A college education provides lots of benefits. Those benefits include acquiring skills, identifying interests, learning about others across time and space, and establishing personal and professional connections.
Abundant evidence exists that college graduates are more mature and self-confident, better citizens, healthier, wealthier and happier than individuals who do not have an undergraduate degree.
As the cost of attendance has skyrocketed, however, students and their parents are focusing more and more on short-term considerations. Does college constitute a sound financial investment? Will a graduate get a good job with a high salary?
College Myths And Misconceptions
In Will College Pay Off?, Peter Cappelli, a professor of management and director of the Center for Human Resources at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, draws on existing data on employment and higher education in the United States to provide some surprising and provocative answers to these questions.
In the process, he busts pervasive myths and misconceptions.
Cappelli acknowledges that the average college graduate now earns considerably more than a person with a high school degree and that the gap between them is growing.
He points out, however, that the “college wage premium,” the difference between the annual and lifetime earnings of college graduates and those who do not have have an undergraduate degree, has been volatile in the United States over time. As recently as the 1960s and the ‘70s, no gap existed. The current gap is higher for workers who have been out of college longer.
Cappelli implies that it may well narrow sometime soon.
In Italy and China, for example, college grads are no more successful than high school grads in the job market.
According to Cappelli, the current labor force is overeducated – a controversial claim at variance with recommendations by the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness and other organizations dominated by corporate executives, who, Cappelli implies, have an interest in generating a surplus of qualified workers.
The average worker, he indicates, has about 30% more education than his or her job requires. About 60% of parking lot attendants have some college education. To document his conclusion, Cappelli includes the results of a survey on employment outcomes 2010-2012 conducted by the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
