Let’s begin by posing and answering the most basic question about college in the mid-2010s: Is a college education still worth the investment?
We’ll save the drama—even in an era of bloated tuition costs, ballooning student loan debt, and a weakened American job market, the answer to the general question of whether a college degree is still worth the investment remains a resounding yes.
Yet, this affirmative answer is strapped with a Barry Bonds–sized asterisk; not every degree from every school for every individual is actually worth the investment. A more extensive and more personalized analysis is necessary to be of any useful guidance. We lead off with the examination of a basic question: Is today’s average college graduate still better off than an average high school graduate?
COLLEGE VERSUS HIGH SCHOOL GRADS
Survey any high school guidance counselor’s assortment of wall hangings, and you will likely spot some sort of infographic clipped from a newspaper, showing the difference in projected lifetime earnings for the average college grad versus the average high school grad—the estimate is about 1 million dollars or more for the degree earner. It’s no secret that more years of education equate to higher earning potential. In fact, a recent study showed that a degree increases one’s hourly earnings by 98%.1
The advantage doesn’t end with salary; benefits such as health insurance and retirement packages are also slanted in favor of college grads. Over 75% of college graduates have access to employer-provided health insurance compared to just 50% of high school grads.2 A similar gap exists when looking at access to retirement plans. College grads also report being more satisfied with their jobs, tend to live longer and healthier lives, and are far less likely to wind up unemployed or in a state of poverty than their nondegree-holding counterparts.
Forgoing higher education is clearly a perilous road, but so is thinking that you’ve got it made just because you are college bound. Over the last decade, earnings for college graduates have actually decreased, when accounting for inflation.3 This income stagnation runs concurrent with college tuition prices continuing to skyrocket and 7 in 10 college graduates emerging from their undergraduate years with educational debt.
Educational debt, in and of itself, is not bad, especially if it leads to better job prospects and improved earning potential. However, a frightening number of graduates take on too much debt, attending unnecessarily expensive schools and programs that fail to provide sufficient returns, despite the fact that equally beneficial yet more affordable options exist.
THE LIFE-ALTERING IMPACT OF STUDENT LOAN DEBT
The myopic nonchalance with which students willingly take on needless debt to attend one university over another is a startling aspect of college selection in the twenty-first century. We’ll explore why, in spite of well-publicized information about the horrors of student loan debt, the great mass of applicants choose to plunge right into IOU financing when better options rest within their reach. Hopefully, we’ll convince you that the debt-free (or debt-reduced) road, while less traveled, is worth exploring.
Negatively charged adjectives—crippling, burdensome, and overwhelming, just to name a few—frequently accompany sound bites and headlines on the topic of student loan debt. Student loan debt is a crisis, people are drowning in it, and it is seen as a threat to the economy at large. It is hard not to come away with an appropriate level of concern regarding student loan debt, yet, in admissions cycle after admissions cycle, swarms of college applicants continue to make decisions that set themselves up to be just as financially crippled, burdened, and overwhelmed in adulthood as the headlines forewarned. The first question is—why?
Some blame lies in the pervasive belief that a student should strive to attend the most prestigious school to which they are accepted. Such a narrow mindset takes value and how one’s undergraduate experience fits into the larger picture completely out of the equation, leading many to believe that paying exorbitant tuition costs, while something to grumble about, is ultimately a fait accompli—an unpleasant but unavoidable reality.
Another key factor is that teenagers, even exceptionally bright examples of the lot, are notorious for concluding that known dangers will never personally affect them (i.e., “I am aware that drunk driving can be deadly, but I know that I’ll be fine.”). Not surprisingly this same faulty bravado seems to enter into decisions around financing higher education.
In the last thirty years, tuition prices are up 538%,4 aggregate student loan debt is now in the trillions, and the average debt load is around $30,000.5 But we acknowledge that numbers, even numbers this staggering, can seem distant and abstract. Thus, we aim to present the very real and tangible ways in which student loan debt can impact a young person’s life, in an attempt to impart that decisions made at 18 can have significant consequences at 25, 30, and beyond.
