The Golden Ticket mindset: millennial college disconnect

My parents are in their late sixties. They went to college in the seventies and for them, that degree was golden. My mom went into computer science right as computers were appearing, and paid off her student loans almost overnight. My dad went the ever-secure route of engineering through Michigan State and now manages his own team at RDS.

And so, even though costs have skyrocketed, their belief that a college education was still a golden ticket to the middle class life was transmitted to me, and I approached college as if any degree from the prestigious U of M would give me smooth sailing from then on. What my parents failed to grasp, and what I was unable to grasp, was that the college investment has changed.

In my parents’ 20s, a college degree was rare and therefore valuable. In 1970, a little over one-tenth of the population over 25 had college degrees; that proportion has nearly tripled today. The investment was costly, but that investment would be returned many times over due to the job opportunities it afforded. College equaled job.

My oh-so-millennial situation is more amorphous, but few recognize it as such. People are still optimistic. They treat college like it is still this golden ticket to a job and a good life, when the truth is that only select concentrations and skills return the now extremely weighty investment that is a prestigious four-year college. No one told me when I was going in that I would need something specialized and marketable. I would rather have had my dreams crushed early before investing in them, than later when it's too late.

I agree with James Surowiecki’s idea that this is like a “higher education bubble”—a “cost disease”. The cost of a degree has been going up faster than peoples’ incomes, and Americans are borrowing money to spend more on an education than it is actually worth. Wages for college grads have fallen over the past decade, yet people have become more willing to pay for that four-year degree. The golden ticket mindset—generalized too all college—is still there, but the reality is not.

Inflation is the result. According to Vedder, we are turning out more college grads than there are professional occupations for them, and because the market is flooded, we have engaged in a costly credential inflation to certify job competency and in so doing have lowered the actual generalized worth of the bachelor’s degree.

But no one tells high school seniors this. There is a huge knowledge gap—students assume no gap exists between job availability and grads applying for jobs. Seniors should sit down and look at what they are planning to go into and whether or not a pricy university is expected to give them a return on their investment. If not, other routes toward employment and development of marketable skills might be the wiser use of the student’s time and their family’s money.

I say that and it sounds logical, yet due to this supply of grads creating demand in the market that allows bartenders to even require a BA, will a student be screwed without being able to slap that BA on a resume? Students are between a rock and a hard place when it comes to this. Students do not want to get saddled with the debt of a degree which isn’t worth the money. Students also do not want to hit the job market without a degree while a bachelor’s degree is the standard. College education is not the wisest decision for many, yet without it they are even worse off.

Because college education is a business, the market will hopefully eventually sort this out. But in the meantime, millennial grads are forced to slog through a shallow job market lugging their load of student debt, and, if they’re anything like me, they also have parents at the sidelines watching in confusion and disappointment.