Tuition and College Quality

For better or worse Americans associate high quality with high price. It’s true for colleges and universities. The higher the tuition the higher the implied quality. The fact is that most students do not pay the list tuition and there are many high quality schools with reasonable tuition.

How to Avoid the Worst Outcome: “I Hate My Job”

If you hate your job you’re not alone. Seventy percent of Americans actively dislike their job or are not excited about what they are doing with their lives. That is pretty sad. Many solutions today focus on fixing the job with such things as access to catered meals, a ping pong table or free massages.

Buzz Today Source: CNBC/Gallup: Just 30 percent of employees are engaged and inspired at work, according to Gallup’s 2013 State of the American Workplace Report, which surveyed more than 150,000 full- and part-time workers during 2012. A little more than half of workers (52 percent) have a perpetual case of the Mondays—they’re present, but not particularly excited about their job. The remaining 18 percent are actively disengaged, roaming the halls spreading discontent.

Google is often cited as the icon for the happy work environment. 84 percent of the Google workforce has a high level of job satisfaction, one of the highest percentages in the Fortune 500. It helps that the average salary at Google is $107,000 per year. But money, free gourmet food, kindergartens and gyms and free time to work on personal projects is not the only story at Google. Google invests lots of effort to make sure that they hire right people in the first place.

Unless you already work for Google their work place solution is not available to you. But that doesn’t mean that you don’t have good options available. You have to change what you do at the beginning, not after you have a degree and begin to look for a job. The forty five year old with a college education who ends up with a degree and a job they (you) hate, most often takes the traditional path to education.

That traditional path begins with the way education decisions are made in our society today. The example here does not describe 100% of the cases but it is true for the majority. And it is likely it will be true for you unless you do something about it before enrolling in a degree program. The first education decision is typically the selection of a college/university to attend. The assumption is: “If I enroll in the most selective university possible I will have the best chance for career success”. This critical assumption is wrong. When it comes to your pay, what you study in college is more important than where you go to school.

Once enrolled in the university of choice, enrolled students try to figure out what to study – a sequence I call Major – Major – Major in my book “Your Future is Calling.” And it is here where the “I Hate My Job” trap begins to snap shut. Desperate and running out of student loans, the typical student will feel an urge to just get a degree and then look for a job. The last question being asked is whether the degree/job fits what I call “who they are”. The result is the forty five year old with a big mortgage, auto loans, kids in school, family obligations and a decreasing number of options to deal with the sad fact that they hate the job they ended up taking.

It’s no wonder so many hate their jobs. Often the job taken is the desperation decision at the end of a string of choices that started at the wrong point in the first place. To avoid this sad state of affairs you need to reverse the sequence.

Rather than beginning with the decision to attend a specific college or university, a better path is to begin with understanding “who you are” in the first place. From there, the best sequence is to select a career based on the match between “who you are” and future career prospects. The selection of a major to prepare you for the career that fits “who you are” is next. Last comes the choice of the university with the best major – tuition cost combination.

In the end, your goal is to immensely improve the odds that as a forty-five year old your state of mind is not “I hate my job”. You want to be able to say what the vast majority of employees at Google say, namely “I love my job”. There are actually people in the world who say that everyday. Your main goal should be to become one of them.

Oh, by the way, there’s an outcome at least tied for worst with “I hate my job”. It’s having huge student debt, a worthless degree and no job at all. My advice is to avoid this outcome at all costs. Work conditions at Google cannot help you here. Only you, and the decisions you make today, can produce the better outcome. GO FOR IT!

Loans for School – How to Keep Your Student Debt Low

The President is right, money you spend on your education is the best investment you will ever make. It is also true that excessive student debt can make paying back the cost of that education a painful burden. But there are alternatives. The best way to get your education and keep your student debt low is to not take on the school loans in the first place. Sounds too easy you say? It’s easier than you think – if you know the facts.

In Buzz Today you can see the way the press is dealing with the challenges of getting an education today. It is a fact that tuition costs can outstrip your paycheck…if you don’t do something different. The old approach of simply enrolling in any college, showing up and taking out piles of student loans will bury you in debt. Buzz Today Source: NPR Obama says higher education is the best investment young people can make in their future, but with tuition costs outstripping paychecks, many families face an unpleasant choice between a heavy debt load or skipping college altogether.

