Photo Courtesy of cramster.com
It’s graduation season. This time of year media outlets pour out stories about the trials and tribulations of college life.
There will be coverage of famous and favorite college speakers and tales of job search woes for recent graduates.
Here’s a little twist to the conventional college season verbiage…
It’s a case where two media outlets are in a sparring match over the value of a college education.
In this corner, you have the Washington Post who recently published a rather compelling chart about college graduates earnings.
The chart (worth checking out below) was based on research from Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workplace. It displays ( among other things)
The typical lifetime earnings of engineering and computer science majors are 50 percent higher than those of humanities majors
The Atlantic magazine saw this chart and thought a different spin to the information was needed. The magazine asserts it is incorrect to value of a university degree solely by the money it generates over time. But the information in the chart is useful.
The Atlantic salutes the folks at Georgetown for their valuable research and its efforts to quatify in numbers the value of a college degree.
We agree with the magazine’s assertion that more information about colleges and their graduates should be made available. Facts about success rates of graduates can help inform current students and applicants of the value of their $100,000+ investment.
Our friends at the Blighty blog post at The Economist online have another take on college success.
They raise a point that children of the wealthiest parents may have more than a financial advantage over other college students.
They suggest better-off kids may have picked up other qualities like perseverance, gumption, and good-heartedness from their privileged upbringing.
“Non-cognitive skills are just as important as cognitive ability: the decisions that are most important in making people happy are the ones in which reason plays little or no part.”
The blog cites the work of psychologist Walter Mischel and his marshmallow experiment .
Home stability and domestic cultural norms should be taken into account alongside monetary means when it comes to assessing how well-adjusted a child becomes as an adult. These are also factors that are often times forgotten on national standardized tests.
“Those who waited longest scored higher in academic tests at school, were much less likely to drop out of university and earned substantially higher incomes than those who gobbled up the sweet straight away.”
How do you judge the success of a college degree?
