Read Matt Yglesias on the value of college, and the David Leonhardt column he links to. For all of our disagreements, I’ll continue to say: when Yglesias gets it right, I do think he’s as good as there is. (And when he’s wrong, I think he’s usually catastrophically wrong, but you knew I felt that way.)
Since the vogue for “college isn’t worth it” articles and blog post appears to be resistant to logic, argument, and evidence, and shows no sign of abating, I’d like to give you a little advice for assessing them. Note that almost universally– in fact without exception as far as the ones I’ve read, and I’ve read a lot– these articles are written by people who went to college. And! I know that because they continue to make that information publicly available, in the same space as their arguments against going to college! I think that there’s a tension there. Why, if a college degree is worthless, do those who argue such still find it necessary to announce their credentials, either in a bio attached to their argument, or (as is common) in the text of the piece itself? It is not difficult to find the value added in a self-contained argument posted online. You can read the argument and decide if it has value for itself. In other words, the value is easier to gauge than that of a bridge or a prescription or a piece of software code, the creation of all of which usually requires higher education and credentials. Yet even in this context, where the quality of the work in question is immediate and fairly obvious, those crafting it find it necessary to announce their credentials, both to the audience of their pieces and the editors that commission them. I would argue that all three sides– the authors, the editors, the audiences– find easy access to this information non-trivial and valuable.
So I would simply say that you should at your most generous take such pieces with a grain of salt, and at your least generous, skip reading them altogether. If you’re reading a piece where someone at once announces that they attended the Iowa Writers Workshop and have an MFA, and they claim that such degrees are irrelevant and unnecessary, it is perfectly rational to find the author’s credibility lacking.
Look, I’m on record, and I’ll say it again, that there are many people going to college who don’t belong there. This is, I’m afraid, perfectly anecdotal, but it is anecdote buttressed not only by the similar anecdata of others who teach at the university level but also by the now well-discussed phenomenon of flagging graduation rates. At the same time, I am firmly possessed of the opinion that everyone should have access to college education, if (and only if) they possess the requisite elementary skills, and the drive, necessary for graduating and deriving value from their college experience. In my experience, we have problems that stem from students lacking either and both– some students simply lack requisite skills, some lack any desire, and some lack both.
The first question is how to improve pre-collegiate education to lower the number of students who come to college lacking basic skills, and as you know, this is controversial. The second question is what level of remedial education programs colleges can provide to those students who lack skills, and this question is vexing and necessarily emotional. (Provide too little, and you turn large swaths of the populace away from an imperfect but proven method of facilitating the middle class lifestyle. Provide too much, and you strain college resources and personnel beyond what they can handle, and erode the value and signaling mechanisms of a bachelor’s degree.) The third question is how to improve the administrative and pedagogical practices of these remedial programs, to better facilitate the transition of high-risk students from high school to college. (This happens to be one of my primary academic interests.) The fourth question, and I believe the most difficult and important, is how to accomplish all of this while altering the culture so that so many don’t feel compelled to attend college when they lack the skills or desire… particularly in a context where there is no broad mechanism for uneducated workers to consistently improve their economic station.
It’s a very tricky road to walk! How do you provide access without applying pressure? How do you make college more affordable and more realistic while at the same time working to remove the stigma of not getting a college degree? We know that improved access to college can come coupled with social pressure to attend, even for those for whom it may not make practical sense. In what in context was a very short period of time, college went from being the privilege of an economic and cultural elite, denied not just to the poor and racial minorities but to women and Jews and assorted other “undesirables,” to being an enormously important signal of American middle class respectability. I have personally seen the consequences of this pressure: students who are admittedly uninterested in college education but go anyway because “it’s what you do after high school.” Convinced that they have to go to college or be consigned to a life of being a loser, who no one will want to marry and raise a family with, many who are not temperamentally or (yes) intellectually prepared for college life enroll, take on debt, and fail, hurting not only themselves but the demonstrable value of the institutions they attend.
(Whenever people mock America’s culture of debt, listen, but consider that the two most obvious planks of the American middle class lifestyle that so many aspire to, college education and home ownership, are both associated with taking on great debt.)
