The problem is that the BS/BA is becoming so watered down that its value has declined rapidly.
And the price tag has gone up significantly and continues to rise. This seems to be a market effect of cheap student loans, similar to the lending situation we are still dealing with in the housing market.
Schools couldn't possibly charge what they charge without the various government-administered aid programs.
I am seeing Master's Degrees pop as requirements for positions that used to require a BS/BA.
This is also having a detrimental effect in that most folks are running up significant personal debt to reach this goal just to have a "good job", but they're stifled in their ability to take any significant risks with their knowledge once they land that job in this soft economy because they badly need the job to pay on those student loans for 20 years.
You used to be able to tough out a few lean years with a Masters degree (when they meant something) and your pay would grow significantly as you got a few year's experience under your belt. Now you're going after jobs that once only required a "real" BS/BA and making that salary to pay off the Masters.
Entrepreneur types could "work their way up" in most companies years ago too. Many places were more than happy to hire and train upper people from within. You don't see that nearly as much, anymore.
They'll take the MBA with no experience to manage a technical division or department over someone who worked every job from the bottom up. And then they'll wonder why the staff is unmotivated to work for an Excel-junkie who has no idea what the department even truly does for a living, but pushes every new thing they read about in a trade rag.
It's utterly broken, fiscally and motivation-wise. Once you have that middle-class job, you no longer qualify for the aid or loans unless the price tags are even higher. Vicious cycle. You're not going back at that point. Not if you're not going to make more than a 10% raise for a $50K additional degree. You might go for personal mental enrichment, but fiscally it's not a good deal if you've already worked for the "right" places and have good resume' credentials via real-world experience.
Even more sickening is that there's thousands of MBAs who come out of school who can't figure this out.
If your life itself can't turn a "profit" on your balance sheet by age 30, you're not exactly going to be living the traditional "American Dream" lifestyle without adding even more personal debt.
Then what? Go get your PhD on even bigger loans? It just doesn't make any fiscal sense.
Not saying the no-degree life is necessarily better, which is where I've lived my whole life. I always had to get stuff done faster, cheaper, and better than my "credentialed" counterparts in IT. But they always seem surprised at my ability to fix damn near anything. It's because I had to.
They give up if it's not in a book or they implement stuff that sounds great on paper that's a god-awful nightmare to maintain in the real-world and usually far too complex versus the actual business need. At least in IT, anyway. You sit there wondering if anyone ever explained to them that applying that stuff from critical thinking or logic courses is supposed to be done to their designs.
That's certainly one thing college is poor at teaching... That anyone can learn or do anything with or without the school. It may be harder without the school, but self discipline gets you further than any piece of paper, most of the time.
Especially after you have a few years and a reputation of better than average work.
Something else is going on, because our "highly educated" society has piles and piles of public service announcements with such gems as "Don't ever shake a baby" and other great ones that are aired with quite some frequency, which just stops me in my tracks while my jaw opens in surprise at the utter levels of true stupidity we still embrace here. Culturally we still shun knowledge and ability as "too hard" and people actually agree. There's something really wrong with that.
I'd happily go back and get a PhD on someone else's dime if I ever hit a bad job patch ever again. Student loans are the only loans that are foregiven at death and not paid for by the estate of the deceased. Getting a couple of degrees for fun in my 70s might be a fun way to shaft someone else with a huge bill after I'm dead.
