Читать книгу Personal Finance in Your 20s & 30s For Dummies - Eric Tyson - Страница 51

If you are considering more higher education, it is imperative to weigh what this education will actually enable you to do in the workforce. (These issues also should be contemplated if you have kids and will be making higher-education expenditures on their behalf.) Simply spending more on education may not be the answer.

Americans spend a lot of money on obtaining traditional college degrees. Yet, a good number of students fail to graduate with the education and training that they need to secure good, available jobs. A survey of those (especially young adults) currently unemployed and underemployed supports these concerns. There are good-quality job openings, but the young adults available to work lack the proper training and educational background to do those jobs.

Simply put, too much money is wasted on higher education that is failing to train young adults to qualify for the best available jobs.

Just as government programs encouraged and enabled excessive mortgage borrowing and contributed to a housing bubble in the late 2000s, the same is happening with higher education.

When considering an advanced or undergraduate degree, try as best you can to research the value of particular colleges and degree programs. There are numerous resources for doing this. My new book, Paying For College For Dummies (Wiley) includes lots of material on fast-growing and cheaper alternatives to traditional four-year colleges and which ones lead to great jobs and careers. And it also covers, of course, more traditional higher-education options.

Among other resources for rating and evaluating traditional higher-education options, those which I’ve reviewed and found useful are the following:

 Kiplingers’ “Best Value Colleges” considers numerous factors including student-to-faculty ratio, the test scores of incoming freshmen, four-year graduation rates, likelihood of graduating students with financial need, affordable sticker prices, generous financial aid and consistency of that during time at school, and low student debt at graduation. See www.kiplinger.com/college-rankings.

 PayScale, the large online salary and benfits information collector, ranks colleges and majors on a return-on-investment basis over 20 years. Visit www.payscale.com/college-roi.