Wendy Williams, 41, who works at Mom’s restaurant as a waitress and is a part-time accountant, told me her children are going to college "no matter what," a sentiment shared by many parents who put a premium on a formal education.
However, with the cost of college going through the stratosphere it is a good idea for each individual to sit back and ask themselves some serious questions about why do they want or need a college education. How will it help them in life? Will it really help them in a career and in what ways.
It is my belief that college has been oversold to the public. Educators seem to think that everyone should be sitting in a classroom somewhere soaking up the pearls of wisdom that their professors dribble out. For many this is simply not the case.
I believe that the typical Florida Community colleges such as Daytona State College perform a valuable service to the public by giving them an affordable means to determine how much and what type of higher education they really need and want without cramming a four-year program down their throats.
From a community college, a person can embark on a program that consists of just a few vocational courses, or an associate,s degree or get a great start on a four year degree. He or she can stop at any point in the process without any embarrassment.
Let’s look at the financial justification for going to college. It is published in a number of places that a college graduate makes on the order of a million dollars more over a working lifetime than a high school graduate. That sounds like a lot until you amortize over a 40-year working lifetime. On average, if you assume a 7 percent return on your money, you lose if you paid more than about $63,000 for your education. If you assume a 10 percent return on your money on average, you lose if paid more than $16,000 for your education.
Thus for some a college degree will not pay off monetarily as they struggle to pay off huge college loans while flipping burgers. Furthermore, you have to take into account the fact that the type of person who graduates from college would probably make more money than a high school graduate whether or not he went to college.
Of course, for many, the earning of a college degree gives them a lot of satisfaction and benefits that can’t be measured in terms of adding to their income potential. Each individual must consider carefully what kind and how much higher education he or she should have. He or she shouldn’t go into great debt to acquire a degree that he or she doesn’t really want or that will not be of much real use.
Most recruiters prefer to go after college graduates simply because they have gone through a filtering process. They have proven that they can complete a four year process successfully while competing with other bright people. The recruiters feel that the college graduate is less of a “risk” than a non college graduate.
This thought was clarified New Smyrna’s own Vernon Altman, one of our country’s giants in the world of corporate strategy. When he was asked what people learned in the top MBA schools that made them so valuable, Vernon replied, “It wasn’t what they learned that made them valuable it was the fact that they had competed with this countries brightest students and come out on top that made them valuable."
Mr. Altman went on to say, “We make sure they learn what they really need to know on the job.”
This idea can be generalized to state that almost everything you need to know on your job is learned on the job. A few professions are materially helped by higher education such as engineering, medicine, and the legal profession.
However, in all professions there is really no need for a college degree to perform the functions of the profession although a college education can often be very helpful.
The “necessity” is created by the licensing process that requires a college degree. The “necessity” is not created by reality.
Some illustrative examples would include New Smyrna’s C. Winston Smith who passed the Bar exam and was a very successful lawyer in New Smyrna Beach without ever seeing the inside of a law school.
Of course, we can’t forget Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak who have played important roles in leading us into the computer and information age.
They did this without going to or completing college. In case of a really big emergency, the City of New Smyrna could see surgeons called in who have never been to med school, but have received their training in the field of combat.
Many of these surgeons would turn out to be quite good. Personally, most of the knowledge I used in the field of communication engineering was learned after college. In fact a lot of it didn’t exist while I was in college.
Furthermore, I had a number of very valuable associates in my technical career who never saw the inside of a university.
Editor's Note: Peter Mallory earned his bachelor's and master's degrees in engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and he is a member of the Board of Trustees for Daytona State College.