JP Gruchacz

MDS 4983
Gregory Sansone
Education, Is It the Answer?
Education has always been an interesting topic of discussion on all levels,
whether it is on a political level or at the local level, the growing need to have a
college education continues to show a blaring weakness within the United States,
and that weakness is we are uneducated. But does being undereducated keep us
from making it to where we want to be? When I was browsing the General Social
Surveys website, I noticed that there were a lot of statistics about household
degrees and how high of an education that household members have obtained.
According the U.S. Census Bureau, households with members of the age of 25 and
higher, 86 percent have a high school diploma, but a staggering 29 percent have a
college degree. These numbers are slowly starting to grow, especially among
women getting college degrees. The average household income is roughly 50,500
dollars. Considering the cost of living and the average family size, $50,000 is not as
much money as it sounds. The demand for a higher education to obtain better
paying jobs continues to grow every single day. Individuals may be more than
qualified for a job based on work experience and other factors, but they will almost
always get pushed down by someone who has gone to college and obtained a
degree. But is education the answer to beginning to work on societies problems?
To take a look at the education system and its effects on people who traverse
through it, we have to first look at where the United States stands in comparison to
other leading nations in education. According to Pearson PLC, the United States
ranks 14th overall, 11th in cognitive skills rank and score, and 20 th in education
attainment. This is all an index of cognitive skills and educational attainment. Those
are some fairly low rankings for a country that is supposed to be the best country in
the world. The top 3 countries in the world in education are South Korea, Japan, and
Singapore. Canada, our neighbors to the north, are more than twice as high ranked
than we are. The education system here is poor to say the least, and it begins with
funding. The government tries to do their best to make sure that our education
system has steady funding to try to remain up to date on supplies, having good
teachers, new facilities, and many other amenities, but the fact of the matter is, this
money is not being filtered that way that it needs to be. In some cases, the money
may be going to schools that are already up to date in technology or have a full
teaching staff as opposed to going to an underdeveloped or out of date school.
There are many school districts that are short staffed because they cannot afford to
pay teachers what they deserve to be paid because they have to funnel the money
in to other areas of concern. Teachers who are fresh off of graduating from college
try to avoid these underfunded schools because they can be difficult to begin a
teaching career at. These schools are normally attended by students who are living
at or below the poverty line, the facilities are old and out of date or breaking down,
and the administration normally are near the end of their careers and just simply do
not care enough to try to make a change in these young peoples lives. To start
making a change in the public education field, there needs to be more funding for
teachers and supplies, and there needs to be officials who are making sure the
money is being distributed correctly, as opposed to filtering money to schools that

already have more than enough. Also, school districts need to make sure that their
teachers are properly being paid and taken care of, so that they are not as prone to
leaving a district that desperately needs their services for a different job. If these
changes could somehow be implemented, we would have a chance to start
changing kids at a young age and prepare them the way that they should be
prepped, not by a state standardized test, but by the means to prepare them for
college and the real world.
The next interesting trend that has been occurring is the average income for
a fresh college graduate. According to the National Center for Education Statistics,
the average income for an individual without a high school diploma was $22,900.
Those individuals who did earn a high school diploma on average made about
$30,000. For people who went to college and earned a bachelors degree the
average income was $46,900. The Institute also noted that people who achieved a
masters degree made $59,600, and these trends seem to be fairly consistent
across all races and both genders. These numbers are fairly different and show a lot
about the difference that achieving a higher education can make a difference on
your annual salary. The alarming part about these numbers is what the average
college graduates debt it. According the Institute of College Access and Success,
the average student debt after graduating from college is $25,550 for public
universities, and $32,300 if you graduated from a private university. These average
debts are for those who obtained a bachelors degree and are quite staggering
considering that the average income for a person with a bachelors degree is only
$46,900. The number one source of debt in the United States is student debt, and
the average student debt when someone graduates college is on the right, those
two dollar amounts are up 25 percent from 20008. When people are doing research
on either going to college or just entering the workforce right out of high school, the
average person is not going to want to put themselves $25,000 or more in to debt
to obtain a degree that only pays them give or take $15,000 or more a year. Yes,
this sounds like an obvious choice to most people, but there are individuals who
struggled their way through high school and barely graduated with a high school
diploma, so to them, the tradeoff is not worth it because they do not want to
struggle through college in the same manor. I know that the high school that I went
to had a 62 percent graduation rate, so the chances were that the person sitting
next to you probably would not graduate with you. When I was in high school they
did not really talk about college and certainly did not prep you for college, so any
aspirations of college had to be done on your own time with your own research, this
made college tough for me. College really is not for everyone, if a person does not
want to go to college then they probably should not. There is no point for a person
to continue to put themselves in to more debt if they are not going to get the
degree because then they just wasted a ton of money and did not even receive the
degree to help them off set those costs.
My final point is that obtaining a college degree does not even guarantee you
a good job when you finally do get done with college. According to a statistic release
by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, roughly 50 million jobs will be created by the
Economy in 2014, and of those 50 million jobs, only 27.1 percent will actually
require a college degree. 27 percent will require a college degree. The Bureau also
noted that currently throughout the United States in the workforce, only 27 percent
of jobs actually require a college degree. This is an alarmingly low number
considering how hard you are pushed to receive a college education and graduate

