Every few years, The College Board releases a report entitled Education Pays: The Benefits of Higher Education for Individuals and Society. It had not done so since 2010, until the latest version.
These reports have a perfectly consistent message, namely that college education is all good. It makes people more productive, helps the economy, reduces socio-economic problems, and builds better citizens. Never is heard a discouraging word.
Arguments that college might be a bad use of time and money for even a solitary student are brushed aside as merely “anecdotal.” The College Board’s writers would no more acknowledge that many students are helplessly weak and disengaged or that standards are so low that students can coast along to their degrees while enjoying a “five year party” (with a tip of the hat to Craig Brandon, who has written a book with that title) than a company would advertise that its products are unreliable.
The big point in the sales pitch for college is that people who have college degrees earn far more than do people who don’t. As evidence, Education Pays cites research contending that, “On average, the benefits of a four-year college degree are equivalent to an investment that earns 15.2 percent per year. This is more than double the average return to stock market investments since 1950….From any investment perspective, college is a great deal.”
Okay—let’s stipulate that, on average, college has been “a great deal.” Does that mean that it is a great deal for everyone today?
The authors want you to think so, and thus to maximize the number of Americans who enroll in college. That is what will keep the higher education bubble going.
But how do the authors deal with the inconvenient facts that large numbers of college graduates are either unemployed or underemployed, working in jobs that don’t call for any academic training, and struggling to pay off their student loans? They briefly advert to them, but race on with their sales pitch, hoping that nobody will pause to think about the problem of a labor market glutted with job seekers holding college credentials.
“Anecdotes about individual students whose paths through postsecondary education have not worked out well do not contradict the fact that on average and for most students, college is an excellent financial investment,” they write.
Just a few anecdotes, people—nothing to worry about.
Certainly the authors know that there are more than a few anecdotes about students for whom college hasn’t “worked out well.” A study published in 2010 by the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, From Wall Street to Wal-Mart, mined Bureau of Labor Statistics data on the jobs that college graduates do and found, “(T)he push to increase enrollments has led to a majority of the increment of our stock of college graduates finding employment in relatively low skilled jobs, most of which are not particularly high paying (although there are exceptions). We added roughly 20 million college graduates to the population between 1992 and 2008, for example, but the number of graduates holding jobs requiring less-than-college education skill sets rose during that same period by about 12 million; in other words, 60 percent of the total increase in graduates over the past two decades was underemployed.”
Just to cite one employment category, in 2008, more than 365,000 cashiers had college degrees, up from 132,000 in 1992. That is not just a few anecdotes. The authors of Education Pays, however, do not cite any of the considerable scholarship that points to the conclusion that we have badly oversold higher education.
Suppose that the manufacturer of a weight-loss drug ignored all reports about consumers who took its high-cost product and either had no positive results or experienced bad side effects, yet continued advertising that on average, those who took it had good results. Most people would regard that as highly irresponsible. People for whom the drug is apt to do no good or even prove harmful ought to be warned, not breezily told about the wonderful effects “on average.”
Just as not all drug consumers are the same, so not all students are the same. Unfortunately, the authors proceed as if students were fungible bits of raw material that enter a black box called college and emerge as graduates who are very likely to enjoy a large earnings boost for having gone through the process. They do admit that “different paths are appropriate for different individuals” but never say that for many of them, college is apt to be an extremely costly waste of time.
Not only does Education Pays ignore the evidence that large numbers of college graduates cannot find work, but also the evidence that large numbers of students learn little or nothing during their college years. The paper never mentions the disturbing results of the National Assessment of Adult Literacy, which found in its most recent analysis (2003) that only 31 percent of college graduates reached the level of proficiency in understanding prose—a figure that was considerably lower than in the 1992 analysis. (They aren’t very good at either quantitative or document literacy either.)
The low level of English comprehension among college graduates is one of the complaints of business managers looking to hire people with the basic skills they need.
How can it be that college is a great deal if many graduates are deficient even in basic skills? How can college make them so much more productive that they merit the high compensation that is paid to degree holders compared to those who never went to college or never finished?
Similarly, Education Pays ignores one of the most important books on higher education in many years, Academically Adrift by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa. They concluded that 45 percent of students did not demonstrate any significant gains in learning after two years of college and 36 percent did not demonstrate such improvement after four years. Mentioning that book might make readers wonder about the educational value of college and then question whether it can actually be a “great deal” for students who come out of the college box with scant improvements in human capital. So they don’t.
If going to college does not lead to gains in skill and knowledge for many students, how can it be that college appears to lead to a huge earnings boost for those who go?
Part of the reason is that credential inflation has spread over the employment landscape just like kudzu over a field. Owing to decades of pushing college as the path to success, we have so many graduates that employers can screen out anyone without a college degree—even for jobs that do not call for anything beyond basic trainability. We have reached the point where It Takes a B.A. to Find a Job as a File Clerk.
The main reason why college appears to confer a big earnings premium is not that graduates are so productive, but rather that fewer and fewer good career paths remain open to people who don’t have college credentials. Individuals who don’t have college degrees are shut out of entry-level jobs they could easily learn. They are confined to a shrinking segment of the labor market where credentials don’t matter, the segment where jobs have low pay and offer few prospects for much advancement.
In his 1997 book How to Succeed in School Without Really Learning, Professor David Labaree excoriated the credentials mania that now grips the United States, causing people to pursue college degrees not for learning, but just because they’re become necessary for “access.” He wrote, “The result is a spiral of credential inflation, for as each level of education in turn gradually floods with a crowd of ambitious consumers, individuals have to keep seeking higher levels of credentials in order to move a step ahead of the pack. In such a system, nobody wins.”
You won’t find a reference to that book either. Labaree’s insights aren’t consonant with the authors’ happy song.
In the attempt to keep college enrollments growing, Education Pays throws in everything but the kitchen sink. Besides the misleading claims about the college earnings premium, it also declares that college lowers your chances of becoming unemployed, raises your job satisfaction, gives you improved social mobility, lowers your chance of needing public assistance, confers a batch of health benefits such as more inclination to exercise and not to smoke.
Overwhelmingly, those are mere correlations. A high school student who is overweight and smokes shouldn’t go to college thinking that doing so will solve his problems. Tellingly, the authors overlook the possibility that college might cause some students to adopt bad behaviors they might otherwise not have, such as heavy drinking and use of drugs.
This paper will probably be cited by some politicians and most higher education spokesmen as proof that government policy must continue pushing college as a great personal and public “investment.” It’s nothing of the kind.