What You Need to Know Before You Pick a Major or a University

Posted on November 27, 2013 // Leave a Comment

“Is College Worth It?” The answer is yes only if you chose wisely. College graduates had, on average, over $32,000 of debt upon graduation in the spring of 2013. The major on their degree had a lot to do with their ability to earn an attractive living and manage that debt.

Buzz TodaySource: American Institutes for Research. An analysis of the earnings of recent college graduates in five states finds that those who went to elite institutions do not necessarily earn higher salaries than their peers, that some certificates and associate degrees are far more lucrative than four year degrees, and that when it comes to science, technology, engineering and math (STEM), students who study biology or chemistry will earn far less than those in the other three fields.

The traditional sequence for individuals going to a college or university has been University – Major – Degree – Career. The reality is that for over half of those receiving a bachelor degree in America the sequence is actually more like: College – Major 1 – Major 2 – Major 3 – College 2 – Major 4 – Degree (finally) and then look for a job.

Has this been your experience? There a couple of things to observe about this typical sequence. The first thing is how much emphasis is placed on the reputation of the college or university. It is as though getting into a prestigious university is all one needs to do to have the golden ticket to a successful life. What we see in the BUZZ Today here is that this is not true.  The research shows that the major/career you select is far more important to your earnings future.

So if being accepted by an elite (highly selective university) does not assure you of economic success, what does it tell you?  Being accepted by a highly selective university tells you that you are among the smartest people in the country. That is nice to know this and does tend to make one feel good about ones self. But in the end, you are smart whether you go to university A or a less prestigious school B. Your smartness goes with you, it doesn’t stay with the university you decide to attend. The bottom line is that you do not have to pay the high tuition costs of the elite university when it comes to having the best chances of making a decent living. Conversely, you are not destined to a substandard living standard if you do not get to go to Harvard or Yale. What is far more important than where you go is what you study – your major.

The major you select is closely tied to the career you are targeting for yourself. To pick the right career you first must know “who you are” – something I discuss in detail in my book “Your Future is Calling.” I will defer a more detailed discussion of the “who you are” challenge for a later post. For now lets return to the career/major discussion.

The amount of earning power related to specific majors/degrees is truly amazing. Data from the very valuable web site CollegeMeasures is loaded with very important information about what specific majors and careers are actually worth in the real world. For now let me leave you with one direct comparison for bachelor graduates in the state of Virginia. On average, such graduates with a psychology degree (one of the most popular majors in American universities) had first year earnings of $29,040 compared to first year average earnings of $51,378 with an engineering degree.

In conclusion for this post:

1. You need to learn to prosper

2. What you study is far more important to your income than where you study.

3. You can save a lot of your education expenses by avoiding Major – Major – Major in combination with selecting your career/major before enrolling in any specific program or any university.

Filed Under: Adult learning, Career, College degrees, Debt, Elite universities // Tagged: , , , , , ,

How to Get Both Quality and Lower Cost in College – I

Posted on September 17, 2013 // Leave a Comment

Here is valuable information about how to have both lower education cost and still get the quality that you need to advance your career. Contrary to general opinion, quality and lower cost in higher education are not mutually exclusive. You can have both but you have to know how to select the university to enroll in.

Confused about what you need to do to both reduce your cost and get quality in higher education? It’s no wonder. The number of things you have to consider is mind boggling and there is not very good information available for you to make this important decision.

In the first part of this series I will share details you need about the most confusing part of this decision – quality. The cost savings come later.

Buzz Today Source: How College Affects Students: Volume 2 – A Third Decade of Research “Institutional Quality: academic expenditures per student, faculty-student ratio, percentage of faculty with Ph.D.s, tuition costs, reputational ratings, faculty salaries, and selectivity… Most have employed institutional selectivity as a single proxy measure for institutional quality.”

In Buzz Today we see how both the public and the researchers have viewed quality in higher education. In later postings of this series I will discuss more details about education quality. In those postings, I will share details on what education should be doing for you. For now, let’s stay with the common beliefs about university quality, most particularly, institutional selectivity.

Princeton University is ranked as the number one university in America by the US News and World. Princeton university is highly selective and becoming more so. At Princeton, the overall acceptance rate in 2014 for the class of 2017 was 7.29%. This is down from 9.9% in 2003. The selectivity is even more dramatic when we look at the details: 10,629 of the 26,498 applicants (40% of the total) had 4.0 grade point averages.

The truth is that, for working adults like you, Princeton University is not a feasible college choice for even if you had 4.0 grades and the money to pay the $40,170 annual cost. The point is that selectivity as a quality measure simply does not help you make the decisions you need to complete your education.

