A question about the importance of bachelor’s degree
Cost of attending Harvard
California Prison Academy alternative
The value of a bachelor’s degree
Possibly you were among the lucky 2,000 applicants, the elite 6.2% of the 35,000 pool, who received an admissions offer from Harvard this year. Yet, just how lucky were you? Recently, numerous articles have appeared questioning the value of any 4-year bachelor’s degree, whether from Harvard or not. One of the skeptical parties, ironically, is Harvard’s School of Education, which recently published a study that claims a four-year college degree isn’t for everyone. Even more ironic, just as the best basketball players usually leave college, after a year, to jump into the NBA, some of the most successful Harvard undergraduates don’t graduate (Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg come to mind).
If you are wired like a Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg, you just might want to do a cost/benefit analysis on the prospect of matriculating into Harvard. For the upcoming year, the cost of attending (COA) Harvard is just under $54,000, with annual increases tracking at 4%, meaning your senior year COA will probably be just under $61,000. Even if your household income is between $60,000 and $180,000, and you have ‘typical assets’, you’ll still be asked to pay an average of up to 10% of income. Furthermore, attending Harvard, offers no guarantees once you graduate. Likely future plans will include graduate school, and that is a whole other set of costs.
A recent article, ‘California Prison Academy: Better than a Harvard Degree,’ suggests an alternative: becoming a California prison guard (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704132204576285471510530398.html). There is one major difficulty, however, and that is each year over 120,000 people apply for a place in the Prison Guard Academy, which accepts only 900: this is an admissions level of less than 1%. If you are the right material, meaning you have a high school diploma or GED, are a US citizen, pass the vision test (something I couldn’t), background check, psychological investigation, medical exam, and a written exam with word problems like this:
“Building D currently has 189 inmates, with 92 beds unfilled. Building D is currently at what capacity?”
…it might be worth a try.
The Academy training last for four months, and you don’t pay; rather, you’re paid $3,050 monthly to attend (versus the tens, if not hundreds of thousands you will have to pay for Harvard’s four years). Better still, upon graduation you have a job that comes with full health, dental, and vision benefits, and a base salary between $45K and $60K. (Average Harvard graduate starting pay is $49,897 and $129,759 after 20 years). Vacation time, after 20 years of duty, is seven weeks. For Harvard graduates, 20 years employment gains, possibly, 3 weeks of vacation, if one can ever find the time to take them. Yet, the crowning case to be made for the prison guard alternative is the retirement benefit package. You can retire at 55 with 85% of your final year’s salary and full medical benefits for the rest of your life.
When you consider that, in 2010, the average college graduate had over $25,000 in loans, and that student loan debt exceeds over $900 billion, higher than the total amount of credit card debt in the US, being a prison guard might not be such a bad choice. Is there shame in selecting a school (or an academy in this case) based on affordability?
Even more telling, just how good is an undergraduate education from most colleges, even Harvard? According to ‘Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses’, “…45 percent of US college students show “no significant gains in learning” after two years in college. (www.benzinga.com, 5-3-2011) Look over Harvard’s 1869 entrance examination and you’ll find it covered, in depth: Latin, Greek, Trigonometry, Algebra, Arithmetic, and Geometry (it was a given you could write a clear 5 paragraph essay). These days, every Harvard freshman, regardless of high school record, must take an expository writing class—solid writing skills, even at Harvard, are no longer a given. That will be $54,000 please.