Beating The College Bubble: How To Learn What You Need Without The Debt [Paperback]

C Davis (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 6, 2008

America is in love with a college education. No matter how much the love may be justified, humans take things too far and pay too much. This is a guidebook to surviving life after the college bubble bursts. It's a short, crisp book I wrote to help me decide how much to save for college and-- this is the most important part-- how much debt to take on. I hope this book will help you get what you need from the wonderful world of college in a way that won't burden you with a lifetime of debt. Your best lesson shouldn't be that a fool and his money are soon parted.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

C Davis spent too much time in college and now has two degrees from Ivy League schools. That wasn't enough and Prof. Davis jumped back in to lead classes at schools big and small, famous and not so famous. This first hand experience is the foundation for this book.

Product Details

• Paperback: 96 pages
• Publisher: CreateSpace (June 6, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1438235909
• ISBN-13: 978-1438235905
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.5 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 2.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,094,811 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Half-baked and not for everyone, June 22, 2010

By 

Steve - See all my reviews

This review is from: Beating The College Bubble: How To Learn What You Need Without The Debt (Paperback)

The bottom line for this book is that the author isn't an expert in education and his ideas are half-baked. He provides some good advice Chapter 11, but it's not worth of the harm of wading through a significant amount of misinformation in the previous 10 chapters.

My main gripe with the book are the following:

Chapter 2 presents a series of case studies of "composite characters" and asks whether college was valuable for them. The problem is that these "composites" are one in a million. One is based on Steve Jobs and two won Rhodes Scholarships. The average IQ for the group must be somewhere between "highly gifted" and "genius" as most attend Ivy League schools, and they all seem to have an extraordinary amount of motivation. Indeed, one of the recurring bad assumptions in the book is that people have the willpower to just get an education on their own time--that I can just buy a textbook and force myself to learn Quantum Mechanics. I've tried. It never works out, but I have learned subjects of comparable difficulty when forced to for a class.

Chapter 3 argues that "knowledge isn't power," presenting a view contrary to the consensus among economists, that technological progress is making education LESS not more valuable. The author says that its easy to offshore the work of lawyers and computer programmers but that jobs for police officers will always be available in the states. This is true, but it's also true that lawyers and programmers make more than police officers and there is every indication they still will in 50 years. The author isn't an economist which becomes even more painfully clear in chapter 10.

Contrary to his earlier claim "[t]here is also no way to know if a college education is a good deal," he asks (and answers) the question anyway. Unfortunately he commits a few basic mistakes in the arithmetic. He quotes a CollegeBoard report on the return to a 4 year degree, then compares these benefits to the cost of going to an exorbitantly expensive private college AND medical school. Does he realize that an M.D. makes at least 2x what the typical B.A. makes? He notes that if you invest $200,000 at 7.2% interest (quite an exceptional rate of return for a low risk investment) you'd have 3.2 million at the end of 40 years, more than the extra $800k-1 mil that college grads earn. But that doesn't compare apples to apples as the college grad could invest his annual income too. We should compare the sums by NPV (I'll use a discount rate of 5%), in which case the $3.2 million is worth around 450k and so is the college degree. He goes on to note that what we really want is a twin study on education because these numbers aren't quite right. He fails to mention that while no one has done a twin study many labor economists have done the next best thing, using credible quasi-experimental methods to estimate the return to education. They generally find a substantial (larger than reported by the CollegeBoard) return.

Despite these quibbles the book has some value to some people. If you're a smart kid with rich parents who aspires to go to a big name college. The truth is that Harvard just isn't worth $50k a year when you can go to UF or UVa for $20k. If you're a young person trying to find your way in the world, the general theme of looking inward and working hard is something to keep in mind. Waving a diploma around isn't going to conjure up a golden road to career satisfaction.