, 45% still work in fields that don’t require college degrees, whereas 79% of college graduates who began their careers in jobs that required a college degree still work college-level jobs.
Why is this happening? Well, as many college graduates have learned the hard way, simply having a college degree doesn’t guarantee a college-level job. As it turns out, the specific degree actually matters. As West Virginia University political scientist R. Scott Crichlow points out, “While a college degree will substantially increase your income, some fields are wiser choices than others.”
Furthermore, a growing number of companies have begun eliminating college requirements for jobs, as they find they have to spend time training employees anyway for positions, and college does little to prepare them. As PublicSquare reported last November, 67% of 905 small business owners said that today’s college graduates lacked “relevant skills that today’s business community needs.”
RedBalloon’s unfortunately named CEO Andrew Crapuchettes contends, “A lot of students are wasting tens of thousands of dollars and years of their lives on meaningless college degrees.”
You don’t say. Is it any wonder that Biden’s student loan cancellation scheme is so attractive to so many college graduates saddled with so much student debt? After all, it beats flipping burgers alongside high school kids.
Targeting a career path before simply heading off to college is the wiser choice. If your chosen profession requires higher education, then by all means, go to college. But be mindful that there are other fulfilling career options that don’t require a four-year degree or a mountain of student loan debt.
Politicians love to tout their favorite one-size-fits-all solutions. But those solutions rarely work out for everyone. Rather, the rediscovery of that good old American Spirit needs to be preached and embraced. That spirit rejects the victimhood narrative and instead sees the rich and wonderful world of opportunities that this great nation affords to all who are willing to put in the work and chase that dream.
(Edited)