I’m pleased as punch by the awesome discussion spurred by my last blog post!  I love tossing ideas out into the universe and then seeing what floats back.  After much discussion by a variety of people, I think a consensus has been reached and I thought I’d share it.

So far, whether or not a college education is valuable appears to be largely determined by how much debt you incur during the course of your studies.  One rule of thumb I found particularly helpful was the following:

If your annual income your first year out of school is not greater than or at the very least equal to the total amount of your student loans, your degree probably isn’t worth it.

So, if Aidan wants to go to university to study Russian literature, I’ll probably discourage the notion.  He can read all the Tolstoy and Dostoevsky he wants in his spare time without garnering thousands of dollars in debt for the privilege.

I heard from a lot of people who didn’t take on any debt while in college, and they all said they enjoyed college and found the experience very valuable.  Truthfully?  If I hadn’t had to work so much while in school and hadn’t graduated in so much debt, I probably would have enjoyed it a lot more too.

The people I talked to who graduated in debt, however, were a lot less glowing in their reviews of the experience.  One person cracked me up with her suggestion that we stand on the side of a freeway offramp with a sign that read, “I graduated with a liberal arts degree.  Any bit helps!”

As for the idea that a college degree is the new high school degree, I’m starting to wonder if that’s an idea propagated by college admissions departments.  I’ve just met and talked to so many people who are successful and never finished college, the argument doesn’t seem to hold water.

It stands to reason that if you interview well, network your tail off, and do your job well, you stand as much of a chance of getting hired as anyone who graduated college.  How else can you explain a college drop-out who makes $80,000 a year doing Web design existing in the same city as the college graduate earning $35,000 a year doing data entry?

The gist of the conclusion I’ve drawn from this discussion is that if someone else is footing the bill for your college education, study whatever you want and enjoy yourself.  If you’re signing your life away in exchange for college credits, though, you’d better make sure you’re majoring in something that’ll pay well.  Or, just get really used to the idea of using half your monthly income every month to pay for your student loans.

I have student loans.  Oodles of them.  My mother elected not to pay for my education because she didn’t want to have to pay for a college education for all of her kids, which is somewhat ironic because I’m the only one of the bunch who went to college.

In exchange for my student loans, the payments of which eat up a substantial amount of our monthly income, I have a degree in psychology from a respected institution.  And self respect and blah blah blah.

What I have to wonder is, what is really the value of that degree?  I know not everyone goes the whole graduate-get-a-job-get-married-have-beautiful-babies-stay-home-with-beautiful-babies route, so maybe this isn’t applicable to anyone but me, but I am curious: Was my college degree worth the tens of thousands of dollars I paid for it?

Wes and I were discussing this the other day and are at a bit of an impasse.  He went to college but didn’t graduate.  He started off studying music composition, left school to pursue an internship, started working full time, and never went back.  Then, when his sales career took a nosedive thanks to the economy, he went to a trade school, got the proper certifications, and now he makes way more than I ever will.

His education took him less than a year, cost a quarter as much as mine did, and he makes more than twice as much per year as I’ve ever made his first year out of school.

Obviously, Wes is not everybody (because he’s awesome), but if this kind of thing is possible, is it even worth it to get a four year degree if you’re paying for it yourself?

I suppose you could say that my degree enabled me to get a job out of college, and that if I hadn’t gotten that job, I never would have hated my job, started blogging, and then switched to blogging as a career.  I have to wonder, however, if I wouldn’t have found blogging some other way.  You certainly don’t need a degree to be a successful blogger.

The reason this is on my mind is, having one parent who graduated college and another parent who didn’t presents an odd example to our kids.  I mean, can I reasonably make a case that it’s important to graduate from college when I’m no longer sold on the value of a college education myself?

(This is obviously not an applicable discussion when applied to careers that require advanced degrees, such as doctors, therapists, lawyers, brain scientists, etc.)

My degree was fun to earn, and I learned a lot, but I can’t honestly say that college prepared me for the working world any more than any of the jobs I held during school.  I can tell you how to correctly cite an academic article in an APA style paper, but I have never used that skill outside a classroom.

What do you think?  Am I just jaded by huge student loan payments, or are college degrees worth it?

This discussion is continued in part 2, which you can read here.