Degree // Current

Does a University degree really set you up for life?

The usual opinion has been the same for generations: get a good degree and you're set for life. But is that still true in... more

Beta_Boy
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Iran minister impeached for false degree

Ali Kordan is Iran's Interior Minister - now former-Interior Minister. Iran's parliament voted Tuesday to impeach him... more

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First: USC to offer degrees in Pop Music

The University of Southern California (USC) has announced that it will be the first major US university to offer a bachelor's... more

Apocalipstick
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Major university offers first US popular music degree

USC's Thornton School of Music will make room starting next year for singers and instrumentalists who play pop music,... more

DonkeyPong
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Pocket Money, Please

If you're a teen, you can make extra cash for the holidays or extra work experience for your future career.

CutestPrincess
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Woman auctions virginity to pay for education

The woman, who has earned a bachelor degree in women's studies and now wants to start a master's degree in marriage and... more

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A four-year college degree, seen for generations as a ticket to a better life, is no longer enough to guarantee a steadily rising paycheck.

A college degree may not take you as far as you'd expect. However, WSJ's Jennifer Merritt reports on a few fields where a bachelor's degree still remains a worthy investment.
Just ask Bea Dewing. After she earned a bachelor's degree -- her second -- in computer science from Maryland's Frostburg State University in 1986, she enjoyed almost unbroken advances in wages, eventually earning $89,000 a year as a data modeler for Sprint Corp. in Lawrence, Kan. Then, in 2002, Sprint laid her off.

"I thought I might be looking a few weeks or months at the most," says Ms. Dewing, now 56 years old. Instead she spent the next six years in a career wilderness, starting an Internet café that didn't succeed, working temporary jobs and low-end positions in data processing, and fruitlessly responding to hundreds of job postings.

The low point came around 2004 when a recruiter for Sprint -- now known as Sprint Nextel Corp. -- called seeking to fill a job similar to the one she lost two years earlier, but paying barely a third of her old salary.

In April, Ms. Dewing finally landed a job similar to her old one in the information technology department of Wal-Mart Stores Inc.'s headquarters in Bentonville, Ark., where she relocated. She earns about 20% less than she did in 2002, adjusted for inflation, but considers herself fortunate, and wiser.

A degree, she says, "isn't any big guarantee of employment, it's a basic requirement, a step you have to take to even be considered for many professional jobs."

MORE DATA

Trends in Education, SalariesFor decades, the typical college graduate's wage rose well above inflation. But no longer. In the economic expansion that began in 2001 and now appears to be ending, the inflation-adjusted wages of the majority of U.S. workers didn't grow, even among those who went to college. The government's statistical snapshots show the typical weekly salary of a worker with a bachelor's degree, adjusted for inflation, didn't rise last year from 2006 and was 1.7% below the 2001 level.

College-educated workers are more plentiful, more commoditized and more subject to the downsizings that used to be the purview of blue-collar workers only. What employers want from workers nowadays is more narrow, more abstract and less easily learned in college.

To be sure, the average American with a college diploma still earns about 75% more than a worker with a high-school diploma and is less likely to be unemployed. Yet while that so-called college premium is up from 40% in 1979, it is little changed from 2001, according to data compiled by Jared Bernstein of the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal Washington think tank
A four-year college degree, seen for generations as a ticket to a better life, is no longer enough to guarantee a steadily rising... more