A couple of weeks ago the FBI arrested a bunch of wealthy parents who had cheated and bribed their kids' way into elite colleges like Georgetown, UCLA, Yale, Stanford and USC. The media liked to emphasize the Hollywood aspect of the scandal by bandying about the names of two actresses (whom I'd never heard of), but this wasn't a Hollywood scandal: most of the parents involved were just wealthy billionaire businessmen.
To make it that much worse, one of the students was an "Instagram Influencer," who didn't really seem to want to go to college in the first place. She was taking up a slot at USC, but would much rather just spend all her time taking pictures of herself hawking products by Calvin Klein, Lulus, Tressemme, etc.
One particularly disgusting aspect of the scandal is how coaches took bribes to accept students who had never played the sports they coached. The man heading up the scam photoshopped the kids into sports action shots and fabricated fake awards on applications.
Which brings up the question: why do we have sports scholarships for colleges in the first place? Every year there are dozens of scandals with boosters and college coaches committing recruiting violations, players being arrested for sexual assault, and now student athletes are demanding salaries. The NCAA is a cesspool of corruption. Universities should be institutions of learning, not farm teams for the NFL and NBA.
But back to the scandal: the thing is, none of these wealthy kids need any kind of college degree to succeed: because their parents are stinking rich, they'll get everything they want handed to them, like Donald Trump. The only reason these kids were in fancy colleges was to stoke the parents' egos.
Today there's a story in the news about how these elite colleges have record low acceptance rates: Yale has 5.91%, USC 11%, Harvard 4.5%. What the headline doesn't mention, though the body of the article does, is that lots of kids apply to lots of colleges.
This is the scam: if large numbers of kids are applying to 20 colleges, sending applications to Harvard and Stanford just for kicks with no hope or intention of going there, the acceptance rate for these schools is completely meaningless. These schools are advertising these low acceptance rates to rationalize jacking up their tuition rates sky-high.
The question is, do you need a degree from one of these these high-falutin' colleges? Is an elite institution a requirement for success?
In general, a big fat no. In some fields, perhaps, the answer may be yes: every current Supreme Court justice has attended Harvard or Yale.
But that's the exception. I graduated from the University of Minnesota 40 years ago with a degree in Russian (with most of my coursework in computer science) and had no trouble getting a job. My wife took BS, MBA and master's degrees in Electrical Engineering from Minnesota, and worked in semiconductor design for companies like CDC and Honeywell. We were able to retire from corporate life after working full-time only 25 years.
Things are different now, you say. Not so much. I know a woman who graduated four years ago from Winona State (a small no-name college in Minnesota) with a degree in Information Sciences, and she got a job immediately at Medtronic, the big medical device manufacturer, for a high five-figure salary. She is already a senior analyst making six figures today.
Kids are stressing out too much about making it into big-name colleges. State and local colleges provide degrees that will let you earn a decent living even though they don't have the cachet of an Ivy League school.
The most important factor is not the school students choose, but their chosen field of study. They should pick a major that they excel at, which is in demand in the place where they want to live.
Sometimes it seems that every other kid I meet wants to be a veterinarian or a marine biologist. The thing is, vet school is very expensive, vets don't get paid a lot, the work is stressful, and they have to work weird hours. I personally know working vets, and it's a tough gig. Marine biologists aren't in all that much demand, and they need to work near the ocean.
If people love animals, they should get a dog, not a DVM.
Also, if kids aren't college bound, they shouldn't waste tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars for a degree from one of these bogus for-profit colleges, many of which are going bust these days (like ITT Technical Institute and Education Corporation of America). Many of these "schools" are just scams (a la Trump University and the Golf Academy of America). These are sadly still being pushed by Betsy DeVos, Trump's education secretary, who has a vested interest in such ventures.
Local community colleges and vo-tech schools are much better deals, and often credits are transferable to four-year institutions if students change their minds. These schools teach vital skills like programming and repairing industrial robots, which isn't glamorous, but is highly essential these days.
Finally, college just costs too much. When I went to college a Pell grant and a part-time job were enough to pay for it all. I didn't have to take out any loans. College doesn't have to be free, like so many Democratic politicians want it to be. However, every state college and university should set in-state tuition so that if students live at home and work part-time they can pay for it all without taking on debt.
Yeah, they won't have the "college experience" of living in a dorm, whining about cafeteria food, getting drunk out of their gourds and finding themselves naked on the mall at 6 AM Sunday morning.
But they'll have a degree and won't be in hock up to their eyeballs.
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