Facts & Figures

I'm writing this as a response to a comment I saw on Facebook by a group I'm part of. I'm not posting directly because I genuinely support what said group is doing and the people in it. Unfortunately, the group relies heavily on statistics from the "We Make This Shit Up As We Go Along" department.

I am all for funding public education - both in terms of mandatory school and public or state colleges. And I'm also of the mind that every American deserves a shot at college. Not that schools should just hand out degrees from overly-specific programs, but at least everyone should try it. And it is true that one stands to land a better-paying job and have a higher quality of life by getting a college degree.

That being said, a figure was quoted stating that the average starting salary of a college grad with a bachelor's was somewhere around 50K a year, and that figure reeks of bullshit. Personally, I've never had a job that pays that much, and I have both a college degree and job training/certs in computer programming. People I know with degrees who have been at their jobs for years don't make 50K. Even my friends who were lucky enough to land really great jobs with unions and benefits don't make that much, so where the hell did this number come from? Time for a lesson in how to fine-tune a Bullshit Detector.

First, check where the info comes from. In this case, the 50K figure comes from the National Association of Colleges and Employers. I don't know who they are either, but since it's a conglomerate of schools who want new students and employers who want new talent, of course they're going to make going to college as appealing as possible, even if it means lying.

And yes, they're lying. The 50K figure came from so far up a marketing executive's asshole its still got half-digested taco stuck to it. More reliable gauges of how much people make are available from sources, like, I don't know, the US Census? According to last year's, the per-capital household income in NJ is 34K a year. That's pretty far off 50K if you ask me, and by the way, that's a few thousand higher than the national average. And by the way again, that's for a household of 2 to 3 people.

Bullshit detected! Shields up!

To one who is passionate about education, it is really upsetting to see that college isn't marketed differently. It's one thing to take a legitimate state school and bring it down to the level of daytime TV nursing school infomerical, but pulling bullshit statistics from disingenuous groups nobody has ever heard of with extremely clear agendas just creates an illusion for potential students. Not that colleges should be all Debbie Downer and pee in everyone's cereal, but there's a better way to go about it. Maybe if schools stop treating themselves like worker drone factories and practiced a little more honesty instead of promising the world to a bunch of wide-eyed freshmen with dollar signs instead of pupils, and helped them to become more well-rounded and worldly adults instead of more productive workers, more folks would be pissed off about the state of things in this country, and just maybe we'd get some of the change everyone has been screaming for.