Impact on Career Options
A recent survey found that only 13% of workers worldwide actually enjoy their jobs—talk about a depressing statistic.6 No one’s goal is to join the 87% for whom work leaves something to be desired, but being boxed in by cumbersome student loans makes someone far more likely to be part of this unsatisfied cohort. While there are plenty of people satisfied and fulfilled by their careers in lucrative professions, there are also many who despise their jobs but are stuck in a type of indentured servitude, working long, stressful hours just to meet their massive monthly student loan payments.
Those carrying student loan debt are less likely to choose careers in the nonprofit or public interest sectors. To a teenager, this might elicit a response along these lines: “Big deal, I’ll just have to take a job where I have to make more money.” However, as this same individual progresses through college, they may realize that their true passion lies in a field like social work, teaching, or public service. Unfortunately, because of loans already accrued, a switch into a lesser-paying field may prove untenable. In a world where workers switch jobs an average of every 4.6 years, this desire or need to shift careers on a dime can likewise be hampered by the burden of debt.7 Student loan debt is simply the number-one enemy of career flexibility.
Individuals with high levels of student loan debt are also statistically unlikely to start their own businesses. Acquiring a small business loan typically requires being relatively debt-free. Even if indebted graduates could get financing to start their business, those needing to make monthly payments cannot afford to endure the growing pains inevitable with any independent venture. Eliminating this option from consideration is a shame, as a recent survey indicated that 55% of small business owners are happy with their jobs—a pretty big jump over 13%.8
Effect on Lifestyle
The only debt burden larger than student loans that most people will encounter in their lives is that of a mortgage. In recent years, thirty-year-olds with student loan debts have become less likely to take on mortgages than their debt-free counterparts—some by choice, others solely because they cannot get one. Those with high levels of debt are also more likely to be refused more simple lines of credit such as credit cards or car loans.
Debt can have other powerful effects on available choices in adulthood, which would have seemed eons away at 18. Holders of student loan debt are far more likely to delay marriage for financial reasons than those without. One survey found that 43% of graduates choose to put off having kids until their student loans are paid off.9
Future Education
It’s important to realize that a college degree, while necessary, is no longer sufficient for entry into many of the most sought-after professions. If a student plans on getting a graduate degree to enter the profession of their dreams, they should be sure to explore that cost before committing to taking on massive undergraduate loans.
The average cost of attending a top MBA program is over $111,000,10 and that doesn’t even account for living expenses and the opportunity cost of forgoing two years’ worth of paychecks. The average law degree will also run a total in the six figures. The cheapest medical school will still cost over $200,000.11
Many graduate degrees that allow entry into lower-paying jobs also cost a good deal of money. Obtaining a master of fine arts degree will more than likely cost two to three times your future annual salary. If your passion lies in the arts, let no one dissuade you from the plan, but you need to have exactly that—a plan. Racking up massive undergraduate debt and then taking on additional graduate debt for the purposes of entering a low-paying job is a setup for disaster, or at the very least, living with one’s parents until the age of 45 (which, even if you love your parents, likely still qualifies as a disaster).
The Overeducated Barista
Tales of debt-saddled college grads lining up for jobs at Starbucks abound in popular media. In this case, popular perception is backed by statistical proof. In the United States today, over 46% of recent college grads report to jobs that do not require a four-year degree—nearly 20 million Americans overall fall into this category.12
Over 300,000 of this group are working as waiters and waitresses, almost half a million as customer service reps, 115,000 as janitors, 107,000 as laborers, 83,000 are tending bar at an establishment near you, and the list goes on and on (mail carriers, flight attendants, landscapers, and construction workers all have large contingents of college-educated workers as well).
Of course, there is nothing wrong with making an honest living through any of these means. The real question is whether this was the working life these folks envisioned when they started their higher education journey. Did the server at your local IHOP anticipate delivering Rooty Tooty Fresh ’N Fruity pancakes to tables of teenagers when he decided to incur 40 grand in educational debt to pursue an art degree? Are the majority of the nation’s educated custodians actually math geniuses trying to pull a Matt Damon from Good Will Hunting? Life can always take us down unexpected roads, but it seems unlikely that anyone would willingly desire to chart such a challenging course.
So, how does one avoid this pitfall? Is it sheer luck? Perhaps Branch Rickey, the baseball executive who famously brought Jackie Robinson to the Brooklyn Dodgers, said it best, “Luck is the residue of design.”
