Is college worthless to the kid in poverty?

I won't talk about my portfolio again today. It took a smack in the face with S&P cutting its outlook for the US. I'm actually considering some form of entrepreneurship as well. I have some ideas for some websites that are dire need in the science but nothing concrete yet. I also would need to fund it and find someone to help me build it next winter which won't happen easily. It's all still in the air for right now, I wish I had a solid plan on that end. Oh well, the time is now to buy up what I can I guess.

I've also started to  notice that there seems to be a large body of news noting college degrees are becoming less and less valuable.I'll chime in and agree, sort of. Having a BS, BA, MS or PhD nowadays really doesn't help much if it all in some industries. You do in fact take in massive amounts of debt and end up unemployed or being paid $30,000 with a PhD in many cases. Many of my friends are self educated and learned some programming languages while working right out of high school for the same amount of time I've been in college. They now make $98,000 a year and work 3-4 hours a week for a few internet companies. I chose to go into the sciences as a passion and ended up broke and trying to make myself somewhat financially secure for life now.

You might say that for someone from the inner city I've failed miserably. I'm broke and will likely be broke for my entire life. I will likely never be financially secure because I went and took the route for higher education. Now of course the data says the average income increases with a degree and it does open more opportunities and makes you more likely as a hire. However you do have no real world on the ground job experience and are worthless to employers in that sense. So to a kid in the hood who hears everyday how much money he can make just getting through high school is going to blow off college as many do. Especially when the risk of going to college means returning to somewhere like North Philly and staying there for the rest of your life completely surrounded by the problems in the area. What's worse you'll have no income or influence to an extent that you can make a difference.

However, there's one thing missing in this logic. See, college has this thing they call a core curriculum where people like me learn American Economic politics, Criminal justice, Art, Gender studies, etc. Things that you won't learn in an inner city public school. It's almost as if you're blinded in the inner city and never have the chance to have professionally designed exposure to philosophy and how the world works. Most people there don't know what the stock market is, how it works why it matters. Most don't know how anything in this world works at all. College core curricula help fill in the gaps for students from low income neighborhoods that were in classrooms completely counterproductive to learning. If they don't get these you end up with the masses of easily manipulated people that have no idea how their city and state government works.

Even worse is the lack of understanding in the sciences , most of it to them is "magic". Then you have uneducated masses voting on issues that they don't even slightly understand. That is where I think a college education is valuable to these students in leadership building and knowledge building. It's much harder to have someone fall prey to marketing tactics if they learned about them in college. Likewise with political scams on the local government level. I still know people that don't know what a bank does with their money and what their rights are for it. Others get their checks cashed at check cashing places because they're "trustworthy" and won't charge them as much as a bank to get their check cashed they think. What about the "santerias" or pretty much witchcraft stores in Hispanic neighborhoods that sell things like mercury illegally as a dietary aid. People don't know mercury is harmful they don't understand the concepts of a slowly developing poison.What about those that don't understand how taxation in the city works and fall victim to political games intentionally designed to fool them?

Is this the responsibility of high schools?  I'd love to say yes but there isn't nearly enough time nor as I stated in previous posts the environment or resources to have this education out there for students.Some college core education is critical to break the cycle of poverty. However as can be seen by my attempts to earn income elsewhere it is not a financial security system. It only increases the chance that you will be financially secure although that statement is becoming less true every year. As costs of college go up the barrier to low income students rises and so does their exposure to criticism of the world they live in.