College: a bad investment?

As a child, I grew up believing in a beautiful country of opportunity and promise, a nation of unequaled vision that urged its citizens to reach for their dreams and then gave them the resources to achieve nearly anything. I was taught that anyone who’s anyone had to go to college and that, in order to succeed, investing in my future was worth a little bit of debt.

A decade-and-a-half later, I’m realizing how very naive were those sentiments. No longer is expanding our horizons an investment, it’s a disaster. With college degrees costing more and more each year and tuition rising by the credit, it’s getting to be that some majors will never pay enough to recoup the cost of getting that degree.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the combined costs of undergraduate tuition and room and board rose a whopping 42 percent from 2001 to 2011. That number is adjusted for inflation, meaning today’s undergrads are getting royally screwed.

So every time your parents told you that you needed to go to college, they might have been right. That is, until the entire market for education grew nearly half again as expensive as it was at the time.

Sure, there are a plethora of reasons for this, including the fast pace of technology, the increased cost of skilled labor and all the pretty majors we have to choose from, not to mention all that construction happening around campus.

But while tuition is rising at light speed, many students aren’t finding jobs that pay anywhere near what they need to attack their monstrous debt. Students are ending up in underpaying or even minimum wage jobs to try to avoid drowning in interest. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics even shows that 15 percent of taxi drivers had a diploma in 2010 as compared to less than 1 percent in 1970, when the job was probably exactly the same.

To add insult to injury, many students who can’t find a quality job right out of college often have to defer their loans until they can find one. While that seems fine in theory, the compounding interest on their unsubsidized debt makes it a debilitating choice.

As that increasing debt accrues over short periods of time, running away from your loans later becomes an occupation graduates may face the rest of their lives. This fact is especially daunting given that student loan debt almost never gets absolved if you file for bankruptcy.

All those horrible thoughts aside, college is still generally a worthwhile investment in terms of long-term payoff, even if it is incredibly time-consuming and risky. As of January, people with only a high school diploma or less were nearly twice as likely as college graduates to be unemployed. So even if we’re miserable, we’re probably a little less miserable than people who decided not to go to college.

Perhaps one of the most important things to take away from such disheartening information is that we need to look at education differently. It’s not that all college is a bad investment; it’s just that it’s different today than it was even 10 years ago, and students have to wrestle more with financial debt—not because we’re frivolous credit card fiends, but because things actually cost much more than in previous generations.

Ultimately, it’s cute when people tell us education is one of those glorious gifts we absolutely need to have in order to live happily ever after. And by cute I mean insulting.

Anyone arrogant enough to tell a modern college student who has decades of debt to look forward to and no job options to be found can just go, well, work. The rest of us will sit in the closets we call apartments and use our diplomas as Pizza Schmizza placemats.