Fifty years ago, college education was sold to students as a way of broadening their intellectual horizons. The curriculum was filled with courses in literature, philosophy, history and so on. If you were looking for job training, that was mostly found in the job market itself, or at technical institutes and community colleges.
Strangely, the situation has changed almost 180 degrees. Today most people look to higher education for job training (or at least preparation) and great numbers of students believe that without a college degree, they will be unemployable in all but menial labor. At the same time, the old idea that the purpose of a college education is to broaden one’s intellectual horizons has been largely relegated to the broom closet. True, quite a few institutions still pay lip service to the importance of a liberal education, but in fact it is quite easy for students at most of them to earn a BA without taking any of the kind of courses that used to be the pillars of the curriculum. Students who want to learn about, say, philosophy or history would be better off looking for a good lecture series on tape than looking through the course catalogue.
The increasing association between higher education and the job market has of late taken on macroeconomic dimensions, with people worrying that the economic well-being of the United States depends upon having a workforce that is able to face the global competition. For example, in their recent book Equity and Excellence in American Higher Education, William Bowen, Martin Kurzweil and Eugene Tobin write, apropos of their contention that America must strive to get more students from lower socio-economic levels into and through college, “There simply will not be enough ‘more traditional’ candidates to meet the needs of our country in an ever more ‘brain-intensive’ age.” (p.250). Similarly, a March 2005 report issued by the National Commission on Accountability in Higher Education, “Accountability for Better Results,” states that “In the 21st century we must do more than just provide the finest education possible to a select few – we must provide all Americans with the skills they need to succeed in the global economy and lead satisfying, productive lives….Put simply – increasing the number of citizens graduating from our nation’s colleges and universities is a vital national interest.” (p.6).
We might state the new conventional wisdom about higher education this way: More and more jobs will require heightened degrees of skill in the future, so the country will fall behind economically unless it succeeds in increasing our number of college graduates.
Like most pieces of conventional wisdom, this one calls for some critical thought. Is it true that more and more jobs will require heightened degrees of skill? And if that is true, is it also true that the way to create the more skillful labor force we need is to send people to college?
In my view, neither of those propositions has been shown to be true and there are good reasons to doubt both of them.
First, why believe that there is a general trend toward jobs becoming more demanding – more “brain-intensive?” The evidence that is adduced in support of that idea usually goes something like this: The fastest growing jobs are those requiring college degrees. For example, in the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund’s June 23 paper “Closing the Gap,” we find this statement.
Higher education unlocks doors to economic, social,
and civic opportunities. Moreover, in a world that
is increasingly reliant upon advanced, information-
based technologies, continued U.S. economic growth
will require a highly-educated workforce. According
to the Secretary of Education, “[e]ighty percent of
the fastest-growing jobs of the 21st century require
post-secondary education or training. (p.3)
Even if it is true that eighty percent of the fastest-growing jobs require post-secondary education or training, does it follow that there is a general trend in the economy toward jobs that can’t be performed adequately by individuals who don’t have college degrees? We don’t want to commit the logical fallacy of composition by assuming that something is true for the whole merely because it’s true for some of the parts of that whole. After all, it could be true that high degrees of academic training are necessary for some of the “fastest-growing” jobs and it also be true that there is no need for an overall increase in the amount of time devoted to formal education.
Suppose that we look at the occupations that are expected to have the largest increases in numbers of people employed, rather than those that are “fastest growing.” The latter may experience fast growth from a very small base number and therefore not be terribly significant numerically. The U.S. government’s Department of Labor Statistics publishes such data. Here, in order of the number of workers employed, is a list of the 20 occupations that are expected to have the largest numerical increases in employment in the decade from 2002 to 2012:
Registered nurses
Postsecondary teachers
Retail salespersons
Customer service representatives
Combined food preparation and serving workers
Cashiers, except gaming
Janitors and cleaners (not including maids and
housekeepers)
General and operations managers
Waiters and waitresses
Nursing aides, orderlies, attendants
Truck drivers, heavy
Receptionists and information clerks
Security guards
Office clerks, general
Teacher assistants
Sales representatives
Home health aides
Personal and home care aides
Truck drivers, light and delivery
Landscaping and groundskeeping workers
Of those occupations, how many are notably “brain-intensive,” requiring postsecondary education for an individual to have any chance at being able to perform them? Nurses, most would agree. Teachers and their assistants are required to have college training as a prelude to certification. Most managers now have college degrees, although it is possible to find successful ones who don’t. For the rest of the list, however, on-the-job training usually suffices. The great majority of job growth will take place in fields that do not call for advanced academic studies.
In sum, it appears that when you look at the broad contours of the labor market in the years ahead, there will not be a large shift toward “knowledge work.” The notion that the nation faces some imperative in getting a significantly larger percentage of its people into and through college looks to be unfounded.
