Lousy subject degrees are way too expensive. Stay away from them.
Posted by John T. Reed on
Today's Wall Street Journal says many of the most expensive grad schools produce grads with huge student debt and little or no job prospects. I will cover that in the book I am working on about avoiding traditional education.
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I have also heard it about law and dental schools. The extreme example in the Journal article was Columbia Film School. Half of them make less than $30,000 a year yet average $181,000 debt.
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That raises another issue—majors that sound cool. Architecture, film, theater, media, sports management. The article also lists history, speech pathology, and social work as producing too many grads. Another is publishing, my career.
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That is funny. You don't need a degree in that. Just read my book How to Write, Publish, and Sell Your Own How-To Book. The median income of publishing masters degree holders after 2 years is $42k. Their median debt is $116k.
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Those careers are oversubscribed.
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My middle son was in the entertainment industry in SoCal for a while. He worked at the company that made the Dog Whisperer TV show and My Big Fat Greek Wedding. He worked at ICM, one if the big three talent agencies, and another start-up talent agency.
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How did he break into such highly sought-after jobs? He had a friend in the business: David Geffen.
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At ICM he started in the mail room, literally. They make everyone start there. You know who else was there? Film school grads—extremely lucky film school grads.
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My wife and I heard Antwone Fisher speak at a charity affair once. A movie was made of his amazing life. He wrote it. He got his start working as a security guard at a film studio and was befriended by Sydney Poitier.
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You know who the other security guards were? Film school grads. Steve Spielberg went to film school, but not at USC or UCLA. He went to less prestigious Long Beach State—and was lucky to be there.
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My oldest son also graduated from Columbia, but with a computer science bachelors. He has been a Silicon Valley software expert for years, as is his youngest brother.
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At Harvard Business School, I took a real estate course. There were Harvard Design [architecture] School students in it with us. They thought having HBS on their resume would defuse the normal, well-founded fear that architects are spendthrifts.
They told us they would lucky to get job as draftsmen after graduation. That is like going to medical school and getting a job emptying bed pans.
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One Columbia Film masters guy borrowed $360k. Guess what one of his part-time jobs is now? He teaches film at a community college. That's creepy.
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Young people and their parents needs to know about such things.
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In my novel The Unelected President, "President Medlock" orders the student loan program to reduce student loans to reflect the payment history of the grads of that institution in that major.
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In other words, if, say, a Cal Berkeley grad who get masters degrees in social work don’t pay back their student loans, stop making such loans to graduates of that degree program. That would fix the problem with regard to taxpayers getting stuck for the unpaid debt.
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The grads should also be able to sue for fraud. Dems have been real big on attacking for-profit schools for doing this to their students. Non-profits need the same treatment.
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In other words, if, say, a Cal Berkeley grad who get masters degrees in social work don’t pay back their student loans, stop making such loans to graduates of that degree program. That would fix the problem with regard to taxpayers getting stuck for the unpaid debt.
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The grads should also be able to sue for fraud. Dems have been real big on attacking for-profit schools for doing this to their students. Non-profits need the same treatment.
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My wife and I went to a very expensive Ivy League grad school—Harvard Business—and got MBAs. We borrowed a small amount during the one year when we were both students at the same time and we paid it off on time. That degree from that school may be the ONLY one that lives up to the hype that all the other Ivy grad degrees are trading on.
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Harvard Medical and Law grads also earn a lot, but those programs are 3 and 4 years respectively, not 2 like HBS, so HBS is probably more cost-effective.
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