Tune In, Turn On, and Drop Out -Friday, April 23, 2004 -3:52 am-
I am soon to have a conversation with my parents that I ought to think about first. As a way of thinking through things, I am going to write about it here. I am strongly considering dropping out of school. This is not to say that I intend not to get a degree I am, instead, saying that the time is not now and the place is not here. First of all, DeVry is very expensive. Far more expensive than OSU. Base fees start at $48,065 for the degree I'm in. Add to this about $8,000 in books and required electronic supplies. Before even considering housing, food, and transportation, as well as other consumables, I will be about $60,000 in debt when I graduate from DeVry alone. I'm also carrying about $10,000 in loans from my 4 years at OSU. All of this is gathering interest. Obviously, my earning potential would have to be quite significant to pay this back in a reasonable amount of time. Keep in mind that most house loans for $70,000 are financed over 30 years.
Were I to make the amount of money the DeVry recruiters implied that I would, this would not be such a large problem. The recruiters claim that the average starting salary for a DeVry graduate in EET in the state of Ohio is $45,000 a year. Inspecting this statement more closely leads to some concern. This average is not, as one might reasonably expect, the figure for the most recent graduating class, or at the very least, a graduating class from the last year. It is the highest average from the last five years. Incidentally, it happens to be from 5 years ago. The average has gone down every term since. I think the reason for this is the loss of jobs in the tech sector. The US Dept. of whoever the hell studies these things (in other words I can't find the bookmark now) predicts that the US will loose 3.3 million Tech Sector jobs (mostly programmers and EEs) in the next decade. In an absolutely amazing coincidence, the same US Dept. predicts that within the next decade, US companies will employ 3.3 million Indians in Tech Sector jobs. The average pay rate of a programmer in America is $40/hr. The average pay rate of a programmer in India is $10/hr. Can we guess what the autocrats in office think about this problem? Put it all together, and I don't see a job in EE for me by the time I graduate, let alone long enough to pay off my debt. Even if the Tech Sector in America isn't killed completely, it will be gutted so severely that the glut of unemployed programmers and engineers will allow companies to pay minimum wage for what used to be considered skilled labor. If has the choice of paying me $6/hr or paying someone with 10 years of experience $6/hr, whom do you think they're going to hire? I just don't believe that with a collapsing Tech Sector I'll ever work myself out of debt.
On another government site, I found an interesting study on job stability. It is predicted that a person of my age will have 15 jobs spanning 8 careers by the time they cease working (I found it ominous that the study did not call this retirement). That's just insane. It mean, implicitly, that whatever you get your degree in is not what you will spend the majority of your life doing. Getting a degree from DeVry worries me for this reason as well. DeVry happens to be a well respected school for technical degrees. However, when I'm looking for my second or fifth career and it happens to be in the wombat facilitation, how well will the HR director respect a degree from "just a tech school"?
Finally, I'm not sure a college degree in any major is going to pay for itself (note, I mean BS/BA/BFA here, I think jobs requiring a Masters of Ph.D. will still hold their own). Of all the people I know around my age that have Bachelors only, one of them is working in a job where a college name was even looked for on the resume. In America there's this idea that you can't get a good job without a college degree. I think this was true 10 years ago, 5 years ago, but I'm not sure it will be true in 5 years. I think you might not be able to get a good job even with a college degree. If that's true, then people who go to college are starting themselves in a $60,000 dollar hole.
My plan, at the moment (we'll see if this plan survives first contact with the enemy), is to leave DeVry and to try to find work, any work. In the short term, I'd like to pay off the large amount of credit card debt I have, then pay down the school loans I have. After that, I'd like to become financially independent and maybe even be able to buy a car so my parents don't have to keep fixing mine. Someday, when I'm not standing in a hole deeper than I can see out of, I'll go back to school and get a degree to take that next step in job advancement.
Sigh... we'll see how this plays