Getting Your Money’s Worth for a College Education

Especially as One Third of College Students Say They Might Drop Out

You probably know that I'm a big critic of college and the college cost and the challenge of getting our students the education they need at a price that they can afford. Now we've got new data from the Chronicle of Higher Education. A third of college students are thinking of dropping out. Faculty say a third of their students are absent from class or not participating when they're there. 76% of students say they're suffering emotional stress. That's the reason they're talking about dropping out of school. The rest say the coursework is simply too difficult.

If you've got a student in college, you need to talk to them about their attitude about college. Are they thinking of dropping out? That could be $50,000 down the drain for you if they've done so.

Universities, meanwhile, are trying to save money, lowering the cost of attending college. Hundreds of schools, including Vanderbilt, UCal Berkeley and USC, they're now hiring companies to create and teach classes without the students knowing that they've been outsourced. These online education companies use .edu email addresses of the universities to recruit students into their courses. They also get phone numbers with university area codes. Are you sure that the tuition dollars you're paying are resulting in your student getting taught on campus by an actual member of the university faculty? Or are you being bamboozled? You need to talk with that university and that college to make sure you really understand who's teaching what to your child. Our institutions of higher education are not always delivering what it is we think we're paying for.