For those of us who doubt that the more students who graduate from college, the better off the nation will be, it’s a breakthrough simply to get a real debate going. So I tip my hat to The Chronicle Review for including in its November 13 issue a lively discussion featuring nine well-known people with highly divergent views.
The Chronicle Review is a subscriber site. If you can read the whole article, I recommend doing so. If not, read the following for a discussion of the discussion and my own answers to some of the questions.
Who should and shouldn’t go to college?
Daniel Yankelovich, founder of Viewpoint Learning (and perhaps best known for originating the New York Times/Yankelovich poll) gave an answer perfectly in accord with the conventional wisdom. He wrote, “In today’s society and economy, virtually everyone who has the motivation and stamina should acquire some form of postsecondary education. That is a practical reality of today’s economy.”
Professor Richard Vedder, who teaches economics at Ohio University and heads the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, sharply disagreed. Vedder pointed out, “The number of new jobs requiring a college degree is now less than the number of young adults graduating from universities, so more and more graduates are filling jobs for which they are academically overqualified.”
George Mason University economics professor Bryan Caplan further damaged the case for near-universal higher education by observing, “Most college courses teach few useful job skills; their main function is to signal to employers that students are smart, hard-working, and conformist.”
My answer: Two groups of people should go to college. First, those who intend to go into careers that can’t be done without in-depth academic training (e.g., medicine or the physical sciences); second, those who really desire the challenges of learning and scholarship (e.g., a student who is fascinated with art history) should go to college. For the far greater number who only want to show prospective employers that they’re trainable, college is a very expensive and inefficient way of doing that.
How much does increasing college-going rates matter to our economy and society?
Marcus Winters of the Manhattan Institute wrote, “Increasing college-attendance rates in the United States is essential to reducing income inequality and maintaining our stature as a world economic leader. Our economic dominance in the second half of the 20th century was directly related to our educational dominance.”
Marty Nemko, a career counselor based in Oakland, countered the idea that increasing the level of formal education is necessarily beneficial, writing, “We now send 70 percent of high-school graduates to college, up from 40 percent in 1970. At the same time, employers are accelerating their offshoring, part-timing, and temping of as many white-collar jobs as possible. That results in ever more unemployed and underemployed B.A.’s”
Professor Caplan also argued that pushing college is actually harmful to the economy: “Encouraging talented people to spent many years in wasteful status contests deprives the economy of millions of man-years of output.”
My answer: It’s a mistake to think that the U.S. (or any country) can pull itself up economically just by luring more people into college. That’s because most of what people need to know to be productive workers does not come from formal coursework, but is instead learned by living and doing. American economic success has had far more to do with the fact that the country was much closer to a laissez-faire economy than were any of the other major nations—something that was true long before we started to heavily promote college education.
Economists have cited the economic benefits that individual students derive from college. Does that still apply?
Sandy Baum, economist and senior policy analyst for the College Board, strongly agreed. “The evidence for the individual economic benefits of college is overwhelming…typical four-year-college graduates earn more than 50 percent above typical high-school graduates,” she said.
Charles Murray, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, took a much more skeptical view: “I submit that most of that premium is associated with the role of the B.A. as a job requirement instead of anything that students with B.A.’s actually learn. The solution to that injustice…is to give students a way to show employers what they know, not where they learned it….”
My answer: Simply because people with college degrees earn a lot more on average than people without them doesn’t prove either that college was the cause of those higher earnings or that taking people from the non-college group and putting them through to a degree will help them earn more. Having a B.A. (or a higher degree) is no guarantee of landing a good-paying job. Many people with college degrees are working at low-income jobs like waitresses and ushers. Luring more academically marginal students (nearly all the above-averages ones already go to college) will just swell the ranks of overcredentialed workers.
Who should pay for students to attend college?
W. Norton Grubb, a professor at the University of California’s Graduate School of Education maintained that the cost of college should be borne partly by the government and partly by students: “There’s a conventional demonstration in economics that students (or parents) should pay to the extent that private benefits (like increased earnings) are the result, and that government should support higher education when public benefits are involved.”
Marty Nemko, however, saw two drawbacks to government financing. “[T]he more the government and private donors pay of the college tab, the less responsibly the student and family need to determine college’s cost-effectiveness. Also, every time the government increases financial aid or a private scholarship is set up, it merely allows colleges to raise their sticker prices more.”
Professor Vedder added, “I question the conventional wisdom that enormous positive spillover effects of college justify large public subsidies for universities.”
My answer: Government financing of higher education has not only driven up its cost, but also allowed for much political interference in it. Our higher education system would be much leaner and more effective if the funding came only from voluntary payers and donors.
Do we have a moral obligation as a society to work to send as many students as we can to college?
Daniel Yankelovich answered in the affirmative. “We have both a moral and a political obligation to ensure all students and their families access to affordable higher education.”
Charles Murray disagreed, saying, “We have a moral obligation to destroy the current role of the B.A. in American life. It has become the emblem of first-class citizenship for no good reason.”
Marcus Winters took a middle-ground position: “Our first moral obligation is to ensure that students leave high school ready to attend college.”
My answer: I agree with Winters that we must improve K-12 education–and if we managed to improve it to the extent he hopes for, few people would need a college degree.
Until the last few years, American higher education kept on growing apace with scarcely any opposition or criticism. Almost everyone went along with the idea that more education was necessarily a good thing. Now that the consensus has been broken, it will be interesting to see if the growth juggernaut will be slowed, stopped, or even reversed.