Whether someone is building a 1940s baseball team or their own educational and career goals, thoughtful design can be the difference between success and failure.
Keep Focused on the Bigger Picture
Author Stephen Covey, in his The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, suggests that it is wise to begin with the end in mind when approaching any big, multistep decision. Applying this concept to college planning, if as a high school senior, a student’s dream is to one day pursue a PhD in Marine Biology, they would plan accordingly, working backward to ensure that their ducks are in a row (a pun if we’re talking about sea ducks). This student might consider the following questions:
•Where do most marine biologists live?
•Where are they employed?
•How much do they make?
•What are the best PhD programs in the field?
•What do those programs look for in terms of undergraduate candidates?
•Which institutions did these candidates attend and what did they study?
•Which of these colleges can I afford?
•Is prestige a big factor in this field?
•How much would I owe in student loans if I attend my first choice and how might that influence the other future steps I’ve outlined above?
Of course, not every high school senior can map out their entire young adulthood from soup to nuts. Reality is, most cannot, and that’s absolutely okay. Even if your son or daughter will be entering college with an undecided label, there are still financial realities that can be projected into the future and considered. They may want to become a banker; they may want to open a bakery. Either way, it would certainly be nice to have the choice.
Designing Your Education
In today’s globalized and competitive economy, skills and/or relevant experience matter as much or more than a diploma, primarily because a diploma doesn’t mean what it used to. While degree attainment was pretty close to a surefire meal ticket a generation ago, simply possessing a credential from an institution of higher education is still necessary but not adequate for most college-level jobs.
Although demand for college-level work has grown, many new degree holders have failed to acquire practical skills valued in the job market, resulting in widespread unemployment and underemployment among recent graduates. In light of these trends, it is essential that today’s college applicants explore academic programs that lead to genuine learning and distinction, not just a vanilla degree.
CHOOSING A COLLEGE MAJOR: WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW
Buridan’s ass is a well-known (and unfortunately named) philosophical paradox where a famished donkey sits equidistant between two similarly delicious bales of hay and, unable to find a rational reason to select one over the other, ultimately starves to death. Strangely enough, this rather absurd and morbid fourteenth-century tale is relevant to the dilemma faced by many college students today.
Never before in human history have young people had such an endless array of desirable career paths as they do in twenty-first-century America. The US Department of Education presently recognizes over 1,500 academic programs offered by the nation’s colleges and universities.13 These include everything from your run-of-the-mill liberal arts, social science, and STEM majors to your more unique upstart disciplines such as blacksmithing (Southern Illinois University), puppet arts (University of Connecticut), and race track management (University of Arizona). Given this cornucopia of potential career paths, it is little surprise that settling on a major is a difficult enterprise.
The Age of Exploration
The concept of a 4-year undergraduate degree is becoming an urban legend on the scale of Bigfoot and the chupacabra. At non-flagship public institutions nationwide, only 19% of students graduate on time. At flagship institutions, the number climbs to just 36%. Shockingly the 6-year graduation rate across all public and private colleges and universities in the United States is only 56%.14 There are a multitude of factors behind these abysmal numbers, but the process of settling on a major is right at the forefront.
Research tells us that the best-laid plans of high school students frequently falter early into their postsecondary experience. It is estimated that 75% of college students will change their major at least once—the average student will switch a stunning three times before graduating.15 Even at Princeton University, a campus filled with some of the most driven and focused young people in the world, an internal study revealed that 70% of this elite student body elect to pull the old major switcheroo.16
Let’s pause to point out that switching a major is not inherently a bad thing and is in some cases an unavoidable outcome. Not every high school senior can be expected to map out their entire academic and career path in permanent ink. It is perfectly normal for one’s interests to shift and develop as new experiences unfold, and nothing is worse than sticking with an academic path one knows is the wrong choice. As the saying goes, “It’s better to be at the bottom of a ladder you want to climb than halfway up one that you don’t.”
While changing majors is inevitable for some, others end up abandoning their initial pathway because of poor planning, lack of information, or following misguided outside influences. Math and science departments tend to see the largest exodus as freshmen receive first- and second-semester grades far lower than anticipated. These students typically did not seek out the most rigorous options at their high school to ensure that they could handle college-level STEM coursework. Any student pursuing a STEM field should avail themselves of advanced math and science classes in high school. Your first college-level course should not feel exponentially more challenging than those experienced in 12th grade.
