By Selwyn Duke

Going to college has become a rite of passage. Like a high school
diploma, it’s now often expected that a student will go on to earn — or
should I say "get" — a bachelor’s degree. After all, this is how we
increase our earning potential, right?

Not necessarily so, says
career counselor Marty Nemko. In the piece cited above, he opens by
discussing the folly of encouraging unqualified, unprepared students to
attend college, writing:

Among high-school students who
graduated in the bottom 40 percent of their classes, and whose first
institutions were four-year colleges, two-thirds had not earned
diplomas eight and a half years later…. Even worse, most of those
college dropouts leave the campus having learned little of value, and
with a mountain of debt and devastated self-esteem from their
unsuccessful struggles. Perhaps worst of all, even those who do manage
to graduate too rarely end up in careers that require a college
education.

Read the rest here.