But wait! I have some good news for you. Even though selectivity has become the representation of quality in American higher education research indicates that it is not that important to the true quality of your education. Here is what the researchers tell us: “student body selectivity in and of itself may tell us little about institutional influences on general cognitive skills and intellectual growth.” In plain English, what this means is that you are not domed to an inferior education if you do not go to Princeton or Harvard.

What you need to look for to get a good education at a reasonable cost involves things other than institutional selectivity. In future posts I will share about things like cognitive skills, problem solving, communications skills and other true quality dimensions of higher education.

Filed Under: Adult learning, Career, College degrees, Debt, Elite universities, Price // Tagged: , , , ,

Why Doing Your Homework Is So Important

Posted on April 7, 2013 // Leave a Comment

In earlier blog posts we looked at why the traditional quality measures of high price and tight admissions selectivity provides little helpful information for adult learners making university and career decisions.  The example was the grand daddy of all high quality American Universities, Harvard University.

But even with the detailed look at what makes Harvard great, you are still left with little practical information about how to select a career and a university.  These decisions are both explored in detail in my book, Your Future is Calling.  In BUZZ Today we see a very practical case study for someone attending a school other than Harvard.   Buzz TodaySource: Hechinger Report     Joyce English was about to start studying toward an associate degree she hoped would lead to a job as a consultant to healthcare companies around Tacoma, Wash., where she lives. Then she discovered a database. English changed her mind and is now majoring in what she learned is the more lucrative field of business management at Pierce College.

The point of our discussion in this blog is that there is good information to help you select both a career and a college.  That information is more detailed and more specific to your decisions than the traditional data available in popular sources.

The Buzz Today source has specific information available in a study called “New Pressure on Colleges to Disclose Grad’s Earnings”.  Here are a few facts.

New data is available about career and college decisions.  I talk about them in Your Future is Calling.  (Note: Very detailed information about Pierce College for example, is available in Chapter 9 of the book titled: “How to Select the Right School”).   New data is becoming available.

In Virginia, graduates of four-year nursing programs earn more than twice as much as liberal-arts majors, on average, and graduates of the University of Richmond make almost 72 percent more than graduates of Hollins University. In Tennessee, majors in health professions make two and a half times what philosophy and religious-studies majors make, and graduates of the University of Memphis earn 13 percent more than graduates of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.

The point of this discussion is not to direct you to Virginia or Tennessee or even to a specific college or university.  The point of this discussion is to make the point that it does matter what you study and where you go to school. You need good information to make good choices.

While income is not the only thing to consider, it is an important consideration for over 90% of those surveyed.  In the end, your biggest challenge is to invest in education and a career that fits “who you are” but income is clearly a factor in those decisions.  The take away is to choose wisely based on solid information.

Filed Under: Adult learning, College degrees, Elite universities, Price, Quality // Tagged: , , , ,

Selecting a College or University – Part IV

Posted on April 2, 2013 // Leave a Comment

Selectivity

In an earlier post we looked at higher education quality in terms of price and selectivity.  That blog focused on price in particular.  Here we are taking a critical look at the second quality parameter – selectivity.  We return to the crème de crème of American higher education, Harvard University.  Buzz TodaySource:  The Harvard Crimson – An all time low 5.9 percent of applicants received offers to join Harvard’s class of 2016.  This marks the seventh consecutive year that Harvard’s admission rate has fallen (become more selective). 

We can see in the BUZZ Today that Harvard is proud of being highly selective. The university broadcasts its selectivity relative to its highly selective competitors like Yale and Princeton.  But the question is: “what does this high selectivity mean for the returning adult learner?”  Unfortunately, those of us who are mere mortals will never have the opportunity to go to Harvard.  What is the average adult learner to do?

Let me first provide some comfort when it comes to selectivity of admissions.  The fact is, that the selectivity is much more about the students attending the university than it is about the university itself.  To this you might say: “but hold on, these are some of the very smartest kids in the land!” To this I reply – True.  But to help you make your selection decision we need to know what this means for the highly selective university and more importantly, what this means for you.

First the University:  By having the option to make sure that those entering Harvard are the best of the best, Harvard University vastly increases the likelihood of those getting a degree from Harvard are the most successful graduates.  Salaries and public acclaim verify that success.

But that is not the entire story.  There is little research that definitively shows that the relative success of Harvard University graduates are the result of what they learned at school (relative to what is learned at other universities).  It is much more likely that the success is the result of the quality of the students entering Harvard.  As a result, we should not be surprised that these students remained among the best and brightest once they graduated from Harvard.

For the more average Joe or Jane, Harvard selectivity helps little in the decision about quality and what university to attend.  For more details see:   Your Future is Calling.

Filed Under: Adult learning, College degrees, Elite universities, Quality // Tagged: , , , , ,
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