Spectacular technological change in a few areas seems to have so captured everyone’s attention that talk of a “new, information-based economy,” implying that our labor market is about to undergo an enormous change that calls for dramatic policy changes. The late Senator Paul Simon advocated “A G.I. Bill for Today” in The Chronicle of Higher Education (October 31, 2003, p.B16) based on the notion that the American labor force needs great “upskilling.” But as University of Pennsylvania Sociology Professor Randall Collins writes, “Many people have been mesmerized by the high-tech sector and easily fall into the rhetoric that makes it a justification of massive educational expansion…(T)he skills of the cutting-edge high-tech industries, such as computers, are generally learned on the job or through personal experience rather than in the formal bureaucratic setting of schooling.” (Randall Collins, “Credential Inflation and the Future of Universities,” in The Future of the City of Intellect, Steven Brint, ed., p.26).
There is no sea change in the offing for the American labor market, and even in those areas where there is swift technological change, it doesn’t appear that college coursework is necessarily the best answer. That leads to my second point.
Let’s look at the second proposition. To whatever extent we do need a more “brain-intensive” workforce, is it clear that the best or only way to accomplish that is to send more students to college?
No, that is not clear. For many college students, their courses provide little if any training for work that demands exceptional cognitive ability. At most colleges and universities, the bulk of the students simply want to get the degree with a minimum of effort and can readily do that, thanks to the erosion of the old concept of “core” courses and the prevalence of websites with information telling students which professors are easy and fun, which are hard and demanding. As one undergraduate I know has said, “People would be amazed if they knew how easy it is to graduate without learning anything.”
In their 1999 book Who’s Not Working and Why, economists Frederic Pryor and David Schaffer observe that an increasing proportion of college graduates are finding that the best they can do once they have entered the job market is to take what used to be known as “high school jobs.” They comment acidly that “The low functional literacy of many university graduates represents a serious indictment against the standards of the U.S. higher education system.” (p.68). That being the case, it is hard to see how herding more high school graduates into our college credentialing system will accomplish anything of economic value.
But what about math and science? American students have fared poorly in those areas on international tests. That fact, combined with the burgeoning economies of China and India, which will probably hire a substantial number of the scientists and engineers from those countries, thus depriving American firms of a large pool of talent from which to draw. Isn’t that a reason for concern?
It may be, but the solution certainly isn’t shotgun approach of trying to draw many more students into college, most of whom are highly averse to the sort of mental work required in mathematics and the hard sciences. Instead, we can rely upon marketplace incentives. A worldwide shortage of mathematicians and scientists will lead to rising compensation for them. More students will be attracted to those fields. Firms will establish more scholarship programs and reach out to sharp young people to convince them that it would be better for them to study physics than political science, for instance. We no more need a big government program to make sure that the nation has enough mathematicians and scientists than to make sure that we have enough auto mechanics.
A third argument commonly advanced in favor of a greater national “investment” in higher education starts with the uncontestable premise that individuals with college degrees, on average, earn more over their lifetimes than do individuals who ended their formal education without them. The conclusion is that U.S. would enjoy a higher overall prosperity by getting more students into and through college.
Economics professor Jeff Madrick, for example, observes that, according to 2000 census data, the “median income of an American man with a college degree was about $52,600, 60 percent higher than the $31,600 for those with a high school degree. The proportions are about the same for women. In fact, the income of those with a high school degree have not grown on average since the 1970s.” (“Why Higher Ed Gets the Ax,” The New York Times, August 5, 2004.) While it may seem to follow that the key to boosting the incomes of people with less than a college education is to somehow get them into classrooms so they earn degrees (Professor Madrick would like to see higher education made free), that conclusion is a non sequitur.
If someone argued that the way to end world hunger would be for the U.S. government to have all farmers apply greater amounts of fertilizer to their crops, since fertilizer is know to increase crop yields, only the most naïve would take it seriously. There is an optimal degree of fertilizer use on crops. That amount and kind is not uniform, and farmers have a strong incentive to find the best fertilizing plan on their own. Adding more of a certain kind of fertilizer everywhere would obviously be wasteful.
It is the same with college education. While beneficial to many people, clearly giving them a good income payoff, college classes (or more classes for those who started but never finished) are not necessarily of any use to many others. Looking back at the list above, the earnings of all those truck drivers, customer service reps, and cashiers won’t be affected in the least by the possession of a college degree. The average earnings of people with college degrees is higher than the average for people who don’t have them, but it’s a mistake to assume that a degree will cause anyone to be boosted up to a new income level. We can’t bootstrap ourselves into greater prosperity merely by luring more of the dwindling percentage of young Americans who don’t choose to go to college into enrolling.
To conclude, the economic/employment case for expanding access to higher education in the U.S. is not persuasive. There is nothing wrong with anyone expanding his intellectual horizons. Why shouldn’t a truck driver enjoy Beethoven while rolling down the highway or a receptionist enjoy a Shakespeare play while on break? But let us not deceive ourselves into thinking that our economic welfare depends on cranking out more and more credentials reading “Bachelor of Arts.”
George C. Leef is Executive Director of the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy in Raleigh.