How to Spend Your Summer Vacation

I am proud to announce that I have topped the 1000 page view mark!  I began this blog in August 2009 with the intention of helping students and parents with the daunting task of career planning and training.  As is my habit, I take the summer off.  (After over five decades of being on one side of the desk or the other, I believe I deserve this respite.)   I hope you enjoy your vacation and put the extra time to good use.   Please go back in the archives to the post of June 8, 2011 for suggestions as to how to spend part of your vacation.  Hope to see you in September!  (NOTE: collegeboard.com is now collegeboard.org)

Post Graduate Prospects

With the month of May come college commencements and news articles about the job outlook for graduates who hope to commence their careers.  In many of my previous posts I've discussed whether the advantages of having a degree justify the cost. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics said that last year's unemployment rate was 4.9% for college graduates while it was 9.4% for those with no college. Also, those with a bachelor's degree had a median salary of just over $1,000 a week while high school graduates with no college earned a little over $600 a week.  That's a big difference and if you spent $10,000 a year just on tuition at a relatively inexpensive public college, it would only take about two years on the job to make up the difference -
assuming you have a job!!!


Jack Hough, a columnist at SmartMoney.com, recently wrote about PayScale, a Seattle based data firm which examines the links between pay and variables like colleges and majors.  PayScale's Katie Bardaro says students should consider the salary they are likely to make before deciding how much to spend on college.  Mr. Hough notes that according to Labor Department data, wages for college graduates rose just 9% while in the past 20 years college costs have risen 184%.


Don't just decide how much you CAN afford to spend on college but how much you SHOULD spend in order to capitalize on your investment.  Sara Murray and Joe Light wrote an article  on the job outlook for college graduates for the Wall Street Journal weekend edition of May 21-22, 2011.  (I'm sure one citing this year's prospects will be published soon.)  Some of their findings are still very relevant and, unfortunately, pertinent:


     Even for those lucky enough to land jobs, the consequences
     of graduating in a weak economy are severe.  Those who
     enter the work force during downturns tend to go for decades 
     earning lower wages than their counterparts who started their 
     careers when the economy was healthy.
     Meanwhile, some degrees are far more valuable than others.
     Computer science, accounting, economics and engineering
     majors were in high demand this year.  English majors struggled 
     and the market for education graduates was particularly
     dire amid state and local budget cuts.
     'It really makes a difference what your background is,' says 
     Till Marco von Wachter, a Columbia University economist
     who studied the long-term effect of graduating during a
     recession.  While engineers from top schools can recover
     their earning losses in five years, that's not the case for
     humanities majors at mid-tier colleges.