How to reconcile our society’s interest in broad access to higher education, the extension of that access to those who genuinely can and want to attend, and our very real need to push back against the cultural pressure that insists those who don’t go to college are ignorant or losers? I don’t know. The fact is that there’s a larger issue haunting us, which is the lack of a functioning job market for those without college degrees, or any plausible description of how we might get one in the globalized world. This is a set of issues that has been discussed on this blog and elsewhere for ages, and it is one of the only discussions where I find near unanimity among leftists, libertarians, and conservatives: almost no one can describe a plausible scenario where uneducated workers in America regain the kind of wages and job security they once had. Reinvesting in trade schools and skills-specific education could be a part. More controversially, a turn towards broader levels of unionization would be a proven mechanism for raising working class wages. But neither is sufficient given current political realities, and our lack of a clear path forward on this issue scares me and should scare you.
All of these issues are at once specific and broad, enmeshed in small bore details while reflecting the fundamental concerns of our social compact. They will evolve in the usual way, with a combination of directed policies and specific decisions and the unpredictable, undirected flow of history. We have no choice but to wrestle with this stuff. Having a middle class is a choice, and a society that neglects to build policies towards that end will suffer for it. I can’t tell you how this is all going to turn out. I can tell you, though, that abandoning college as one of our mechanisms for creating an equitable and bountiful society, out of the misguided notion that college “isn’t worth it,” would be a great mistake. We need to adjust policies and work on a more understanding culture, not dream up gimmicks or spend all of our time critiquing without presenting meaningful, actionable alternatives.
Zifnab
That’s not so crazy. Columnist jobs will always weigh heavily towards the college-educated. However, not every college educated individual will get a job as a major newspaper columnist.
If a lawyer penned an article saying “Not everyone needs a J.D.” would you throw up your hands and call him a hypocrite because he’s got one?
I agree, it would be good to see two sides of the coin. A column written by a successful businessman without a college degree would carry more weight than Yglesias’s rant. But Matt’s argument isn’t automatically made moot by point at his cap and gown.
Freddie deBoer
… this post is endorsing Yglesias’s post, without qualification.
mike in dc
The full legal employment rate(i.e., percentage of graduates working as attorneys or in jobs requiring a JD and law license) for law students who graduated last year is probably around 35-40%. See Paul Campos and abovethelaw.com for some confirmation of this.
I just graduated this May. My prospects are–how shall we say this?–not specifically too good. And I graduated from the #20 law school in the country. I already have a middle-income job, but that won’t cut it once those loans come due. Due to the recession, the legal industry was effectively gutted. Some firms laid off new associates, and all the rest basically cut their recruiting in half. Over and above that, there was a glut of law school graduates. The net effect is that even students from top law schools, with decent grades, are having a hard time finding any kind of lawyer job at all, let alone a decent one.
Yevgraf
My thought is that we screwed up the day we deliberately tracked every smart kid toward college. I’ve known (and represented) bunches of folks who were smart enough for college, yet tracked toward skilled vocational training back in the 60s and 70s. They wound up running nice quality machine shops, plumbing shops, electrical and HVAC houses. In the end, they made more money, had more personal free time and more of an inclination to enjoy their lives than did the generation of folks who were uniformly steered to college afterward.
Sadly, I don’t know that the earlier generation of smart vocational guys have a merit based, school trained bench to pass the baton to. The younger folks are either stumbling into it or gaining through inheritance, and that does not bode well for the future.
Walker
The problem with Ygelsias and education is that he continually spouts reform talking points without any understanding of pedagogy at all. In higher education, he believes that technology and productivity gains (read: bigger classes and cheaper labor) will solve our problems.
A classic example of bad Yglesias was started by the following post:
http://thinkprogress.org/yglesias/2011/06/23/252178/what-does-diane-ravitch-think-we-should-do-to-improve-education-in-the-united-states/
Diane Ravitch has published papers in this area, but Matt feels that it is okay for him to ignore them and rant anyway.
DecidedFenceSitter
@Mike in DC – you too? A close friend graduated, probably from the same university you did at the height of the “Sorry we’re going to just skip recruiting this year’s worth of J.D.” so my friend is now eeking out a living working for himself, and hoping that the state will send him the payments its owes for 3-4 months ago.
