Cathy Small is a professor who posed as a student, lived in dorm, observed students in their natural habitat, asked probing questions and wrote a book about it: “My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student”.  What she found out is interesting, and some of it will be a shock to parents who are about to write that college tuition check.  Cathy is our guest for the first two segments of this week’s Think Tank.

Her observations are a springboard to a discussion of Is College Worth It?  There is data that college graduates earn between $1-$2 million dollars over their lifetimes than non-college graduates.  This factoid is demonstrably true and yet completely misleading.  Tune in and hear why. (But if you’ve had a good college course in either statistics or philosophy/logic you may already know the answer).

So is college worth it? My take: it depends.  But I am not going to give the fashionable answer and just say “only if you major in something practical”.  Many of the jobs of the future don’t exist yet, and you can’t “train” people for them.  But with the right educational skills, some will be able to teach themselves to adapt to these jobs. But many, perhaps most, of our current crop of college students won’t figure this out until it’s too late.

If you are about to head off to college, are writing a check for someone who is, or paying taxes to support someone else’s college experience, you will find this week’s Think Tank instructive.

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