Passion Matters
Another popular category of major switchers are those who selected their initial area of study for the wrong reasons. The majority of high school students, almost two-thirds, select areas of study that do not match their interests—an extremely odd phenomenon and one that is ultimately counterproductive. Studies have repeatedly shown that students who pick a major in an area of high interest earn better grades17 and are more likely to finish their degree in 4 years.18
Yet, despite these findings, many adolescents still feel tremendous pressure from their parents and others to pursue what are considered the most economically viable and/or prestigious fields. Interest, passion, and enjoyment often take a backseat to projected future salary. However, outside of a few fields, salary data based on your undergraduate major can be highly unpredictable.
Starting Salary Data
Articles ranking the highest-paying college majors are easy to find but are typically of little help in selecting a career. A quick glance at any such list will make you notice that just about all of the degrees producing the handsomest return on your tuition dollars end with the word engineering. This is great news for anyone interested in becoming a petroleum, computer, chemical, civil, electronics, nuclear, mechanical, or electrical engineer and wholly irrelevant news for the other 95% of prospective college students.
The fact that the average petroleum engineering major makes $93,500 right out of college does not mean that all the future humanities majors out there should abandon all of their respective passions and immediately register for Introduction to Fossil Fuels.19 Planning the extraction of crude oil from subsurface reservoirs may be lucrative, but it isn’t for everyone.
It goes without saying that the decision on what to do with the next 40 plus years of life after college graduation should not be driven entirely by average starting salary figures. In addition to the obvious reason that people don’t want to be stuck in a job that makes them completely miserable solely to earn a few extra bucks, recent studies have actually shown that salaries by major tend to level out in the long run. For example, liberal arts majors may lag behind before the age of 30, but after 50 (their peak earning years), they surprisingly outearn individuals who pursued a preprofessional or professional track in college.
Still, one should be cognizant of their short-term, postgraduate earning potential when selecting what type of school to attend. Ignorance of this factor can be a setup for financial distress later in life—stress that with proper planning could have easily been avoided. College grads in the bottom quartile of earners actually make less than the average high school graduate. Some of the lowest-paying majors include early childhood education, drama/theater, social work, library science, and psychology. Students considering these majors are wise to avoid incurring unnecessary debt in pursuit of their undergraduate degrees. The same goes for graduates in STEM fields that do not typically lead to high-income positions right out of college.
While engineering and computer science grads enjoy solid starting salaries, meteorology, biology, and zoology majors begin their careers paid below the median college grad. Other majors that many assume would have poor starting, and mid-career salaries are actually shockingly strong. For example, philosophy majors outpace their peers who studied marketing, pre-law, and even chemistry in mid-career income.20 You read correctly—philosophy majors!
As stand-alone credentials, many undergraduate diplomas, even from elite schools, do not alone qualify someone for a high-paying professional job. It is in these situations that salary data broken down by college major becomes particularly hard to interpret.
Majors Dependent upon Grad School
Many bachelor’s degrees have limited value on their own but can be parlayed into relatively lucrative careers through continuing one’s education. Psychology is perhaps the ultimate example of this phenomenon. Those with bachelor’s degrees in clinical or counseling psychology enter the field making less than $35,000 on average. Most will find entry-level employment in the behavioral/mental health field, working in positions such as a drug and alcohol counselor, probation officer, group home coordinator, or social worker.
While engineering majors can call themselves engineers upon graduation, psychology majors need to pursue advanced degrees to claim such a credential. Master’s level psychologists will more than double up their bachelor’s-only peers, and those who eventually earn a PsyD or PhD will see average earnings above $87,000.21
If a student plans on entering a grad school-dependent field, make sure they don’t break the bank on their undergraduate education. Students with ambitions to enter fields such as law or medicine should account for undergraduate affordability and performance in addition to prestige, given the costs of a professional degree. Aspiring doctors and lawyers, along with would-be professors and scientists, should also realize that graduate school credentials, not undergraduate name, will be most important to their job prospects.
