The Huffington Post’s Lucy Sherriff comments on the fact that Ernst & Young, an international professional services firm headquartered in London, U.K., will no longer be using a college degree as a criteria for its positions. With Ernst & Young being the fifth largest recruit of graduates in the U.K. their action bring up the question of whether or not a college degree is worth it—I believe it is not.
I don’t believe that a college degree is worth it, because of the significant rise in tuition costs. Those in the workforce who have a college degree apparently earn over a million more dollars in their lifetime—on average—than those without. But, it is at a skewed level, considering the debt they had to repay with interest first. CNBC’s Jennifer Barrett points out that on top of that fact, the yearly salary of a degree holding worker versus a non-degree holding worker is a 56 percent difference. Meaning, that for every 100 dollars a non-degree worker earns, the average degree holder earns 156 dollars instead. But this math is faulty as well.
For example, there are some troubling numbers that crop up when Barrett digs deeper into the math of this career equation. Factoring in the cost of college—or rather, the additional amount of time it takes to obtain a degree in the modern age—that bump in wages seems to completely disappear due to loan payments. The average college student now takes at least five years to graduate with an average student debt of just under 20,000 dollars. Even with the full increase in pay scale earned with a college degree, based off of the average salary of an Eastern Michigan graduate, as provided by MLive’s article “Salaries of Students from Michigan’s Universities” and subtract the cost of living required in Michigan provided by livewage.mit.edu, it would take a single adult, with no other expenses, at least six years to pay off the student loan debt not including interest.
When put in comparison of someone able to put aside their cash at the non-degree earning worker’s wage, this means that while a college graduate would have zero savings and paid off their entire college debt, a non-degree earning worker would have been able to save 18,000 dollars or more in that span of time. The difference, however, is that as soon as the degree earning worker is done paying their loan, they now have 56 percent more of their money to stow away, invest and keep safe—which is where the college student supposedly has the non-college student beat.
You’ll notice that in a span of six years the college student, with a frozen salary, paid off their debt of twenty thousand, but the non-degree earner only had 18,000 dollars saved. But what happens in the next six years with frozen salaries? Well, now that non-degree worker has 36,000 dollars in savings and the college student has 20,000 dollars. After another six years the non-degree earning worker has 54,000 dollars and the college student has 40,000 dollars. It would take almost your entire lifetime’s savings to catch up with the non-degree earning student, as a college student, before the supposed salary benefit of college paid off.
In closing, college costs increasing as drastically as they have has started to make college to the up and coming working force more and more irrelevant—and businesses like Ernst & Young are ahead of their time in catching this trend of needless costs and expenses to learn a social science trade.
