Summary of - Is College the Best Option

Xavier Cole

Summary of  “Is college the best option”

        Going to college in todays society and generation is seen as a requirement for citizens to live a stable life. We are taught from an early age that college is a essential step in life, but is college all that it is hyped up to be? Stephanie Owen and Isabel Sawhill gives us a good look into the positives and negatives for going to college, based on the Rate of return on the education you’re getting,  differences between major choices, whether or not the school you are attending is a public school or a private and if that school is competitive or not.

        First point they bring up about if going to college is the best thing is the rate of return of return, on average do students who go to college do better in “life” despite college debt or even the fact they might not graduate. On page 213 it talks about lifetime earnings for students who go to college, which varies for different schools. People who attend the most selective private school have lifetime earnings over 620,000 dollars. People who attend a minimal selective private school have a third of the lifetime earnings of students who went to private school. Given this thought, 23 to 25 year olds with bachelor’s degree make $12,000 more than high school graduates and the overall lifetime earnings between them is a total of $570,000 for bachelor’s degree and $170,000 for those high school graduates. Despite the difference in salary going to college does put a toll on the people who do go with an average cost of $102,000 in tuition.

        Even though the rate of return is great for people who do go to college versus people who don’t , what major you graduate with has a big part of lifelong success. The highest paid majors are engineering, computers and mathematics. With the low paying majors being education and psychology. Based on census calculations the lifetime earnings of education majors and art majors are lower than the average earnings of high school graduates over a lifetime. They say that 14 percent of people with a high school diplomas make at least as much as those with a bachelor’s degree, and 17 percent of people with a bachelor’s degree make more than those with a professional degree.