Don’t End up a Starving Donkey
As with any element of postsecondary planning, decisions about college majors should be made within the context of the bigger picture of a student’s career and life goals. It’s important to be aware of financial outcomes for graduates in a chosen area, but future salary considerations are often highly dependent on future educational attainment. A young person’s own internal compass should guide the major selection process more than any outside voice.
When it comes to postsecondary choices, young people today possess a level of choice that would make Buridan’s donkey’s head explode. If a student makes their choice strategically and follows their instincts, they’ll be able to successfully pick out the bale of hay that best fits into their life plan.
LOOKING BEYOND MAJORS: SKILLS THAT EVERY COLLEGE STUDENT SHOULD ACQUIRE
The selection of an undergraduate major is important but is far from the be-all and end-all of a college experience. It is an overly simplistic view of higher education that people emerge from four years of college with a specific skill related to their primary area of study: education majors learn how to teach, accounting majors learn how to crunch numbers, allied health majors learn skills particular to the health care profession, and so on.
Yet, no matter the primary field of study, there are certain generalized skills that will serve students well in the modern economy where the average worker will change jobs an astonishing 11 times.22 Abilities in the areas of written expression, public speaking, foreign language, and quantitative analysis can and should be honed while pursuing a degree in any field. If a student emerges from any degree-granting program capable in those four areas, their investment will be rewarded many times over.
Writing
Elect to major in English and only one thing is for certain—you’re going to endure at least four years of barbs and jabs from your know-it-all, curmudgeonly Uncle Jerry. At family gatherings, he’ll interrupt your attempt to relate your love of Chaucer to a group of elderly female relatives whose names you have never been 100% sure of (Agnes? Gertrude? Doris?) with something along the lines of:
Q: “What’s the difference between an English major and a park bench?”
A: “The park bench can support a family of four . . . hardy har har.”
Light laughter and stares of pity from the rest of the room follow.
What Uncle Jerry and his peanut gallery don’t realize is that becoming a highly literate person actually makes you a very marketable person in the modern economy. Reports, emails, memos, newsletters, press releases, and presentations are just a handful of the ways in which written communication is required on a daily basis in most places of business. Good writing sets a tone for a company, as of course does inferior writing. Poor grammar, misspellings, and subpar sentence structure in workplace communication can be the equivalent of showing up for a client meeting sporting a mustard-splotched tie (something Uncle Jerry would totally do).
Whether or not a student majors in English, it behooves them to sharpen their writing skills throughout college—chances are they’ll use them in their future profession. Survey executives from literally any industry and they all say the same thing—quality writing is a necessary skill for most jobs. In fact, within American companies, over two-thirds of salaried employees have some level of writing responsibility.23 As a result, the vast majority of companies take writing ability into consideration when making hiring and promotion decisions.
Many employers bemoan the level of writing ability demonstrated by recent college grads, even those from elite schools. At risk of sounding like the aforementioned Uncle Jerry, in a world filled with daily texts, tweets, and Facebook posts, the average college grad’s grammar, punctuation, and sentence structure are simply no longer up to the standards of many hiring officials. This, however, is good news for all of those strong young writers out there, as their skills have never been in greater demand.
Public Speaking
Warren Buffett once opined that for those entering the business world, becoming an effective public communicator can boost one’s future earnings by an estimated 50%.24 Unfortunately, this bump in income would be viewed by most people as full-blown hazard pay—public speaking is simply that terrifying an endeavor.
Fear of public speaking runs so deep that, in survey after survey, Americans report fearing the act of oratory more than any more traditionally nightmarish situation you can conjure up: heights, plane crashes, sharks, getting stuck in an elevator, getting stuck in an elevator filled with sharks, and most famously—death itself.
In trying to avoid public speaking, one might first cross off the obvious list of professions requiring the practice: minister, motivational speaker, broadcaster, and actor. Unfortunately, the list doesn’t end there: purchasing agents, marketers, nonprofit fundraisers, sales reps, public relations specialists, teachers, professors, realtors, and corporate trainers all are required to speak to groups, large and small, on a regular basis. In any profession, even ones almost completely devoid of social interaction, most employees will still likely have to go through a harrowing interview process, participate in staff meetings, and discuss one’s worth at some type of annual performance review. Public speaking, in one form or another, is pretty darn close to unavoidable.
