Earlier this year a new study was released saying that 46% of college students today do not received a degree or any credentials within SIX YEARS of starting college.  There can be lots of reasons – but poor planning has got to be up there at the top of the list. And with college costs continuing to rise in spite of their poor success records, it should come as no surprise that college debt is becoming one of the nation’s biggest challenges.

Working with high school students (to help them plan for college and careers), we find that students fall into three basic categories:

1. Those that have it all figured out (i.e., where they will go to college, what they will study, what they want to do for their career – and they know how they are gifted and how that relates to their career options).
2. Those that kinda sorta know. They know where they want to go, and what they think they will major in, and don’t think much further beyond that.
3. Those who plan to figure it out IN COLLEGE. These are the ones that will give Blutarsky a run for his money in terms of time and money wasted on college.

PeopleRightCareers works with students to help them develop a game plan for success in college. We start by helping students understand how they are wired, how that relates to career options, and then how to compete effectively for the limited number of job openings the current economy is producing.

• What am I going to do after I graduate?
• Have I chosen the right major to give me the best options for getting a job?
• Do I even know the implications of changing my major after I get to college?

Just yesterday the New York Times ran an article on college students who are homeless and living on the streets because they can’t find jobs that pay a decent wage after they graduate from college. The article states that young adults (age 18-24) have the highest unemployment rate of all adults, and it is rising significantly. While it is true that we are in the middle of a very tough economic cycle, it is also true that a lot of college students have graduated with degrees that make it difficult to find jobs.

I am not one to say, “Show me the money!” should be the only mantra when choosing a college and a major. In fact, I fall on the opposite end of that spectrum a lot of times because I believe how you are wired should drive the type of work you do. But it is not an either/or proposition: young people should do what they are wired for – and do it within the context of what types of jobs are available, and what majors it takes to get those jobs. Young adults need to do their research – on themselves and on the environment they will hopefully be working in someday – when making these lfe changing decisions.

And the holidays is a great time to give it some thought!

“Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you too can become great.”   ~ Mark Twain

• From WWII to 1991 it typically took 8 months for jobs lost during a recession to return to their previous levels
• After 1991 it took 23 months for jobs to return to prerecession levels
• After 2001 it took 38 months
• After 2007 it is expected to take five years or more

The main reason for the change is that the world has changed, and continues to change so fast. When jobs go away during a recession, they usually don’t come back in the same form they were in prior to cutback. And the two factors that are driving this change the most are 1) advances in technology, and 2) globalization.

Both of these factors also have a huge impact on what kind of people we need to have in different types of roles. Oftentimes, the additional  technology components incorporated into a job means that we need a higher skilled person to perform the job. Globalization means that we can often find this resource cheaper someplace else.

And all of this should be considered by young adults as they try to figure out what/who they want to be when they grow up, and what is the best path to get them there.

Mike McCormack is the founder of PeopleRight and PeopleRight Careers. He spent over twenty years in corporate America before launching his first business 10 years ago. His main mission is helping people and companies match individual skills and talents to the needs of the world. You can reach Mike at 214 702-6826.

The focus of all of these talks was that there are four major components of the college decision process, and almost everyone ignores at least one.

The four major college questions are:
1. Where will I go? (which includes, How can I get in to my top choices?)
2. What will I major in?
3. How much will it cost?
4. What will I do when I get out?

The one that often gets postponed until later is #2, and # 4 often gets ignored completely. And doing so can have HUGE implications on #1 and #3. I hear parents say (way too frequently) that we can’t expect a 16, 17, or 18 year old student to possibly know what they will do when they graduate. As I’ve told my audiences recently, it is O.K. if they can’t answer the question definitively, but it is NOT O.K. if they don’t have any kind of game plan for how they are going to figure it out. And the longer it takes them to figure it out the more it will cost them. And waiting until they are in college to figure it out why they are there in the first place can be the most costly approach of all.

The second thing I emphasize is that just as #1 consists of following a pretty rigorous process for completing and submitting applications, #2 is also a process that consists of lots of activities that don’t just happen overnight. This is an important distinction for this generation of students, because so many of them have been raised with the ‘game reset’ mentality, expecting immediate results or just starting over when the going gets tough.

Helping them to focus on creating a process for choosing a career can be a major step in becoming a successful, independent adult. PeopleRight Careers focuses on helping students understand how they are wired, and how that wiring effects the type of work they will be good at. And who doesn’t want to be good at what they do?

In one of the most thorough studies I have read recently called Chasing the American Dream: Recent College Graduates and the Great Recession (dated May 2012), the researchers from Rutgers’ John J. Heldrich Center for Workplace Development posted some startling conclusions from a survey of 444 college graduates who graduated between 2006 and 2011, including:

• Nearly 60% of the graduates were paid by the hour on their first job (with a median starting wage of $10.23/hr)
• Only 4 in 10 reported that their job required a four-year degree
• Only 2 in 10 saw their first job as being on their career path
• Over 80% of these graduates had already transitioned form their first job out of college to another job
• 64% had borrowed money that they have to pay back, the median debt at graduation was $20,000, and 1 – 5 years after graduation only 13% have paid off their education debt
• Of the 20% of students who had gone on to graduate or professional school, 6 in 10 had not paid off ANY of their previous education debt
• Overall, 51% of the graduates in the study continue to get financial support from their parents or relatives
• The cost of a college education increased at a rate greater than inflation over the past three decades

On the positive side, those who had internships while in school had several advantages over the rest of the group:

• Higher salaries
• Better prepared to be successful in their jobs
• Better prepared to get a job
• Better prepared to find a job

By far the foremost thing the respondents would have done differently is “to have been more careful in choosing a major”. The leading factor cited when choosing their major was job opportunities in the field (39%), but 25% admitted they considered “Nothing” when choosing their major.

