The Importance Of College In Today's World

The world has changed, and this is especially true of developed nations like the United States. Fifty years ago, a high school education was a pretty good guarantee of a decent job. That is no longer true. In these poor economic times (and much more technological society), a person needs some kind of education beyond the high school level -- and the best choice is getting a Bachelor's degree.

This is illustrated very well by the latest official unemployment figures from the U.S. Labor Department. Far fewer people with a Bachelor's degree are unemployed than people with less education than that. Here are those figures:

Less than HS grad...............9.6%
HS graduate...............6.3%
Some College...............6.1%
Bachelor's Degree or more..............3.4%

Those are some starkly different numbers. Traditionally, about 3% unemployment has been considered "full employment", since there will always be a certain number of people leaving jobs for various reasons or switching jobs. Note that those with a Bachelor's degree come very close to that "full employment" goal, but those with less education have an unemployment number doubling that goal -- and those without even a HS education have an unemployment number tripling the full employment goal.

The American people are well aware of this fact. The charts above were made with information from a Gallup Poll -- taken between November 25th and December 15th (2013) of 1,012 nationwide adults, with a margin of error of 4 points. Note that 70% of Americans say a college education is "very important". In addition, 73% say a college education will help a person to get a better job, and 74% say it will help a person to have a better life.

This brings up an interesting question. If 7 out of 10 Americans know the value of an education beyond the high school level, then why are Republican elected officials trying to make it so hard for today's students to accomplish that?

They have imposed a silly interest rate on loans for college. Although it wasn't as high as they wanted, they still were able to impose a loan rate that will keep students in debt after they graduate for far too long (which means they will have less money to start their lives -- buying a home, investing, starting a business, starting a family, etc.). In addition, they now want to cut a whopping $125 billion from the Pell Grant program -- a move that will prevent huge numbers of students from being able to even go to college.

They say they want government to act like a business, and make a profit. But that makes no sense. Government is not a business, and it was established to help American citizens -- not make money off of them. The truth is that the Republican policies will not only hurt graduating students (and the economy), but it is not cost-effective (something they always claim they want government to be).

Rather than making it harder for people to go to college, the government should be making it easier. Even if the government paid for college costs (like some other nations do), they would get more than the amount they spent in future tax revenues (since a person with a college education will pay far more in taxes than someone without it over the term of their working life).

The Republican policies make no (social or economic) sense, and need to be changed.