Sometimes even presidents have questionable ideas--at least in my judgment.

The suggested criteria for selecting a college and by inference that must also include the choice of major, minor, and/or dual major has become "getting the most bang for the buck." We have come a long way in assessing value of post-secondary education, and the way travelled has not been on the road to a very desirable place--again in my judgment.

Estimating the lifetime earnings of every 18-year-old incoming college freshman must be easy, if you are the president and have a cadre of MBA's from Wharton Business School, Yale, and Harvard providing support. What are the careers that will be the goldmines for earned personal income over the next four decades? If word gets out that pea-picker is an up and coming career choice with promise of a 6 digit annual income until 2053 and beyond, what is the effect of US and foreign colleges and universities producing twice as many pea-pickers as global industries can absorb? Let's see. Pea-pickers will be working half-time; half of the diploma clad pea-pickers will be out of pea-picking work; pea-pickers working in their chosen field will be working for credit at the company store. Then there is always the possibility that a pea-picker with a secondary major in mechanical engineering will develop a robotic pea-picker that puts the pea-picker dudes and dudettes in unemployment lines and eligible for retraining for the latest up and coming goldmine career.

Another challenge in sizing up the bang of the buck is the impact of a college or university education apart from the academic field of study. Certain academic institutions are able to significantly add to the success of their graduates based on the network of alumni and a reputation that may or may not evidenced in any particular graduate. Would Clarence Thomas or Sonia Sotomayor be US Supreme Court justices, if they had not gone to Yale Law School? (I am glad that they did, and they are.) I suspect their legal careers would have unfolded very differently, if they were graduates of Hamline University School of Law, St. Paul, MN. Would either be a less competent legal mind, if they had?

Does the medical profession provide us with an example of the unintended consequences of chasing the big bucks? Forty years ago, the advice was to go to medical school, if one wanted to make big bucks. The evolution of health care and the development of medical specialties with questionable claims to higher rates of reimbursement has left us with a void of family practitioners and pediatricians and other socially less sanctioned specialties.

Recent reports on MBA careers may be another example.

This country needs more good lawyers, physicians, and bankers than can ever be absorbed by Washington, DC legal firms, for-profit cardiac surgery centers, or Wall Street banks. Come to think of it, this country needs good high school chemistry teachers, automotive mechanics, and philosophers--to name just a few--again in my judgement.