To fully comprehend the value of quality public speaking, reflect on the practitioners of the art that you have witnessed every day for the last 12 or so years—your K-12 teachers. Sadly, a great many of this cohort were probably such poor presenters that they made your brain melt on a daily basis (coincidentally, brain melting is #174 on the list of Americans’ fears). On the other end, the best teachers you had were able to transcend the monotony of the school day, engaging, enlightening, and inspiring you, while even on occasion evoking laughter and tears. Imagine what possessing such a skill set would do in any chosen profession.
Some colleges and universities require that all graduates take a course in public speaking; most do not. Either way, we recommend that students seek out opportunities to practice this intimidating but extremely worthwhile craft. Taking a public speaking course is a good start, but it shouldn’t stop there—students should ask around and find out which elective courses require presentations and consider joining a club or activity that requires public speaking. College presents a unique time to work on becoming comfortable presenting yourself and your ideas to others—a skill that will pay off mightily in a future career.
Foreign Language
The Soviet launching of Sputnik in 1957 is widely recognized as the impetus for President Eisenhower’s initiative to improve science education in America’s public schools. The strong push for STEM education persists in the modern era, this time with the revised aim of preparing US youth to compete in the global economy.
Lost to history, though, is the fact that Eisenhower also spoke of the equally pressing need to help American pupils become proficient in foreign languages. By the 1960s, over two-thirds of higher education institutions required students to learn a foreign language as part of their bachelor’s degree; today that number has fallen to just 50%.25
The Cold War may have crumbled with the Berlin Wall, but we now reside in a globalized marketplace where knowledge, trade, and investments know no borders. For anyone entering fields such as business, finance, information technology, software development, government, law enforcement, or health care (just to name a few), fluency in a foreign language has never been more advantageous.
The ability to converse with international clients in their native tongue is of great value. Bilingual college grads entering the private sector right now can expect a pay increase right off the bat; those conversant in Mandarin Chinese, German, Japanese, and Arabic may demand even higher compensation.26 As a secondary bonus, research shows that the process of language acquisition is the mental equivalent of a P90X workout. Bilinguals develop increased gray matter in their brains, which leads to heightened creativity, focus, and decision-making ability.
While studying language may no longer be required at many colleges and universities, we recommend that students consider completing multiple levels of a foreign language and take advantage of now-commonplace study abroad programs. Learning a language during one’s college years will be easier than one-day listening to Rosetta Stone recordings in the car as you drive your screaming kids to day care.
News flash: Analyzing data is no longer done exclusively by middle-aged men in pocketed, short-sleeved white dress shirts, robotically inputting punched cards into giant mainframe computers. In a world with Moneyball, Nate Silver, Freakonomics, and widespread fantasy sports participation, stats have officially entered the mainstream.
It goes without saying that individuals majoring in areas such as math, engineering, actuarial science, pre-med, or architecture will be required to become fluent in the likes of calculus, geometry, and trigonometry. On the other end of the spectrum, many liberal arts majors manage to take just one basic math course in college or even eschew mathematics entirely. Math-phobic individuals tend to cast the quantitative out of their lives forever as soon as they are able to—a move that may not prove altogether wise.
Some level of data analysis is now a requirement in a surprising number of non-STEM fields including but by no means limited to business, politics, nonprofit work, health care, and education. Becoming a human calculator is less important in today’s workplace than being able to accurately interpret data. Traces of an increasingly data-driven society are everywhere. Analytics are increasingly being utilized by human resource departments for recruiting, measuring productivity, and workplace planning. Companies like Walmart and Amazon have famously used logistical models to revolutionize retail. Even the formerly quaint world of public education becomes more and more data-reliant each year in this age of accountability.
In an effort to cultivate data literacy, we recommend students take at least one statistics course and one economics course (preferably in microeconomics) during their undergraduate years. Possessing some level of ability to analyze data will enhance their employability in just about any field.
FINAL THOUGHTS
In this chapter, you’ve learned many of the basic tenets of what is genuinely important when planning for postsecondary education—what students study and what skills they acquire matter as much or more than where they go, college planning should be done with long-term life goals in mind, and taking on too much unnecessary debt can have a sweeping, negative impact on a student’s future. In spite of these acknowledgments, however, it’s understandable if you’re still not ready to take the leap and reframe your approach to college admissions.
