I love that to support their headline, the article states that at hundreds of colleges many students aren't earning more than high school graduates 10 years after graduation. Then in the next sentence says that those hundreds of "colleges" include barber academies, cosmetology schools, and for-profit colleges.
They're certainly not institutions I would normally consider 'collegiate'. And god knows they're not Universities. They're trade schools.
But, barring the fact that they're an Apples-to-Oranges comparison to typical liberal arts colleges and should be segmented as such in the data, I nonetheless think it's interesting information. Trade school expansion is often touted as a reasonable alternative to pushing more people into the higher education pipeline. To that end, we should seek to highlight and study which trades are actually worth pursuing from an economic perspective.
There are still plenty of traditional liberal arts colleges in that group. For my alma mater (Oberlin College) only 52% of students are earning more than high school graduates. Pretty sad.
That's true, but that's exactly the rhetorical trick they used to make their point seem stronger than it is.
They grouped barber colleges with 4 year schools to make the overall statistics look worse. Then they combine that with anecdotes about a few poorly performing 4 year schools.
To you're point about Oberlin--the data isn't separated by major, and from Oberlin's website they emphasize college and conservatory of music. It's not surprising that musicians aren't making a lot of money.
The Conservatory makes up only 20% of the students, so I don't think that's the bulk of the issue.
Of the College students, most major in literature, art or social sciences. And there's a strong tendency to work in non-profits or academia after graduation.
This would all be fine if it weren't so damn expensive to attend. While I had a great time there and learned a lot, I wouldn't recommend the same path to my kids.
20% is a pretty big number, add to that music, art, theater, dance, and cinema studies and you likely have a pretty big chunk of the total population.
Saying that only 52% of Oberlin graduates make more than the average high school graduate is pretty close to saying that the performing arts don't tend to pay well.
The information they're using is also based on tax returns, and musicians are way more likely to not report their full earnings than, e.g., someone who works for a company and gets paid salary with normal withholdings. Unless you're a huge touring musician playing to thousands, you're usually getting paid in cash or checks that are below the 1099 requirement level.
Just because you don't get a 1099 doesn't mean you earned that income tax free. It still needs to be reported and people are breaking the law if they don't report it as non-1099 income.
Oh I'm fully aware it's income tax evasion, I'm just saying that, realistically speaking, a lot of people tend not to pay taxes when on unreported income.
