Will College Pay Off? A Guide to the Most Important Financial Decision You'll Ever Make

The college marketplace today is bewildering. Many of the new developments mirror what has happened in healthcare: costs continue to rise with prices all over the map depending where you go, a barrage of advertising making us aware of options we never knew existed (degrees like “sports broadcasting” are the equivalent of treatments for “restless leg” syndrome in medicine) while confusing us about the quality of schools and degrees. For-profit providers are musclinginto the market, and the traditional not-for-profit colleges are acting like for-profits in their pursuit of dollars. The major concern for parents facing the enormous costs of college may be whether different degrees will pay off in the form of a job for their child at graduation. Reports in the media offer no help. Stories about employers complaining that they can’t get enough graduates with the right academic background are followed by others where recent grads struggle to find even unpaid internships. Specialized career degrees designed to get graduates into jobs in a particular industry like hospitality or fields like counseling have exploded in part because of this concern and because of the very real fact that employers have become reluctant to train new hires. It is up to the student, and often their parents, to get those entry-level job skills now. Business majors already outnumber liberal arts majors in the US eight-to-one, but the trend has been for even more focused programs targeted to ever narrower niches in the labor market. In my home town of Philadelphia, for example, local universities provide degrees in fields like pharmaceutical marketing and hospitality management with concentrations in casino management. Parents guiding their children through the college application process – and paying for the choices – have to be something of a venture capitalist to think through which programs are worth the money. How should you navigate these options? Assuming you’ve decided already that your child is going to college and that you care whether they will have a job when they finish, what I will be showing is what to bear in mind.