Archive for January, 2012

From the Washington Post:

(click to embiggen)

A few things I see regarding this:

1) From a market perspective, it looks as though the smallest return (measured as “likelihood of employment”) on investment in an advanced degree is in the arts, law, business, ag, and health.  I do realize that measuring return as “lifetime investment” instead of as “higher likelihood of employment” on an investment in an advanced degree would result in a much different list.

2) Note the bottom of the chart: “experienced college grads” and “graduate degree holders” are both defined as between 30-54 years of age.  Someone 54 years old hasn’t been in college for a very long time and in fact probably has multiple children that are college graduates themselves.  That skews the perspective of this chart somewhat, considering that the unemployment rate of 20-somethings is significantly higher than the unemployment rate for those in their 40s and 50s.

3) Note the fields with the lowest unemployment (sub-3%) among those with graduate degrees and experience.  Health.  Education.  Ag/Natural Resources.  Science.  Recreation.  All those fields seem to be pretty secure areas.  If you can get a job there in the first place (not hard in health and education), you’ve probably got one for life.  In health care, you apparently don’t even need an advanced degree.

So, unsurprisingly, the field your kids or grandkids major in matters quite a lot when it comes to job opportunities.  It’s one thing to follow your passions.  It might be quite another thing to be able to support yourself and a family while doing so.

This week I want to start a short series of posts on some of the ways you can make a gift to ACU or most other non-profits without tapping your bank account.  We call these types of gifts “planned gifts” because they take more planning and thought than just reaching for your checkbook or pulling the credit card out of your wallet.

The planned giving work we do with each of our donor families attempts to accomplish at least one of the three things we have written on the sidebar of this blog under the heading “Who We Are”.  Planned gifts can be a part of your estate plan.  They can be vehicles for making gifts that are transformative to you as well as to the University.  They can be a great way to pass on your legacy to future generations.

And all of these things can happen without, generally speaking, taking cash out of your pocket.  In many cases, planned charitable gifts are not just one-way gifts to your favorite non-profit.  They can actually give back something tangible to you and your family.  The first post in this series on the elements of charitable planned gifts talks about just such an instrument.

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