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Sovereign Man

Vilnius, Lithuania
August 5, 2015

Conventional wisdom tells you that a university degree is the best investment you can make for your career.

Invest the time and money now, they say, and you’ll make heaps more in the future.

The thing is, that’s not really happening anymore.

Tuition costs have skyrocketed, meaning a far higher initial investment, while potential returns have slumped.

From baristas to janitors, some 43% of graduates don’t even need a degree for the jobs they have.

This basically means that they are four years behind and $50,000-$100,000 worse off than if they’d just gotten that job straight out of high school.

There are better uses of one’s time and money than getting a degree.

But, if you feel like you absolutely HAVE to have a degree, at least do it smartly.

Treat education like an investment. Think about both the capital and opportunity costs, and calculate the expected returns.

The costs are the time and money that could be spent doing other things; while the potential returns are the knowledge, connections, and opportunities you stand to gain.

Then, look for great deals, where you can maximize your returns.

As is the case with most investments, many of the best deals are found overseas.

Peking University is the most prestigious in China; yet tuition runs less than $5,000 per year.

Here you would be rubbing elbows with China’s elite business circles, providing invaluable connections for doing business in the country later in life.

Meanwhile, you’d be saving on living costs and building up fluency in one of the world’s most important emerging business languages.

Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, where you’d be studying at one of the finest universities in the world—in ENGLISH—for less than $1,500 a year.

Even if you just want to drop in, EPFL lets you attend classes without being awarded a degree for about 50 bucks per course.

This is a steal given that EPFL ranks higher than Cornell, Brown, Northwestern, Rice, Carnegie Mellon, Dartmouth, UC Berkley, BU, Duke, McGill, NYU, and many other top-ranked US schools.

Technical University of Munich, one of the most highly regarded universities in Europe, where you can get an advanced degree for a whopping $120 a semester.

AND that includes a free bus pass. I mean, it’s like being paid to go to school.

My favorite investment deals are always the ones where I can get something for nothing.

I love a great real estate deal, for example, where I can buy a high quality home for less than the cost of its construction. Or buying a company (stocks) for less than the amount of cash that it has in the bank.

Getting something for nothing is almost always a great deal. And they’re out there, whether you’re talking about traditional investments, or the investment you make in yourself (like education).

What stuns me is how few people take advantage of this, especially when they come from high cost countries like the United States.

In fact, only about 4,600 American students are enrolled in all of Germany, where tuition costs throughout the country are uniformly low.

Just think about it-- imagine spending next to nothing while graduating debt-free, with international experience, and possibly even another language under your belt?

Now that is how you make going to university profitable.
Until tomorrow,

Simon Black
Founder, SovereignMan.com

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I Owe It All to Community College

By Tom Hanks, NY Times, Jan. 14, 2015

In 1974, I graduated from Skyline High School in Oakland, Calif., an underachieving student with lousy SAT scores. Allowed to send my results to three colleges, I chose M.I.T. and Villanova, knowing such fine schools would never accept a student like me but hoping they’d toss some car stickers my way for taking a shot. I couldn’t afford tuition for college anyway. I sent my final set of stats to Chabot, a community college in nearby Hayward, Calif., which, because it accepted everyone and was free, would be my alma mater.

For thousands of commuting students, Chabot was our Columbia, Annapolis, even our Sorbonne, offering courses in physics, stenography, auto mechanics, certified public accounting, foreign languages, journalism—name the art or science, the subject or trade, and it was probably in the catalog. The college had a nursing program that churned out graduates, sports teams that funneled athletes to big-time programs, and parking for a few thousand cars—all free but for the effort and the cost of used textbooks.

Classmates included veterans back from Vietnam, women of every marital and maternal status returning to school, middle-aged men wanting to improve their employment prospects and paychecks. We could get our general education requirements out of the way at Chabot—credits we could transfer to a university—which made those two years an invaluable head start. I was able to go on to the State University in Sacramento (at $95 a semester, just barely affordable) and study no other subject but my major, theater arts. (After a year there I moved on, enrolling in a little thing called the School of Hard Knocks, a.k.a. Life.)

