Figuring out how much college is worth

By Iowa City Press-Citizen

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Earlier this year, Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin and the other Democrats on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee heard horror story after horror story about how for-profit colleges and education companies were targeting at-risk populations, encouraging them to take out large student loans and then providing them with an inadequate educational product that fails to help the students find the “gainful employment” needed to be able to pay off those loans.

The numbers are concerning for the entire for-profit college industry. And we agree with Harkin that Congress and the U.S. Department of Education need to do more to help these schools to improve and, for those schools that refuse to improve, to eliminate the school's eligibility for federal aid.

But the issue isn't just with the for-profit schools. Would-be students also have a role to play. They need to make sure that the courses in which they enroll actually will lead to the accreditation they are seeking. They also need to make sure that the average salary for their intended career will be high enough to allow them to pay back the debt load they are incurring. And they need to remember that no job is guaranteed in the current economic climate.

At the very least, students and would-be students should look through a report released earlier this year from the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. Titled “What's it Worth? The Economic Value of College Majors,” the 183-page report uses census data to analyze earnings based on 171 college majors in 15 categories. Available at http://cew.georgetown.edu/whatsitworth, “What's it Worth?” gives today's college students a chance to see how much money the can expect to earn based on the fields they hope to study.

The quality of a college education, of course, shouldn't be measured purely by the monetary earning power students have after graduation. But the information in “What's It Worth?” will help students better understand how much debt they can take on and realistically expect to pay back.

Federal student loans remain the most important way for people to have access to the post-secondary skills and training they need for a better job with a higher paycheck. But taking out too many loans - whether to attend a for-profit business school or to major in a less-than-lucrative field at a nonprofit, public university - will mean that education could be more than just a lifetime investment; it also could be a debt that could take a lifetime to pay off.

That's why we're glad to hear University of Iowa officials report that a growing number of students are starting to think ahead and are recognizing they need both the hard skills and the soft skills in the workplace.

Everyone throughout the higher education community should be interested in answering the question, “What's it worth?”