If you’re a parent of a recent college graduate, still smarting from the $200,000 expense, and the kid has turned out to be unemployable, it may be worth a visit to Glenn Beck’s Wikipedia biography before shelling out for the younger sibling’s college degree. It seems that Glenn Beck graduated high school and never enrolled in college (though as a 32-year-old he signed up for a single class at Yale). Wikipedia shows that he has a “salary” of $32 million per year.
[In case anyone is motivated to ask, I am not a Glenn Beck fan. I have only seen parts of his show a few times while in various aviation facilities, all of which seem to have Fox News playing in the pilot lounges. This blog entry was prompted by a friend claiming that Glenn Beck was a Yale graduate, which struck me as unlikely based on what I’d seen of his show. Regardless of his achievements as a TV personality, I am very impressed by his return on investment in education!]
Phil,
The ability to entertain others will always reign supreme in
today’s world. Forget about erudition, IQ and the like, if you can
capture the public’s attention (and it doesn’t take anything
particularly inventive to do so) you can write your own ticket.
I am amazed that we now have people who are referred to as
“famous for being famous”. Every thime I read that quote I
recall the quote attributed to P.T. Barnum…
Hm. I remember in your Women and Science essay you wrote very eloquently about the risks of young people getting a warped perception: “I can’t decide if I want to be a scientist like James Watson, a musician like Britney Spears, or an actor like Harrison Ford.”
So, isn’t arguing that parents should consider encouraging their children to become “a TV personality like Glenn Beck” instead of going to college exactly the same fallacy? Are you going to encourage them to start playing the lottery too?
and we add..
LeBreon James and other associated NBA, NFL players
Richard Branson
Kirk Kekorian..and I am sure we could go on and on…..
JJD – Knowin’ who the smart one’s are….
Chris: I wasn’t pointing this out as a matter of practical career advice if for no other reason than not every American can earn $32 million/year. Mostly I think it is ironic that graduates of elite colleges cannot get jobs while this Beck guy makes $32M. It is perhaps good food for thought on what exactly students are getting in exchange for the $200,000+ that elite colleges are charging.
There can should be only one Glenn Beck.
Forget about elite colleges, even supposedly everyman colleges such as Northeastern (my Alma Mater) have costs shooting through the roof. Good luck to anyone who shells out approximately $150K for an undergrad ComSci degree and then has to find a job paying at most $70-75K for being an IT cubicle dweller. If they’re lucky they’ll find the job.
Subsidized student loans were supposed to make education cheaper. Instead what they’ve done is to make it easier for schools and colleges to provide five-star facilities and ladle on the ancillaries, while increasing the cost of tuition. Students and their parents confuse cash flow with cost, borrow heavily and postpone their problems of repayment for another day.
Certainly seems like every FBO lounge I’ve been in has had the TV tuned to Fox News. The only general respite, is in the later evening hours when the Owners/Senior staff have gone home for the day, and the line guys invariably tune it over to ESPN.
You know better than to argue from anecdotes. Bill Gates is a much better return on investment for quitting school argument anyway.
To truly speak to this issue, you would want to cite figures comparing the financial success of otherwise similar people who went to various schools vs. those who did not.
I think the issue is what is the distribution of incomes after education expenditure, ideally adjusting for debt.
It might well be that the Ivy league is overpriced but one guy earning 32M despite no college education does not mean that the median income of college educated people is lower of those who left primary school unfinished, though it might not be higher — in fact if money earning is all that one cares about education might not be needed if it can be substituted buy hard work and a good plan (and good luck).
Having said that, given the cost of education in the US it might well be that the median income adjusted for debt of college educated people is less than that, adjusted for debt, of illegal immigrants from Elbonia.
Brad: My posting was not meant to be a scholarly study of the return on investment from different forms of education. I don’t think the other readers are so dense that they need you to point out that extrapolating from a sample of one to a country of 310 million is not statistically valid.
That said, Bill Gates is not in remotely the same league as Glenn Beck. Bill Gates dutifully applied to and then enrolled at Harvard. There are plenty of very successful college dropouts of Glenn Beck’s age, but I don’t know that there are in fact that many who never started down the officially sanctioned path.
I like to estimate college costs using a state school. I use NIU for my purposes because that is where I went and the costs for other Illinois public universities are similar. The current yearly cost is $11,674.16. You can take 18 credit hours per sememster at this cost and easily get out in 7 semesters and save half a year’s costs. Plus DeKalb is a cheap town. Even with a reasonable room and board plan if you want to stay on campus, it’s $21,424.16 a year.
http://www.niu.edu/bursar/tuition/estimator.shtml
One thing I’ve noticed about a lot of 4 year degree programs is that the schools tend to structure the course offerings and prerequisite requirements so that you pretty much have to go 8 semesters. Some courses are only offered fall or spring. If you don’t take a core course this fall, you must wait until next fall to take it, pushing all classes that depend on that course as a prerequisite back a year. I think some of this scheduling has more to do with making sure the school gets 8 semesters worth of tuition and less to do with good education.
Where is the online “Standard” College that can provide undergrad instruction at a minimal cost, especially in technical fields such as engineering, math, science, CompSci, etc? The textbook for my Deformable Bodies engineering class 20 years ago was exactly the same as the one my father had from his college days 20 years before that, only updated with metric units. It’s the same one in use in the course today. Why not create standard courses on subjects like these that don’t really change over time?
I think it might be useful for the government or a philanthropic organization to produce top quality, free use, online degree programs, especially in the technical areas. Sort of an “OpenOffice” competition to the “MS Office” of the normal university system. University of Phoenix is an example, but their tuition is significant. Assuming the market would respect the degrees offered by this program (which they should if the program is rigorous enough), it would allow anyone with ability to educate themselves with almost no investment other than their own time, which they could use flexibly. Online tutoring could be had for a price. The student could earn a useful degree while backpacking through Europe with his laptop. The student loan industry (subsidized by us) would dry up.
It may be worth going to Harvard just for the doors that open when you can say, “I have a Harvard degree.” But frankly, I think the academic education offered by most universities could be gained at a much, much lower cost to the individual and society as a whole.
I’m pretty sure Rush Limbaugh’s formal education consists of one semester of a Junior College.
Yet he’s a clean and articulate formerly-fat white guy who manages to make mega-bucks while driving my liberal friends insane.
Jim: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rush_Limbaugh#Education_and_Vietnam_draft confirms your theory. Sadly the Wikipedia article does not have a “salary” like Glenn Beck’s.
Note to other commenters: It makes my life a lot easier if you hit Google and Wikipedia and include a link rather than saying “I’m pretty sure”.