By some fluke of the punch-card computer era, I made Chabot’s dean’s list taking classes I loved (oral interpretation), classes I loathed (health, a requirement), classes I aced (film as art—like Jean Renoir’s “Golden Coach” and Luis Buñuel’s “Simon of the Desert”), and classes I dropped after the first hour (astronomy, because it was all math). I nearly failed zoology, killing my fruit flies by neglect, but got lucky in an English course, “The College Reading Experience.”

A public speaking class was unforgettable for a couple of reasons. First, the assignments forced us to get over our self-consciousness. Second, another student was a stewardess, as flight attendants called themselves in the ‘70s. She was studying communications and was gorgeous. She lived not far from me, and when my VW threw a rod and was in the shop for a week, she offered me a lift to class. I rode shotgun that Monday-Wednesday-Friday totally tongue-tied. Communicating with her one on one was the antithesis of public speaking.

Classes I took at Chabot have rippled through my professional pond. I produced the HBO mini-series “John Adams” with an outline format I learned from a pipe-smoking historian, James Coovelis, whose lectures were riveting. Mary Lou Fitzgerald’s Studies in Shakespeare taught me how the five-act structures of “Richard III,” “The Tempest” and “Othello” focused their themes.

In Herb Kennedy’s Drama in Performance, I read plays like “The Hot L Baltimore” and “Desire Under the Elms,” then saw their productions. I got to see the plays he taught, through student rush tickets at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco and the Berkeley Repertory Theater. Those plays filled my head with expanded dreams. I got an A.

Of course, I goofed off between classes eating French fries and looking at girls; such are the pleasures, too, of schools that cost thousands of bucks a semester. Some hours I idled away in the huge library that anchored Chabot’s oval quad. It’s where I first read The New York Times, frustrated by its lack of comics.

If Chabot’s library still has its collection of vinyl records, you will find my name repeatedly on the takeout slip of Jason Robards’s performance of the monologues of Eugene O’Neill. On Side B he was Hickey, from “The Iceman Cometh,” a recording I listened to 20 times at least. When I worked with Mr. Robards on the 1993 film “Philadelphia,” he confessed to recording those monologues at 10 in the morning after lots and lots of coffee.

President Obama hopes to make two years of free community college accessible for up to nine million Americans. I’m guessing the new Congress will squawk at the $60 billion price tag, but I hope the idea sticks, because more veterans, from Iraq and Afghanistan this time, as well as another generation of mothers, single parents and workers who have been out of the job market, need lower obstacles between now and the next chapter of their lives. High school graduates without the finances for a higher education can postpone taking on big loans and maybe luck into the class that will redefine their life’s work. Many lives will be changed.

Chabot College is still in Hayward, though Mr. Coovelis, Ms. Fitzgerald and Mr. Kennedy are no longer there. I drove past the campus a few years ago with one of my kids and summed up my two years there this way: “That place made me what I am today.”

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College president takes a $90,000 pay cut to give low-wage workers a raise

Raymond Burse is forfeiting a chunk of his salary at Kentucky State University to improve pay for the lowest-paid workers.

By Hayley Fox, TakePart AUGUST 15, 2014

Jim Young/Reuters/File
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It's become a gross norm of campus income disparity: College executives regularly collect salaries and perks that top $1 million a year as their ramen-dependent students struggle with ever-increasing tuition and mounting debt—and the lowest-paid workers are perenially undercompensated for all they do to keep the whole system running.

A minor but interesting shift took place this month when two dozen of the lowest-paid Kentucky State University workers got a hefty wage increase because their college president gave up $90,000 of his own six-digit salary so others could earn a living wage.