with at least a bachelors degree. Of this 27 percent, most of the jobs that are going
to be obtained by college graduates do not even require your degree to be within
that field of work. The Bureau went on to point out that currently in the work force,
46 percent of workers have at least an associates degree or higher. In 2022 the
projection of jobs that will require you to have a college degree increases .1 percent
to 27.1 percent, this is only up 2.1 percentage points since 1996. To process all of
the statistics I just threw at you, 27 percent of all the jobs that are currently being
held in the United States require you to have a college degree, and even with that
college degree, a lot of the same jobs require you to have multiple years of work
experience in that same field. Of the hundreds of millions of people who are
currently in the work force, only 46 percent have an associates degree or higher. So
less than 1 out of every 2 people has a college degree who are working, and roughly
a quarter of those people actually needed a degree to get their job. I interviewed
my father, John Gruchacz, to gain his knowledge on this particular area. John worked
for the San Antonio Police Department for 27 years. He worked his way up from a
traffic cop all the way to working for a specialized unit in SAPD as a sergeant. After
he retired, he was recruited by one of his former bosses to go work as a Lieutenant
for the San Antonio Airport Police Department. After working there for a few years
he was promoted to Chief of Police for the Airport Police Department. He left that
position after the city of San Antonio dissolved the Airport Police and made that a
branch of the San Antonio Police Department. John was then recruited yet again by
a former boss to go work as a consultant at CPS energy. His income is now over
$100,000, and what is the highest level of education he obtained? He obtained an
associates degree while working for SAPD because there was law passed down by
the city that police officers had to have at least an associates degree to have a job.
The reason that he was able to obtain such a good salary was not because he had a
college degree, it was because he worked his butt off every day being a police
officer, and working that hard every day, he caught the eyes of his bosses with his
work ethic, and they remembered him when they moved on to better jobs and were
able to give him one when he needed to move on. There are numerous stories like
this out there that prove that yes, having a college education may be able to get
you a good paying job if you are willing to work hard when you get there, but you do
not always need a degree to get a good paying job. Sometimes just working
incredibly hard every day, and gaining the notice of people in higher positions is
more than enough for you to achieve the work wage that you want, and get into a
job that you want. So this loops my question back around, education, is it the
answer?
While I was browsing the General Social Survey, I noticed that there was a lot
of surveys about college degrees, and what the highest education within a
household so I started doing some digging. Education does not always mean that
you are going to get a high paying job. After some research, I noticed that there are
differences in income between people with an associates degree and higher versus
those who might not have even graduated from high school. But after doing some
more research, I found out that having a bachelors degree or higher does not even
guarantee you a good paying job. The Bureau of Labor Statistics says that only 27
percent of jobs actually require you to have a bachelors degree, or roughly one out
of every four jobs. Most jobs require you to have work experience, as given in the
interview with my father. While maybe having a bachelor degree will get your foot in
the door, at the end of the day, you need to be able to work hard and get noticed by
your superiors to work your way up to a higher salary. After doing the research,

obtaining a higher education does not seem to be the answer to working your way
up to society, it just appears to be a title more than it actually helps you out.

References.
"Access and Analyze GSS Data." GSS Data Explorer. 1 Jan. 2015. Web. 27 Apr.
2015. <https://gssdataexplorer.norc.org/>.
Carnvehale, Anthony. "Too Many College Grads? Or Too Few?" PBS. PBS, 21
Feb. 2014. Web. 27 Apr. 2015. <http://www.pbs.org/newshour/making-sense/manycollege-grads/>.
Gruchacz, John. "Work and Education Experience." Personal interview. 15 Apr.
2015.
"Index of Cognitive Skills and Educational Attainment." Index Ranking.
Pearson. Web. 27 Apr. 2015. <http://thelearningcurve.pearson.com/index/indexranking/overall-score-highest>.
"Quick Facts about Student Debt." College Success and Access. 1 Mar. 2014.
Web. 27 Apr. 2015.
<http://ticas.org/sites/default/files/pub_files/Debt_Facts_and_Sources.pdf>.
"United States Census Bureau." USA QuickFacts from the US Census Bureau.
31 Mar. 2015. Web. 27 Apr. 2015.
<http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/00000.html>.