In this post, Abraham Piper poses this question and comment:
How Important is college?
College shouldn’t be considered a take-it-or-leave-it decision. Nowadays, deciding against college is like deciding to not graduate from high school.
Your thoughts?
I posted this in the comments:
Economists call it human capital formation. (I am looking forward to the day when one of my kids says, “Dad, thanks for investing in my human capital formation”). Economists have noted for years that the return on a college education have been increasing over the past decades despite the fact that the cost of a college education has dramatically outstripped the inflation rate over the same period.
Some readers will point out that money isn’t everything. And of course they are right. Better a Christ-treasuring ditch digger than a worldly physician. But on the whole, in our economy, people find more long term satisfaction from the careers that require post-secondary education. And I think finding pleasure in your work is a very worthwhile, God-glorifying goal.
What I find odd, and slightly disturbing, are several families I know that assume that their sons will attend college(and encourage them to) and assume that their girls will not attend college (and discourage or even forbid them).
Steve
I want to elaborate a little. The data is very clear on two factors: college grads have higher earnings potential than non-college grads and they have higher job satisfaction. According to 2000 census data, college graduates earn about $1,000,000 dollars more over the course of a lifetime. 2006 Census data revealed that adults with a bachelor’s degree earned an average of $54,689 in 2005, while those with a high school diploma earned $29,448. This same phenomenon also explains the growing income disparity between the top and bottom quintiles of income distribution. The rich are not getting richer because those greedy republicans keep giving them tax cuts but because the return to higher education is growing as our economy transitions away from a manufacturing based economy to a service based economy.
I have created a spreadsheet for use in Microsoft Excel that I am calling the Ultimate Budget Spreadsheet. This spreadsheet is a powerful tool for helping you to manage your personal budget.
I have written this to be my first stab at an online business. It will not be free software. For $25.00 a user will get a copy of the spreadsheet and access to my upcoming website that includes a document called A Step-By-Step Guide to living on a budget AND video tutorials on how to use the budgeting spreadsheet.
But this is the good news for you, our loyal readers, I am GIVING away the first 50 copies of the software to first responders to this blog post. All I ask in return is that you link to my upcoming website from your website (if you have one — that could be a blog or a business site ) AND/OR that you write a brief testimonial about the spreadsheet once you have given it a go.
To help you determine if you would be interested in the software I have put together this 7+ minute video on how to use it. Check it out:
If you would like to be included please leave a comment on this post.
I remember as a kid being simultaneously fascinated and terrified by the ultra-campy TV series Land of the Lost. Well its coming to the big screen with Will Ferrell in the lead. Apparently, the series has had a very successful release to DVD and has a large cult following. Still, that is a studio pitch I would have liked to have seen.
Amazingly, it seems that hollywood is determined to turn last years highly popular Iron Man movie trailer into a “full-length motion picture.” For all the details watch the newscast below from the Onion News Network.
For those of you that don’t know me personally…I write software applications for a living. An application I have written was briefly mentioned in a local newscast here in the upstate of SC. The article doesn’t quite get it right in terms of what the application does but it still is sorta cool to see some of your work get a fly-by mention.
Susan, interviewed for the newscast, particularly is a good friend of mine as well as a customer.
To watch the newscast click the URL mentioned below:
My friend Harrison informs me in this blog post that their is talk that our great Governor, Mark Sanford, is being discussed as a running mate for John McCain. For a number of reasons, I hope Governor Sanford declines. But I am glad that he is getting national attention. Maybe Sanford will be the next Ron Paul but without the goofiness. Now if it was Sanford/McCain instead of McCain/Sanford (in some bizarro parallel universe) that would be the ticket. Or Sanford/Paul. A guy can dream can’t he.
“That Christian who has free grace, who has free justification, who has the mediatorial righteousness of Christ, who has the satisfaction of Christ, who has the covenant of grace most constantly in his sight, and most frequently warm upon his heart—that Christian, of all Christians in the world, is most free from a world of fears, and doubts, and scruples which do sadden, sink, perplex, and press down a world of other Christians, who daily eye more what Christ is a-doing in them, and what they are a-doing for Christ, than they do eye either his active or passive obedience.
Christ has done great things for his people, and he has suffered great things for his people, and he has purchased great things for his people, and he has prepared great things for his people; yet many of his own dear people are so taken up with their own hearts, and with their own duties and graces, that Christ is little eyed by them or minded by them!
This is the great reason why so many Christians, who will certainly go to heaven—do walk in darkness, and lie down in sorrow.”
There is SO MUCH I want to say about Barack Obama that there is no time to write the post. So in lieu of something comprehensive here is some very good analysis from George Will.
My favorite quote is as follows. Discussing Obama’s rhetoric as the pinnacle of “new liberalism” he write:
The emblematic book of the new liberalism was “The Affluent Society” by Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith. He argued that the power of advertising to manipulate the bovine public is so powerful that the law of supply and demand has been vitiated. Manufacturers can manufacture in the American herd whatever demand the manufacturers want to supply. Because the manipulable masses are easily given a “false consciousness” (another category, like religion as the “opiate” of the suffering masses, that liberalism appropriated from Marxism), four things follow:
First, the consent of the governed, when their behavior is governed by their false consciousnesses, is unimportant. Second, the public requires the supervision of a progressive elite which, somehow emancipated from false consciousness, can engineer true consciousness. Third, because consciousness is a reflection of social conditions, true consciousness is engineered by progressive social reforms. Fourth, because people in the grip of false consciousness cannot be expected to demand or even consent to such reforms, those reforms usually must be imposed, for example, by judicial fiats.
I remember as a kid being simultaneously fascinated and terrified by the ultra-campy TV series Land of the Lost. 
My friend Harrison informs me in