As someone who has earned not one but two college degrees–neither of which is in a “marketable” program such as engineering–it pains me to say the obvious: Higher education today is unsustainable, inflicting high personal and financial costs.
As Forbes magazine tells it in a recent article, advocates for college have preyed on ignorance of a simple fact that should be drilled into every student in Statistics 101: Correlation is not causation. It’s true that college grads have on average higher incomes than those with only a high school diploma. But did the college degree cause the higher income, or was something else at work? Some of both, perhaps, but the sheepskin itself doesn’t translate into a life of fantastic employment. (I know: In my first job after college, I really did ask, “would you like fries with that?”)
In addition to the high cost of tuition and debt is the opportunity cost of college–money that students could have earned in some sort of job rather than toiling away in Sociology 101, or worse yet, Introduction to Partying and Puking.
What has fueled the college binge? A lot of factors, including old-fashioned financial self-interest, social climbing, and just perhaps, the rise of government. By the latter, I don’t mean just the financial aid apparatus that entices students into college. I’m also thinking of LBJ’s Great Society of the 1960s. That era set in place the idea that longstanding human problems (poverty, for one) could be solved through the diligent work of highly educated people. Go to college. Earn more money–and make the world a better place as a professional helper or manager.
Many colleges, meanwhile, are steeped in a socialist/progressive mindset that just makes things worse. The other day, I heard an interview with the president of a highly selective liberal arts college. The interviewer asked the president to defend the common practice of charging a sky-high tuition rate and then discounting almost everyone’s tuition a bit through financial aid packages. (This practice, by the way, is called price discrimination, and it’s something many academics would object to if practiced by the telephone company or grocery store.) Why, said the interviewer, don’t you scale back your financial aid programs and drop your tuition?
The president replied that it would be morally wrong. Why? Some very wealthy families, who currently pay full freight, would get a price cut. Progressives eating their own, I guess.
For the record, Kiplingers offers up a list of the 10 worst and 10 best college majors for a career, though beware that projecting job demands years out is at best an inexact science.
Finally, in Texas, Gov. Rick Perry has challenged state colleges to construct a $10,000 undergraduate degree. It’s a work in project, but one worth watching.