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August 23, 2007

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So what I think you're saying is that if you go into huge debt becoming a doctor and then, after graduation, decide to chuck it all and work road construction, that the money wasn't well spent? This is an extreme example, but it illustrates the point that spending a fortune for a degree that doesn't get used isn't a good investment.

Mike

I got a liberal arts degree - couldn't afford to go to law school - and earn minimum wage. That was an absolutely atrocious investment.

My wife did something similar to what Mike illustrated, just not so bad. She went to school to be a Surgical Tech, and after graduating, decided that she didn't really like the surgical field. I would say that money was wasted, but that's one of those 'we don't talk about that' subjects.

Anyway, 10 years later, she's happy being a stay at home mom, which I actually like better.

If it made you a better person and you can afford to pay the money back, then it was a great idea. There are more important things than money.

But I couldn't afford to pay the money back and got into deeper debt trying to start a business to make enough money to pay it back.

An extended illness and hospitalization wiped out my business, ultimately I returned to work at a minimum wage job and couldn't repay the added debt and a debt collector sued me.

I have just received official verification of an out-of-court settlement which guarantees that unless I can increase my income, I will be broke for the next three years. (And then they will sue me for other old debt.)

Now if I had never gone to college, I would have started out with $4,000 of childhood earnings and savings (approx $20K in today's dollars) and no debt, plus I would have had excellent employment opportunities at the time.

Your comment about matching debt and potential earnings. A friend of mine once taught at a private college. He mentioned once that he was bothered to see some of the students racking up thousands in student loans to get a teaching degree there, when his state had 2 public universities that had better teaching programs and cost a third as much...

I heard a talk show host argue in favor of charging higher prices for "soft" degrees that don't have a specific career track (like, say, engineering degrees).

I suggested that many of these degrees should cost LESS than engineering and business degrees because humanities instructors are a dime a dozen while engineering and business profs are expensive.

The LOANS, on the other hand, should be more expensive for humanities degrees because they entail much greater risk.

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