Is college still the path to success?

Here is another viewpoint on the education topic that I continue to cover [November 3rd 2011 Whats Your Kid Getting From College].  With the cost of education in bubble territory, unemployment up, the prospects of gaining an adequate return on your investment people need to take a serious look at weather college is still the path of success.


In this piece Is College still the Path to Success? posted on MSN.com by US News & World Reports the article takes a look at both sides of the debate.  My personal belief is that a person must weight the return on investment as I keep noting as to weather or not college is the right path.  If you aren't able to make a wage high enough to pay for the costs let alone a position in the field that you want or are studying for then how does college make sense?  Fortunately if you are planning on sending your kids or other family members to college there are a plethora of ways to save for it.  This is where our firm can help cut through all of the varying options that people can face.  There are quite a few tax implications that can either help or hurt your savings goals and plans.


Remember that paying $100k for college just to have your child find out what they want to be is an extremely expensive proposition.


From the article;

• In "The Education of Millionaires," Michael Ellsberg argues that many young people would be better off skipping college altogether and going into business for themselves. "For the typical kid who isn't really sure what they want to do . . . and who just wants a general introduction to becoming an adult, $50,000 a year is a very expensive price to pay for that," he says. His own degree from Brown University, he says, proved useless in the real world. In fact, he says his experience there made him a worse writer. Many of the most successful people in today's economy skipped college in favor of self-education, he writes.
• Businessman and philanthropist Peter Thiel recently launched a fellowship program for entrepreneurial young people; the $100,000, two-year fellowship allows young people to pursue business ideas instead of going to college. One of the first recipients was Dale Stephens, the founder of the website uncollege.org, which encourages self-starters to look for alternatives to a traditional college education.
• Richard Vedder of the American Enterprise Institute has argued that colleges are failing to educate students while getting more and more expensive. Andrew Sum, an economics professor at Northeastern University, has pointed out that many young college graduates, age 25 and younger, wind up taking jobs in customer service and retail that don't make use of their college degrees, while these students are still paying dearly for them.
• But Ellsberg argues that's not a good enough reason to pay tens of thousands of dollars in tuition, and also says studies showing that unemployment rates are much higher for those without a college degree are misleading. "Correlation is not causation. . . . The fact that people who do better tend to also have college degrees doesn't necessarily mean that (the degrees) caused their success, it just means that smarter and more ambitious people tend to go to college. So, if you're one of those people, you should question whether you need to spend $200,000," he says. "What if instead, you start a business? Then you could have a whole portfolio to show potential employees," he adds.
• Ellsberg acknowledges that in certain training-intense fields, such as medicine or law, a college degree is necessary. But for motivated young people who plan to go into business, art, or technology, there are better and cheaper ways to learn the necessary skills, he says.