If College Is An Investment, Should We Be Looking Closer At Returns?

Filed in archive Careers and Money , Kids on August 2, 2006

The scenario of the college student who wants to study 19th century literature while his or her parents are pushing for pre-med has been a staple of many a movie, book, or afterschool special. In general, you are supposed to side with the free-spirit student who doesn't care about money but wants to follow his passion.

Unfortunately, with the costs of college continuing to increase faster than parents' incomes, and less and less financial aid being available, a student who follows her passion without thought to how she'll pay the bills upon graduation could find herself knee-deep in debt. Recent books such as Generation Debt have documented the thousands of dollars in student loans that many graduates took on without a subsequent career path that would help them pay the loans off. Now they're working a second job at Starbucks just to keep up with the payments.

Everyone says college is an investment in your future. But if college is an investment, should students be looking closer at the expected returns? Can today's college student afford to entertain romantic notions about becoming a museum curator or an English Literature professor, or should they be thinking about fields that promise a monetary return on the college investment, i.e. business, medicine, law?

This article discusses who should pay for college, parents or kids (or both). One mother mentions the high tuition for her daughter as she pursues her religious studies degree. Other than those megachurch ministers and the guy who wrote The Da Vinci Code, most people aren't getting rich off of religion. So should she continue to pursue this course or drop religion for something more practical--say, accounting?

Somewhere along the line, something's got to give. Universities will find fewer students enrolling, or at least fewer enrolling for majors with little cash value. Perhaps they'll have to charge on a sliding scale based on the likelihood that a chosen path will lead to a lucrative career. Whatever the answer, schoold can't continue to jack up prices and expect students to pony up. And students can't expect their parents to pay for degrees that are little more than prerequisites for working at the local Italian restaurant.

In the meantime, a generation of students is suffering, and is being forced to ditch the romance in favor of cut-and-dried economics. Should they be looking solely at the return on their college investment? Can they afford not to?