thePULSEHow to Survive the Middle-Class College Apocalypse
By Matt Shaw
When I finished Dave Horne’s first book, Career Secret Sauce, I was mad. Not at the book, mind you ~ the insights Horne provides are impeccably detailed and essential to understanding how to build your career from the moment you select your college through retirement. No, I wasn’t mad at the book. I was mad that it hadn’t been published before I enrolled in a very expensive private college seven years ago.
Every college student who will deal even remotely in the business world needs to buy Career Secret Sauce. In fact, you need to read everything about personal finance you can get your hands on, says Horne, for four very disturbing reasons.
First, Horne says, good-paying jobs in America are quickly evaporating, and have been since even before the economic collapse of 2008. “It began in the ‘90s,” Horne says, “as manufacturing jobs went offshore. Today, as the developing economies of the world get more mature, entire industries have joined the exodus.” But the problem isn’t just the loss of blue-collar jobs. “The big problem occurs when foreign companies crop up and begin effectively competing with their US counterparts. Specifically, once a major foreign company gets good in an industry, it’s just a matter of time before the mass exodus of jobs begins. When this happens, most of the white collar jobs are lost as well ~ engineering, marketing, finance, and legal service jobs also leave the country.”
American youngsters are also racking up more debt than has ever been recorded in history in the form of student loans, over $80 billion in total through 2006. “Middle-class parents will soon receive their 2009 tuition bills,” Horne says, “and will invariably ask themselves a couple of questions: ‘Is a college education worth this much money?’ and ‘Where do we get the money to pay for this?’ Unfortunately, as families struggle to answer these questions, the outcome will be more middle class students dropping out of college. This could be the greatest squeeze of all on working families.”
Horne also says we are fostering a failed educational system in the United States. “The sad truth is that as the United States industrial strength has grown,” he says, “our education system has weakened. According to the Eli and Edyth Broad Foundation, American students rank 25th in math and 21st in science compared to students in 30 industrialized countries. This means that today’s college graduates are leaving school with a diploma that did not teach them as much as their global counterparts received in over 20 other industrialized nations.”
What’s worse, college students today are burdened with the responsibility of funding both their own retirements and the retirement of the Baby Boomers. “There is no escaping the fact that by the time today’s young people retire, there will be no money left in the system, and there will not be enough workers paying in to cover their benefits,” Horne says. “Imagine retirement planning for the typical Gen Y worker. It’s pretty bleak: college loan payments continuing for decades, postponing buying their first home and thus losing the home equity appreciation that Baby Boomers relied on. In the midst of this, members of the Gen Y know that they must save money for their retirement or that may not have one.”
Given all of this, it is vitally important to plan your career starting immediately. “My advice is to think about a college education the same way you’d think about any other big financial decision. Treat college as an investment whose only return is getting a good-paying job after graduation.” You’ll be happy that you did.
