Pushing students to receive traditional four-year degrees has long been the ultimate goal for state and federal education departments. However, researchers are beginning to study the usefulness of obtaining a bachelor’s degree and ask if students are getting more bang for their buck.
According to Interim Director of Administration and Finance Sam Domiano, tuition for a full-time student is approximately $2,181, not including mandatory fees. This puts the university as having the second-lowest tuition in the University of Louisiana System.
Furthermore, according to Domiano, when comparing the total operating budget per FTE (full-time equivalency) with other University of Louisiana System schools, Southeastern is the second lowest in the system, coming in at $3,408 per FTE.
The amount of funds the university spends on students seems to have little effect on graduation rates, which are calculated at 35.8 percent, but does not include students who start part-time or transfer from another institution. This makes up about half of the university’s graduates.
Most recently, the Hammond Daily Star endorsed four-year degrees, citing research released by the Pew Research Center, which found that nine out of 10 college graduates said either their bachelor’s degrees had already paid off or they expected them to pay off.
Within the same study, Pew found that college is worth more today than ever before because students with a bachelor’s degree of Generation X, in 1995, earned a median income of $43,663 per year. According to Pew, Millennials, in 2013 and in the same scenario, earn a median income of approximately $45,500 per year.
Economics professor Jay Johnson, however, said the research by Pew is misleading because it was conducted using broad statements, rather than specific ones.
“It’s very difficult to make a blanket statement for Millennials because it makes a big difference whether you study engineering, technology or computer science versus music, in terms of the labor market,” said Johnson. “Now, it may be tremendously valuable for you to get a music degree, but in terms of earning income, it may not generate nearly the income productivity that you’d expect.”
Johnson said that if Pew had differentiated the kinds of degrees that were most popularly earned by each generation, instead of averaging numbers for a large population altogether, the research would be more reliable.
In a conflicting study, conducted by the American Institutes for Research and Matrix Knowledge Group, which gathered data from Arkansas, Colorado, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia, found that students who earn an associate’s degree often times earn more in their first year in the workforce than students who earned a bachelor’s degree.
According to Johnson, two-year degrees can be much more beneficial for students as far as earnings because students spend less on their education at a technical institute versus a traditional four-year university.
“Here in Louisiana, we’re going through a building and construction boom because of the increase in oil and gas production,” said Johnson. “There’s a high demand for electricians and pipefitters. These are very high productivity in the job market. That’s the reason right now, you could graduate with a two year degree as an electronics technician and earn far more than the starting bachelor’s degree even in some of our business fields.”
Coinciding with this research, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released a list of jobs it says will be in high demand in the coming years that require nothing more than a two-year degree or vocational training.
The list includes dental hygienists, commercial pilots and electrical and electronics repairers. Median incomes for the 10 positions range from $58,080 per year to $74,980 per year, which Johnson said undermines the misconception that the more a student spends on education, the more their earnings will be when they enter the workforce.
“A four year engineering degree is going to have tremendous job opportunities at high incomes and a four year degree in history or political science is going to be a lot less,” said Johnson. “So a two year electronic technician degree would be far more valuable, at least in terms of earning an income, it may not be as satisfying to you as much as you like doing political science, but purely as earning an income, a two year degree definitely has better payback in some fields.”
When surveyed by the Office of Institutional Research at the university, a majority of students who graduated with bachelor’s degrees said they already had a full-time job before graduating.
Although only 12 percent of students contributed to the 2006 – 2007 school year survey, roughly 25 percent of respondents said they accepted a job upon graduation. Only about one percent said they did not have a full-time job.
Of those who reported not having full-time jobs upon graduation, nine percent said it was because of a lack of marketable skills, while 36 percent said it was because of a lack of educational qualifications.
At the state level, a push for education that focuses on jobs that are in high demand is surfacing.
Gov. Bobby Jindal proposed a plan that supports a $40 million allocation for the Workforce and Innovation for a Stronger Economy (WISE) fund, designed to support higher education programming that aligns with the state’s job market.
Colleges and universities would have to use those allocated funds to further train students in fields where the state is currently lacking workers.
Though Johnson said the state sometimes does get more bang for its buck by backing vocational training and community colleges more so than traditional universities, he said there is still a need for a wide variety of studies for students to choose from.
“The purpose of a university is to provide a large number of diverse studies of education,” said Johnson. “So we don’t want to cut off all of the music majors and political science majors just to have higher incomes. But trying to get that balance right is very difficult.”