The costs are too high and the risks too great to keep allowing high school students to coast into college without thinking about what they plan to do when they get out. I have had many parents say to me, or at least infer, that “poor Johnny couldn’t couldn’t be expected to know what he wants to do right out of high school”. It may be O.K. to not have a definitive answer to this question, but what is NOT O.K. is to NOT have a plan for how they are going to figure it out. The statistics above prove that the colleges are certainly not geared to help them figure it out.

This sounds about as obvious as Dorothy’s realization in the Wizard of Oz that, “we aren’t in Kansas anymore”. Expecting college to work the way it did 25-30 years ago is a huge mistake for families. Peter Thiel, a high-tech entrepreneur, is going as far as discouraging young adults from going to college, citing that colleges have drifted too far from their core mission of learning and offer no accountability for their end product.

As many colleges pour hundreds of thousands of dollars into marketing efforts, I think we are just seeing the tip of the iceberg. Smart families are doing much more research on graduation rates and degrees that lead to job offers, so the marketing efforts will likely continue to expand. Even smarter families will start to ask even harder questions like, “Why is junior going to college in the first place?“, because the lack of direction and focus on the front end often leads to huge costs and disappointments on the back end.

The results show schools “where  students are most able to shoulder the costs of their degree”, and “where the education has a proven record of being a valuable investment relative to other schools”. Besides MIT, other schools ranked in the top 10 included Harvard, Princeton, and Stanford, and the only large state school included in the top 10 was Georgia Tech. Baylor came in at #4 in the poll, in large part due to indicating that 0% of their graduates had any school debt at graduation. Florida, Louisiana Tech, Cal – Berkeley, and Texas A&M were the other state schools to crack to top 25.

As a parent of a recent college grad, I’m sure glad he chose a school that made the Top 25 list (A&M).  I’m more proud of the fact that his degree led to a job offer!

In addition to choosing which colleges to apply to, many students will also be choosing a major field of study, and few will stop to think about how important that major decision will impact how long they stay in college or how much it costs before they eventually get out. The common approach for most students is to focus almost all of their energy on where they will get IN to college, and not near enough energy on what they will do when they get OUT.

The result of this approach is that approximately one-third of college freshmen will change majors after they start school, and the average student will change 2-3 times before they graduate. No wonder it is taking most students over 5 years to graduate from college these days. By being so focused on how to get IN, most students fail to concentrate on how to choose a major that aligns with how they are wired and gives them the best chance of finding a job when they graduate.

And they fail to consider that it may be hard to change majors once they start school because the major they want to  switch to is already full or it takes a 3.5+ GPA to be considered for a transfer. So, while it is important to choose your school wisely, it is equally important to apply the same rigor to choosing the right major.

The problem is that last year more than 60% of students failed the English III Writing exam even though it had an extremely lenient passing standard, and those standards will be rising over the next few years. During this first year of testing of ninth-graders, only 38% passed the writing test, 50% passed the reading, and 65% passed in algebra (and only a 37% correct rate was required to pass in algebra!). Under the proposed final standards planned for the writing tests only 18% would have passed.

There is one alternative to passing these tests, and that is to achieve a score of 1,500 on the SAT test (out of 2,400). That is equivalent to scoring an average of 500 (out of 800) on the three parts, something not so easy to accomplish.

Robert Scott, the former Texas Education Commissioner, said, “Even if you were to qualify for a full-ride scholarship based on artistic ability, you would be barred from attending a four-year institution unless you passed the exams.” He didn’t mention what would happen to athletes who didn’t pass these standards.

It appears that legislators are trying to raise the expectations on secondary education to help improve the college graduation rates, which could certainly use some help. It will be interesting to see how fast these laws get changed, or the the passing standards get lowered, before 2015.

Today I received an e-mail from the College Board with the Subject line: For Parents of Seniors talking about the fact that it’s still not too late to make your college choice.  For those still trying to decide, it said “Consider whether the college offers the opportunity to explore many different majors, especially if your child is undecided.”  I wish they would have been really honest and said ‘…and be prepared to open up your checkbook, because taking this approach and not knowing what you want to study before you go will cost you tens of thousands of extra dollars.’

I continue to be surprised by how many families have the attitude that students can’t possibly know what they want to be/become/study before going off to college.  Maybe they can’t know all of the answers, but not even trying to figure it out is like jumping in to the pot of tepid water.   Before they know it, grades will be slipping, they will change majors (often multiple times), then get a degree in something that allows them to graduate – but then leads to seven job changes before they turn 26.

I have a daughter who is a high school senior, and she went on a campus visit where the Advisor for the university told her something like, “Oh sweetie, you don’t need to decide your major before starting college, take your time to figure it out after you get here.’  I wish she would have asked him, ‘and who is going to pay for the additional semesters it takes to graduate (at $23,000/semester!) if I decide to take your advice?‘

Taking this approach is one of the primary reasons that the average college student today spends 5.5 years on campus, and an EXTRA $30,000 on their college education.  And those costs figures are if they go to a state school – they’re much higher for a private or select school.

Maybe I’m just too practical.  I think a college degree should lead to something – like a job that can eventually pay off the enormous cost of going to college.  We should encourage our students to begin college with an end in mind, not just go to college to find themselves.  They might just find themselves in boiling water…