What you need to do is ignore the battle between colleges and the politicians over the rapidly rising cost of college tuition. There isn’t anything you can do about that. Just for the record, I agree with those who say that the rising college tuition is excessive and out of control.

What you can do is take actions that serve your needs even as these political battles rage around us. Here are some tips I talk about in Your Future is Calling. They will help you keep the cost of that important education down, eliminating your need to take on crushing student debt in the first place.

1. The reduction in tuition paid on average is actually about 45% below the tuition price published on the college WEG site. For information on the actual tuition paid at all but a handful of American universities go to the government site COLLEGENavigator. On this site you can see what students enrolled at you favorite college actually paid. You should not pay more. You will if you do not have these facts.

2. The first two years of college curriculum cover what educators call the “General Education”(gen ed) core. Regional accrediting bodies in American require these courses. Notice what these requirements are called – general education. What this means is that how individual colleges fulfill these requirements are general, that is, about the same in every college. This means that you can take these requirements about anywhere, including at a low cost community college, and then transfer those credits to the college of your all important area of concentration. Not every college will accept credits from just any school, but many do. The facts you need to know are which colleges will accept what transfer credits from what source. You need to ask. Don’t just enroll.

3. Many college students incur excess debt through what I call Major, Major, Major. This happens when you enroll in college, take high cost gen ed, randomly select a major, decide its not for you, then select a second major and even a third major. Every time you do this you take longer to graduate and in so doing, increase your student debt. To avoid this, you need the facts about what career fits “who you are”. The career choices are detailed on O*NET

The President is right that an education is the most important thing you can do for yourself and your loved ones. But the Buzz Today insert states a false choice. There are alternatives to high debt or no degree. You just have to have the facts to make the right choices before you incur student debt.

50% to 65% Off List Price – SALE!

The headline today is one you would expect to see from an aggressive retailer promoting an out of season sale on pants and shirts. The surprising thing is that this headline is about tuition and fees at American Colleges and Universities. The information applies to Four Year Public Universities, Four Year Private Nonprofit Universities and Private For-Profit Universities.

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Buzz Today Source: College Board Submission for the record: US House of Representatives – House Committee on Veteran’s Affairs

              2012 – 2013                 Tuition and Fees

Published      Net         Discount

$8,660       $ 2,910        66%     Public Four Year in State

$29,060    $13,380       54%     Private Nonprofit Four Year

$15,170     $ 4,950        67%     Private For-Profit  Four Year

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In the BUZZ Today data we can see a number of things about the cost of attending an American college or University.  We can draw several important implications from the data.

First of all, which university you decide to attend has a very significant impact on the amount you will end up paying and in turn, the size of your student debt once you get your degree. Clearly attending a private or for-profit university represents several times the cost of an in state education. Just how much more it costs is not always obvious without the data. Details on published tuition and fees for every accredited college in America is available at COLLEGENavigator, a service of the US Department of Labor. How to interpret the extensive data available at that WEB site is available in Your Future is Calling.

The second important information in BUZZ Today is how much students are actually paying to get their education. There is a lot of attention paid to the increases in the published tuition and fees at universities. These are the numbers referenced when people say that college costs are increasing faster than the rate of inflation.

While these increases are real and not sustainable over the long run, they do reflect a challenge for learners like you and our nation. We cannot afford to have learning costs increasing at such a high rate.

But it is not the headline grabbing increases that I want to leave with you here. What is most important in this data is the SALE! stated in the headline of this post. Unlike the SALE sticker price on the tag attached to the pants and shirts in the retail store, the discount in education is not well publicized. Unless you ask, you will never know what the best price available for your education actually could be. This is extremely important when it comes to managing your student debt. But this information is even more important to your decision about which specific university to actually attend.

To manage this reality in your education decisions it is extremely important that you know the actual facts and every bit as important, what to do with those facts once you have them. For the to do list on how to mover forward, see the Your Future path in the pages of Your Future is Calling. In the end, it is indeed your future that you are determining.