Take a look at this article in Forbes, assuring everyone that they may be better served not going to college. Yes, indeed! You are better served not going to college, and that you should invest the tuition money while you work your way to the top - that is their conclusion. Well, that sounds questionable, but their logic must be sound, I mean this is Forbes, right? Excuse me while I whip out my enzyme…

Certainly some jobs–medical doctors and university professors–require formal education. But many do not, and between the Internet and an excellent public library system, most Americans can learn pretty much anything for a nominal fee. By all means, go to college if you want the “university experience,” but don’t spend all that cash just on the assumption that it will lead you to a higher-paying job.

The perfect way to start this post is to see how they ended their article. Note the denigrating quotations around “university experience,” and the lip service to higher education because *whoa* doctors need to know what they are doing. Yes, there’s a lot of information in libraries and on the internet, and all you need to be is determined and you can do it, right? Now, let’s take a look at their five pieces of evidence that support this conclusion.

  1. You’ll be losing four working years.
    This argument gets tossed around a bit, but it is not very substantive. For example, it assumes that you will not be working during college, or that you don’t get scholarships to help you out. For the purposes of their overall argument, it only makes sense if you do not earn any more money after you get out of college than before, or that you didn’t really need to go to college in the first place. Also, not every career and corresponding college are the same. One could go to a 1 or 2-year technical or trade school that is designed around particular occupations. That’s what my cousin (Karl W. Mogel, I kid you not) did. Now he works on diesel tractor engines, making plenty more than if he started out as a lube tech and tried to work his way up. Their statement that you will automatically be able to move up in any career with experience alone doesn’t match up with many careers. Many jobs require the background knowledge that you gain in higher education, and some pay you depending upon your education, rather than mere years in the business. Next, please.
  2. You won’t neccessarily earn less money. College grads earn an average 62% more over the course of their careers than high school grads. But economist Robert Reischauer of the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., argues that those numbers are skewed by the fact that smarter kids are more likely to go to college in the first place. In other words, the profitability of higher education is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
    Oh, please! First, the fact that smarter people tend to go to college in the first place does not negate the education that people get while at college. In other words, while trying to argue that no one needs college, they have to pin this statistic on something else. By the way, there are a lot of people in college that aren’t that smart, yet, they gain experience and knowledge that helps them get into successful careers. But wait, if someone at a well-known think tank such as the Brookings Institute suggests an explanation, there might be something to it. Well, taking a look, Robert Reischauer is not at the Brookings Institute, at least anymore. He left to become the president of the Urban Institute in February 2000. It appears that Forbes isn’t very good at doing research, considering that it has been six years since Reischauer was at Brookings.
    I was not able to find anything about this claim of his, but take note at the difference between what he says, and what Forbes concludes from what he says. He said that the results are skewed by the fact that college contains disproportionately more smart kids than the general population. He did not say that the results are explained by this fact. Nevertheless, they make a sweeping conclusion off of someone arguing that the percentage is skewed, off of what seems to be old dusty claims in the first place. It turns out that college graduates earn about 73% more than high school graduates. Well hey, at least they didn’t argue that income is based entirely on innate abilities. (Read the article, THEY DID.)
  3. In fact, you could probably make more money if you invested your tuition. Put $160,000–the approximate cost of a Harvard education–into municipal bonds that pay a conservative 5%, and you’ll have saved more than $500,000 in 30 years. That’s far more than the average college grad will accumulate in the same amount of time.
    Wow, I didn’t realize that I could earn so much more money staying ignorant! Instead of just poor logic, now they have poor math skills. Where to begin..? Well how about the glaring fact that they just compared the cost of an above average school (that still seems inflated) with the average income of college graduates over 30 years? Running the calculation again, with the cost of attending an average public institution, and it drops to $200,000. You could probably save that in a couple decades off of average college-graduate income. (Also, take a look at what Reischauer and his associates at the Urban Institute are talking about. - found while searching for information about him. Search for “400,000″ in the text. It turns out you earn way more going to college than not.)
    Next, yet again, they have left out the role that scholarships play in all of this. Many students do not pay very much for their education at all, especially those that qualify for need-based scholarships. If they didn’t go to college, then they wouldn’t get scholarships, and they wouldn’t even have that money to “invest” in bonds.
    Finally, if you receive loans to pay for your education, there’s no money to invest either, to say nothing about earning anything off of it. Their strategy only works for families that are already wealthy. Their disdain for education is evidenced by what they choose to call an investment. College is an investment itself, an investment in yourself, something that the Forbes staff sorely needs. I’m on a roll…
  4. You don’t need to be in a classroom in order to learn something. Truly motivated learners can teach themselves almost anything with a couple of books and an Internet connection. Want to learn a hands-on skill or trade? Consider an apprenticeship.
    Yes, apprenticeships are of course supposed to be the norm today. Rather, I think internships are the norm, many of which you cannot get without being enrolled in college. Additionally, public libraries do not compare to university libraries. And with college enrollment, you also get open access to scholarly journals, without which you would have to shell out a lot of money to learn the really complicated stuff. Not only that, but then you would need to have someone willing to mentor you, and explain some of those complicated concepts to you. How about… a college professor? Nah, then we would have to have the “college experience!”
    They are right, however, that you don’t need to be in a classroom to learn something. But you just can’t beat having books picked out for you, subject broken down, and guides to using the internet for research and learning. What was their closing argument?
  5. Plenty of other people did fine. Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Quentin Tarantino, David Geffen, and Thomas Edison, among others, never graduated from college. Peter Jennings and John D. Rockefeller never finished high school.
    The exception does not prove the rule. They could have also cited that George W. Bush went to Ivy League schools, to really drive their point home that education doesn’t do a lick of good. Ill-logic doesn’t even describe this. For example, High School in John D. Rockefeller’s time was not the same thing that it is today.
    But let’s explore the Bill Gates example, to really show the depth of idiocy displayed by Forbes here. They have claimed that all you need is a motivated individual with innate abilities, public libraries w/internet, and an apprenticeship, and you can be on your way to becoming a billionaire after you graduate from your local high school.
    Bill Gates, however, went to an exclusive private high school, where he had access to electronics that allowed him to get a real competitive edge over everyone else. He was actually running a little business before he even went to college, and he dropped out so that he could jump right in to the market. The fact is, he got his education already, and so it was worth it for him to go right into computers. An education, by the way, that few other students with similar innate abilities would have had access to. Gates’ education was fully paid for by his already successful parents, allowing him access to technology that you can’t find at any public library. Today, the only places where most young people could get access to cutting edge technology in technology-driven fields is, well, at college.
    Their conclusion, that success is the result of innate abilities and mere motivation, is the self-fulfilling prophecy that they are trying to prove, and poorly so. When in fact prior money and access to education are primary factors, that even innate ability has a hard time overcoming without the involvement of these two. That is why we have college, and financial aid - to help people reach their full potential.
    And additionally, the ill-conceived concept of legacies, where unremarkable students have an easier time getting into a college just because their parents went there before, means that not every student who goes to college really has that ‘innate aptitude’ that Forbes is fixated on. How did George W. Bush get into Yale, then?

