Vedder's Essay 'For Many, College Isn' T Worth It

We view “college as a job” that gives substantial earnings returns to a college degree, irrespective of occupation, whether an individual is an insurance agent or a rocket scientist. This is not true because there are people with high degrees, like a PhD or a computer programmer, who have lost their jobs to layoffs. So having a college degree does not guarantee “substantial returns,” as Richard Vedder summarizes in his article, “For Many, College Isn’t Worth It." Vedder thinks the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) are fairly accurate and that college is not worth it for everyone because we are all created differently. An impartial understanding of the information is that school is justified, despite all the trouble, for some huge number of youngsters, but is a significantly more financially dangerous …show more content…
Vedder argues that with fewer subsidies for higher education, the problem might disappear; however, this is not a good solution because if public subsidies were taken away, education would be more expensive and only certain people would get it, thereby reducing the total number of graduates. A better solution to this could be that a college education should not be so expensive to the point people are in debt when graduating.
Vedder’s essay analyzed and criticized many points of Carnevale’s essay, but Vedder failed to realize that he also had flaws in his own essay. Vedder pronounced in paragraphs seven and eight, “The BLS dataset is robust enough to account for underemployment, albeit perhaps imperfectly.” Carnevale’s feedback of the BLS information is nothing, contrasted with that of Cliff Adelman of the Institute of Higher Education