—
On the larger issue – If you want to succeed to at least upper middle income, you need a college education; however, that’s no guarantee of it, especially now. And putting yourself into huge amounts of debt only exacerbates the situation – a different friend of mine put herself through college and grad school and now has a larger monthly payment than my mortgage. It looks like it may pay off for her, but the huge debt starting out is killing any friend of mine who does work for the Federal government as IT/Developer/Programmer or Engineering.
Yevgraf
Sorry, kid – I know it sucks. I graduated into a similar legal employment environment in ’88, and it was a bitch for a lot of years. All I’ll say is that if you can hang on by your claws for a few years and can muddle through with help from parents and some menial second jobs, you might get to the point of earning a living.
Jason Bylinowski
Thanks for that dude. I am 34 and finishing up my English degree (for no reason other than pride, really, though I hope it has some small benefit to my salary one day) and to hear this bullshit all the time is really kinda alarming.
No doubt at all that my future degree isn’t as valuable as it would have been twenty years ago, but to say it isn’t worth it is just crazy talk. I understand the rationale but I just don’t agree. If nothing else, a nation of degree-holders is more apt to be a more rational, thoughtful and culturally rich nation. Sure, the relative value of the piece of paper declines as a result but that’s capitalism for you.
I just got advised today for the fall semester as a matter of fact, and what I would like to see change is the fact that the program is so extremely bound up in meeting specific requirements for fulfilling the degree requirements that I feel like I have to sacrifice the depth of my education just to meet their guidelines. College is now shaped around the eighteen year olds who don’t want to be there, but who have been told they need the degree. It would be nice if my college had a wider independent study program so I wouldn’t be as held up by the shenanigans of these young lamers, but as of now they only offer it for a few specific fields.
Anyway I’m not entirely sure what I intend with this comment, but I did want to acknowledge Freddie’s effort here.
Jason Bylinowski
Thanks for that dude. I am 34 and finishing up my English degree (for no reason other than pride, really, though I hope it has some small benefit to my salary one day) and to hear this bullshit all the time is really kinda alarming.
No doubt at all that my future degree isn’t as valuable as it would have been twenty years ago, but to say it isn’t worth it is just crazy talk. I understand the rationale but I just don’t agree. If nothing else, a nation of degree-holders is more apt to be a more rational, thoughtful and culturally rich nation. Sure, the relative value of the piece of paper declines as a result but that’s capitalism for you.
I just got advised today for the fall semester as a matter of fact, and what I would like to see change is the fact that the program is so extremely bound up in meeting specific requirements for fulfilling the degree requirements that I feel like I have to sacrifice the depth of my education just to meet their guidelines. College is now shaped around the eighteen year olds who don’t want to be there, but who have been told they need the degree. It would be nice if my college had a wider independent study program so I wouldn’t be as held up by the shenanigans of these young lamers, but as of now they only offer it for a few specific fields.
Zifnab
:-p Sorry. I misread.
Martin
A college degree is far from worthless. That said, there’s a very poor supply/demand relationship between what degrees universities want to churn out and what degrees/skillsets the job market wants.
Universities, particularly public ones these days, want to churn out cheap degrees – that’s mostly BA degrees in humanities and social sciences. They’re constrained almost entirely by lecture hall availability. You can push 300-500 students per year through 32 courses and only need about 12 faculty and a bunch of grad student TAs. If you’re collecting $12K per student per year (tuition + state subsidy), that’s $3.6M to support a dozen faculty and TAs, which isn’t too bad so long as they aren’t all senior faculty.
If, on the other hand, the market wants engineers, scientists, programmers, then you’re looking at labs and facilities, and much smaller class sizes and much more TAs. And that’s ignoring that a market demand for those instructors will exist requiring the institution pay them more. Compared to the humanities/social sciences, that public rate simply won’t work in the hard sciences/engineering any longer, even though those are the degrees that there are jobs for.
So here’s the problem – unless you’re going to an ivy, a private humanities/social sciences education is unlikely to be a good value proposition, unless you’ve got a pile of scholarships to cover your costs. If you’re taking out loans or paying out of pocket, you’re unlikely to recoup those costs. A private engineering/science education is still a good value, however.
