BREAKING NEWS: College is expensive.
Just remember…you heard it here first.
Ok, so you probably already realized that. Especially if you’re a high school student searching through the sea of colleges or better yet, if you’re the parent of a high school student who plans on helping foot the bill.
There was a recent article in Smart Money Magazine that did some research into whether or not elite universities provided a solid “return on tuition investment.”
The article states that the average public university runs around $7,700 per year, while the average private school is closer to $18,600. Pretty big difference huh?
If you’re going to pursue a private college, you have to ask yourself, not only will the education be better (term used loosely), but will it be nearly $11,000 better?
The article partnered with PayScale.com (which recently published a survey on alumni salaries) with the goal to determine the relationship between tuition costs and graduates’ earning power. The bottom line…
A private school does NOT offer the return on investment that a public school does.
Again, this isn’t my opinion or my take on the college economy…this is what the numbers tell us. That being said, let me make 3 observations about the cost of college…
- The More You Spend Doesn’t Equate To The More You Will Earn – You can go to an English 101 class at Harvard or an English 101 class at your local community college, and the information covered will be virtually the same. Just because you took the class at Harvard doesn’t guarantee that you will earn any more or any less than someone who took the same class at the community college.
- The Knowledge Is Valuable, Not The Name On The Degree – We live in a knowledge-based economy, so today you are paid based less on what you can produce but more on what you know. Employers don’t care where that knowledge came from as long as you are applying it in your work.
- What You Do With The Knowledge Is Up To You – No school and no education can guarantee you success in life. Success is up to you. There are “successful” people in the world who have masters and doctorate degrees from some of the world’s most prestigious universities and other “successful” people that are high school dropouts.
For another good post on this subject, read 10 Ways To Stretch Your College Fund by Just Plain Joy over at the Frugal Dad site.
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