Raymond Burse, interim president of the school, will now receive a reduced annual salary of $259,744 so low-wage workers can get a pay bump to $10.25 an hour. By comparison, food servers were paid an average of $24,213 in the 2013–2014 school year, according to a survey published by the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Recommended: 10 companies that pay higher than minimum wage

Of course, Burse is in the unusual position of being able to forfeit part of his pay because he retired in 2012 (with good benefits) from a long career as an executive at General Electric Co., he told the Lexington Herald-Leader. Burse didn't immediately respond to a TakePart request for interview.


10 companies that pay higher than minimum wage

The KSU Board of Regents has agreed to maintain the $10.25 hourly rate for employees even after a new president is brought in, and he will continue to use it as the wage base for future hires.

"This is not a publicity stunt," Burse told theHerald-Leader. "You don't give up $90,000 for publicity. I did this for the people. This is something I've been thinking about from the very beginning."

Burse said his good deed wasn’t meant as a jab at other college leaders to do the same, but maybe it should be.

The discrepancy between the highest- and the lowest-paid employees on college campuses is problematic, said William Tierney, a professor at the University of Southern California and the codirector of the Pullias Center for Higher Education.

“Those who are making the largest salaries versus those who are making the least...the average between the two has grown over the last 20 years,” said Tierney.

Forty-two presidents of private universities made more than $1 million in 2011, according to a report from the Chronicle of Higher Education. It’s not just private schools that are feeling flush. As average tuition at four-year public universities climbed by more than 8 percent in 2011–2012, four public school presidents made more than $1 million a year in compensation.

The exorbitant incomes of these executives include not only base pay but also an array of perks, from housing allowances to travel expenses (which are often first class and allotted to presidents' spouses as well) to generous retirement benefits.

While the philanthropy of KSU’s president is “admirable,” it’s not unprecedented, said Tierney. Lots of administrators give donations to the school or fund student scholarships, he said. One president, William Harvey of Hampton University in Virginia, gave more than $1 million to his college this year to increase the pay rate of full-time, low-wage employees.

However, there are systemic problems in the way university employees are paid throughout the country, said Tierney. For example, most college presidents are more concerned with keeping top faculty happy for prestige reasons. These are the employees who often see raises, said Tierney, not the low-paid service workers who empty wastebaskets or cook dorm hall dinners.

This becomes especially problematic in states such as California and in cities with high costs of living, such as Los Angeles or San Francisco. Although Gov. Jerry Brown has approved a minimum wage increase in California, it’s being implemented at a snail’s pace, said Tierney. It is scheduled to be bumped up to $9 in 2014 and $10 in 2016.

“What happens in California is everything’s legal, so the people who are working for the UC or the CSU or my own institution, they get paid a legal salary, but the minimum wage is so paltry right now that it makes it very difficult for individuals to have a living wage,” said Tierney.

Many universities have sidestepped the politics of minimum wage pay and avoided responsibility by outsourcing some of their lowest-paid positions. College executives often set up contracts with private companies to fill certain campus jobs, such as janitorial work or food service, said Tierney. By opting for outside agencies instead of in-house workers, the schools often save a significant amount of money—and protect themselves from criticism or pesky unionization threats.

In 2012, Texas A&M University outsourced more than 1,500 landscaping, maintenance, and dining service jobs, according to The Daily Texan. And in 2013, the University of Texas considered proposals to contract out campus dining, housing, and parking services, which they claimed could save the school more than $490 million over the next decade.

While outsourcing may save the universities money, it comes at a cost. These new private workers are less invested in the school and often, the well-being of its students, The Guardian reports. Universities also end up having less control over the training and development of these contracted workers, which can affect their performance on campus.

Tierney maintains that the issue is much larger than college politics. It’s about the widening gap between the rich and the poor throughout the country, in all professions.

“Universities need to be fountainheads for change,” said Tierney. “They need to not mirror the worst tendencies in societies.”

• Hayley Fox is a regular contributor to TakePart who has covered breaking news and the occasional animal story for public radio station KPCC in Los Angeles.

• The original article appeared at TakePart, a leading source of socially relevant news, features, opinion, entertainment, and information – all focused on the issues that shape our lives.

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