If you've attended, graduated, or paid for a stint in college in the past ten years, you've probably had one of those cold-sweat spells late at night in which you wonder: Sweet Jesus, was that worth it? The creeping realization: probably not.
Thanks to the sky-high price of a four-year degree (not to mention graduate school, 'cause you know you're not going to get a job without that upper-level paper), a whole generation of young Americans is saddled with some serious student loan debt.
Combine that with zero job opportunities and you begin to get a sense that this is a bum deal. So over at the Atlantic, they've crunched self-reported numbers from graduates with jobs to determine which schools and majors are the biggest waste of money. One South Florida institution is prominent on the list.
Using self-reported pay data from the past 20 years, the magazine forecast what graduates will make over the next two decades compared to someone who didn't go to college but entered the workforce with just a high school degree. Sure, not a perfect study (because, who knows, there might be some huge industrial need for Milton scholars in the next couple of decades, right? RIGHT?), but it spells out an interesting future.
The results... well, they suck. Especially if you were an English major at Florida International University.
If you were a humanities and English major at FIU paying out-of-state tuition, you will make $192,000 less than a high school graduate entering the work force at the same time. Only one school -- Murray State University -- was a worse deal: $197,000 less than a high school grad for an arts major.
It doesn't get better for in-state tuition. According to the same analysis, an FIU humanities and English major from Florida will make $132,000 less than a high school graduate over 20 years.
So, yeah, ugh (not to mention, at FIU, you'll also get spied on while you pray). FIU isn't the only Florida school to make the list. An out-of-state student at the University of Central Florida will also be down $132,000 over 20 years.
Oh, hey, by the way, the medium salary of a plumber is $49,140. So even though you can rap some semiotics, probably should have just sold all those books by French authors and picked up a plunger.
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