Anyone who knows me knows that I don’t have a very high opinion of college.  The education system in this country leaves much to be desired.  We tend to push people who don’t belong in higher education along to college.  They can’t handle it, they drop out, and they make the process worse for the people who should be there.

When you marry that with a pathetic K-12 system, colleges have now become really expensive versions of high school.

I could go on and on about what needs to happen to fix our education system, but I won’t, for now.  What I really wanted to do is highlight this piece from the Wall Street Journal.  It starts this way:

For years, higher education was touted as a safe path to professional and financial success. Easy money, in the form of student loans, flowed to help parents and students finance degrees, with the implication that in the long run, a bachelor’s degree was a good bet. Graduates, it has long been argued, would be able to build solid careers that would earn them far more than their high-school educated counterparts.

Several figures have been thrown around related to the lifetime earning potential of those with and without college degrees.  The consensus was that college graduates would earn about $1 million dollars more over their lifetime.

Well, the issue is that those estimates didn’t take into account the whole picture.  This guy thinks he has a better number:

Dr. Schneider estimated the actual lifetime-earnings advantage for college graduates is a mere $279,893 in a report he wrote last year. He included tuition payments and discounted earning streams, putting them into present value. He also used actual salary data for graduates 10 years after they completed their degrees to measure incomes. Even among graduates of top-tier institutions, the earnings came in well below the million-dollar mark, he says.

Assuming a 45 year career, that works out to about $6,000 a year.  Not chump change,  but not an astronomical amount, either.

After over a decade working in business, I think I can boil it down to this: You can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig.

Or, said differently, a loser with a college degree is still a loser.

I worked with many, many, people who felt that their degree entitled them to more money or a higher position.  The problem was that they lacked any real skills or work ethic.  They couldn’t write intelligible emails.  They had no vision.  They had no follow through.  They were still losers, but they had a really expensive piece of paper that they felt entitled them to more money.

And they usually quit to go work at a restaurant or languished in their entry level position for years.

It’s not that I don’t see a place for higher education in our society.  I certanly wouldn’t hire a Chemical Engineer or a Doctor without a degree.  But for a large majority of jobs out there, all a college degree does is give you a lot of debt and take you out of the workforce for 4-6 years.

As some people are learning the hard way:

And just like any investment, there are risks—such as graduating into a deep economic downturn. That’s what happened to Kelly Dunleavy, who graduated in 2007 from the University of California, Berkeley, with $60,000 in loans. She now works as a reporter for a small newspaper in the Bay Area and earns $34,000 a year. Her father is currently paying her $700 monthly loan payments. “It’s harder than what I think I expected it to be,” she says.

Unfortunately, HR departments across the country have not quite realized this, and the truth is that many companies have ridiculous and artificial rules about hiring people without degrees.

So until we get some real, radical reform in our education system, expect a lot of pigs with lipstick running around with a sense of entitlement.  Just don’t expect to be able to read their emails.