Inflation is running around two percent. Colleges and universities increase their tuition about 8% annually, meaning that the cost of a college education is running 4x inflation and the real cost doubles every nine years.
Sadly, institutions of higher education have betrayed the public trust, grossly overinflating annual tuition costs because federal loan money flows as freely as opioids.
There are exceptions, but as a whole, universities have failed to deliver on their central promise to improve the quality of life for millions of its graduates who are not finding well-paying jobs related to their fields of study. And because they enter the world up to their ears in debt, they postpone buying homes and investing for their future. Managing personal finances and building wealth are not skill sets that universities routinely teach in school.
Rather, they encourage American families to go broke on useless electives.
From a recent report, The Permanent Detour, by the Strada Institute for the Future of Work, a nonprofit organization that analyzes the relationship between education and work, and Burning Glass Technologies, a career analytics company, here are some of the alarming and, yes, shameful statistics about new college grads:
After graduation, more than 40 percent of new college graduates take positions that don’t require any degree.
They are five times likelier to be working in the same position five years later, compared to the fortunate grads who were able to put their diploma to use immediately after graduation.
More than 20%, a whopping 1 in 5, still don’t work in a degree-demanding job a full decade after graduation.
Now that the workplace has typecast and pigeon-holed them, the impact of this first “temporary” no-degree-required job takes its toll, and a full decade later, 75% of these underemployed grads earn $10000 less annually than their well-placed counterparts who got jobs demanding any degree.
The average student debt in the United States of America has ballooned to a monstrous $39000.