As a child, I knew I was going to go to college. My father was the son of immigrants and had worked a trade since the day he graduated high school. For him, the American dream is about generational progress; he would do better than his father and I would do better than him. He would marry into a prominent and well educated family and he would dedicate his whole self to his wife and children: working 50-60 hour weeks despite a diagnosis of Multiple Sclerosis and constant, crippling pain.
My mother has two post-secondary degrees and is brilliant in her own right. She instilled in her children a love for learning and an appreciation of the benefits of education. To my parents, hard work, knowledge, and sacrifice were the keys to success and college embodied all three of these ideals. In this household, there was never any real debate as to whether I would pursue a collegiate education.
But there should have been some. After all, my mother is severely overeducated for her job as a paralegal and my father has been able to maintain steady employment, support his family, and build a solid career, all without a college degree.
Let me drop some numbers on you: only 38% of recent graduates agreed that their college education was worth the cost, Outstanding student loan balances reached $1.2 trillion in the fourth quarter of 2015, and the class of 2016 was set to graduate with an average $37,172 in student loan debt. 10.5% of recent college graduates are without work and 14.9% are underemployed, meaning they are overqualified for the position they currently occupy. On top of all this, Tuition has been rising at nearly three times the rate of inflation in recent years, far outpacing economic growth and rising incomes.
Once upon a time, a college education was a guarantor of prosperity. A degree was like a ticket promising safe passage into the middle class and beyond. A post-secondary education was viewed as something akin to a remedy all woes. This is the fairy tale we were all raised on and took as gospel. A great lie sold to us by our families, our teachers, our educational institutions, and society itself.
Going in to my senior year, this information is as depressing as it is foreboding. In May, I will graduate with a degree in political science and approximately $27,000 dollars in debt. In November, I will receive my first payment notice for my student loans. The unemployment rate for recent graduates in my major is north of 10% and should I pursue a graduate degree in law or political science, those numbers are even higher.
I now ask myself “what if?” What if I hadn’t gone to college? What if I had been pragmatic instead of idealistic? What if I had followed in my father’s footsteps and joined the international brotherhood of electrical workers? What if I hadn’t made the decision to bury myself in debt? I would be a fourth year electrical apprentice making north of 30,000 a year and well on my way to a stable and fruitful career. I would be living on my own without a crushing burden of debt looming on the horizon.
It may be too early to say with any certainty whether college has been worth it but right now it certainly does not seem so.
Michael O'Malley is a senior studying Political Science at Ohio University. How do you feel about the price of higher education? Email your thoughts to Michael at mm913812@ohio.edu.