It is true that a college education is not an automatic high-paying salary, in fact, many fields (such as science, medicine, law, education…) require additional education above the Bachelor’s degree level before you can earn the big bucks of that field. There are rare exceptions where success comes without formal education, but that doesn’t detract from its value to everyone else. For example, I know from my formal education in genetics that DNA coils in one specific way, and if you’ll click through the Forbes article to the 5 reasons they give and I have addressed, you’ll find that one of the IBM ads shows DNA coiling in the opposite way. (See this previous post) Not knowing even the basic facts of any field can make you look real stupid.

There’s a sixth reason, which they only alluded to, which might explain the origins of this whole article.

“For, in truth, most professions–journalism, software engineering, sales, and trading stocks to name but a few–depend far more on “on-the-job” education than on classroom learning.”

Coming from this source, and considering the demographic of people who are likely to read Forbes, it seems that there might be a bit of angst over the requirement of higher education for many professions. But you see, this is where they are flat wrong. George Deutsch didn’t graduate college, he was appointed directly into a cushy job where he could harass scientists. See, he didn’t need to learn anything about research, fact-checking, and other unimportant things such as that. I mean, all you have to do to be successful is make money. And that is just what readers of Forbes want to hear, how to make and keep money, and they’ll eat up anything a few staff writers think is a trendy thing to say about money, even when it flies in the face of the actual news that the magazine reports rather well. In some settings, ideologies trump education.
The bottom line, not going to college can really be a wise career move - if you’re planning to write for Forbes.