Don’t worry, you’re right where you should be. Just lend us your ears, approach chapter 2 with an open mind, and discover what research and data actually say about the relationship between college selectivity and student outcomes.
NOTES
1. Pew Research Center, “Is College Worth It?” May 15, 2011, accessed December 6, 2015, http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2011/05/15/is-college-worth-it/.
2. Elise Gould, “A Decade of Declines in Employer-Sponsored Health Insurance Coverage,” Economic Policy Institute, February 23, 2012, accessed December 6, 2015, http://www.epi.org/publication/bp337-employer-sponsored-health-insurance/.
3. Elise Gould, “2014 Continues a 35-Year Trend of Broad-Based Wage Stagnation,” Economic Policy Institute, February 19, 2015, accessed December 6, 2015, http://www.epi.org/publication/stagnant-wages-in-2014/.
4. Mamie Lynch, Jennifer Engle, and Jose L. Cruz, “Lifting the Fog on Inequitable Financial Aid Policies,” The Education Trust, November 2011, accessed December 6, 2015, http://edtrust.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Lifting-the-Fog-FINAL.pdf.
5. The Institute for College Access & Success, “Project on Student Debt: State by State Data,” accessed December 6, 2015, http://ticas.org/posd/map-state-data-2015.
6. Steve Crabtree, “Worldwide, 13% of Employees Are Engaged at Work,” Gallup, October 8, 2013, accessed December 6, 2015, http://www.gallup.com/poll/165269/worldwide-employees-engaged-work.aspx.
7. U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Employee Tenure in 2014,” September 18, 2014, accessed December 6, 2015, http://www.bls.gov/news.release/archives/tenure_09182014.htm.
8. Yodle, “Survey: SMB Owners are ‘Happy’ Despite Concerns about Healthcare, Retirement & Customer Acquisition,” August 22, 2013, accessed December 6, 2015, http://www.yodle.com/company/press-releases/yodle-smb-sentiment-survey.
9. American Student Assistance, “Life Delayed: The Impact of Student Debt on the Daily Lives of Young Americans,” 2013, accessed December 6, 2015, http://www.asa.org/site/assets/files/3793/life_delayed.pdf.
10. Patrick Clark, “Debt Is Piling Up Faster for Most Graduate Students—but Not MBAs,” Bloomberg Businessweek, March 25, 2014, accessed December 6, 2015, http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2014-03-25/student-loan-debt-piles-up-for-graduate-students-but-not-mbas.
11. Janet Lorin, “Medical School at $278,000 Means Even Bernanke Son Has Debt,” Bloomberg Businessweek, April 11, 2013, accessed December 6, 2015, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-04-11/medical-school-at-278-000-means-even-bernanke-son-carries-debt.
12. Richard Vedder, “Why Did 17 Million Students Go to College?” The Chronicle of Higher Education, October 20, 2010, accessed December 6, 2015, http://chronicle.com/blogs/innovations/why-did-17-million-students-go-to-college/27634.
13. Cecilia Capuzzi Simon, “Major Decisions,” New York Times, November 2, 2012, accessed December 6, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/04/education/edlife/choosing-one-college-major-out-of-hundreds.html?_r=0.
14. Doug Shapiro et al, (2013, December), “Completing College: A National View of Student Attainment Rates-Fall 2007 Cohort (Signature Report No. 6),” Herndon, VA: National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, accessed December 6, 2015, http://nscresearchcenter.org/signaturereport6/.
15. Virginia Gordon, (2007), The Undecided College Student: An Academic and Career Advising Challenge (3rd ed.), Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas.
16. Corinne Lowe, “70 Percent of Students Change Major After Enrollment, Study Finds,” The Daily Princetonian, September 18, 2014, accessed December 6, 2015, http://dailyprincetonian.com/news/2014/09/70-percent-of-students-change-major-after-enrollment-study-finds/.
17. Lawrence K. Jones and Juliet Wehr Jones, (2012). “Personality-College Major Match and Student Success: A Guide for Professionals Helping Youth and Adults Who Are in College or Are College-Bound,” accessed February 29, 2016, http://www.careerkey.org/pdf/Personality-College_Major_Match_Guide_Professionals.pdf.
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