On the public side, engineering/science is a GREAT value, but those seats are getting really hard to find. Humanities/social sciences is generally still a good value even paying out of pocket, but it’s iffy even there. There’s simply too many students grinding out a BS/BA degree with no specific career intent other than to have a BS/BA degree. They look like shit when they hit the job market because they don’t know how to DO anything, because they don’t know what they want to do. They’re mostly filling jobs from bank teller to Starbucks barista.
IMO, the guidelines that the administration has put forward for financial aid to for-profit schools should be applied to non-profits and public schools as well. Schools should track and show what students earn in their first 5 years after earning a bachelors degree, with a provision if they are attending graduate school. If an institution is turning out nothing but BAs that are working minimum wage jobs, they really don’t deserve those financial aid dollars because they aren’t adding any value to people’s lives, and those institutions that are doing the best job of adding value (which unfortunately will bias the ivys, but that should be handled by deducting out some % of their endowment value) should be rewarded for doing so. It’d give schools an incentive to do real job training and placement, and because students attending graduate school get a provision, it provides an incentive for encouraging that as well.
Marcelo
I think the argument really isn’t “should one go to college” but rather if you ARE going to college, is it worth it to spend 100,000 dollars on a fancy high-level school or are you better off sticking to your 20-50k state school? I think far too many people think they can only get their education at the single best school ever, and thus don’t consider that for a lot of things state schools and cheaper community college options give you the same skills and the same abilities at a far better value.
The Spy Who Loved Me
A friend’s daughter will receive her Master’s degree next month. Fortunately, for her, she has already been offered a job by a Top 50 PR firm. Unfortunately, the entry level position is essentially a glorified internship, with a non-negotiable starting salary of 28K. Given the dearth of jobs available to recent graduates, she’s accepted the job. And her parents know that, for at least the first year, they will have to continue to throw a few dollars her way so that she can put a roof over her head, keep the lights on and have food to eat. The bright side is that she’ll actually have a job, they can afford to help her out a little, and she’s graduating free of student loan debt.
Kirk Spencer
A major issue unmentioned is those people who don’t go to college.
In the US, if you don’t go to college you are highly UNlikely to “do well”. These days getting a position higher than line supervisor — and in some industries even that — requires college. No college, nothing but the bottom for you.
Seniority used to matter and still does in some places. Unionbusting is taking that out as well, however.
The reason there’s such a fight to go to college is because we’ve laid down a culture that says it’s a requirement for a successful life. Not a guarantee, but a requirement.
Martin
We’ve really stigmatized a non-college career path, unfortunately. The tile guy we hired to do our bathroom makes 2x what I do and he was complaining that he can only find Mexicans that are interested in learning the trade, which is fine by him, but he wonders what all those white kids think they’re going to do with their lives – they can’t all be bankers and lawyers, but someone has convinced them that they all can be.
Martin
That’s bullshit.
In the US, if you don’t go to college and you’re so unfocused in life that you can’t establish a skillset, that’s when you’re fucked. Most of the trades make good money, but you have to work. There’s lots of good jobs out there, but you can’t just fuck around and not learn something and not work hard and hope the world lands in your lap – and that seems to be the main problem not just with the non-college path, but with about 1/3 of the college path as well. Jason above has figured out the college students in that category.
Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal
first off, without getting into the debate itself, i think you are choosing to ignore the rhetorical device being employed. that is,
i went to collegeonce i thought like you, now i think otherwise, this is what changed my mind.i think its a dumb debate, as it evolves into debt, and average earnings over a lifetime, social status, etc.
the more important debate is, should college be necessary. is there a place in the world for people who don’t want to know about rhetorical devices, but want to earn a decent living?
is there a way to train people to do the jobs many people with college degrees do, without the requisite being that college degree. should there be more options for people who want to enter certain fields, and see college as a means to an end, versus an open ended learning experience.
that side of the debate is more interesting, to me.
cyntax
@10. Martin
I think you make some good points, particularly about not going into debt for a general BA/BS degree. However, one of the number one complaints in the private sector is that graduates aren’t good at written communication. The only part of the curriculum that’s in charge of that is the Humanities, and teaching writing in class sizes of anything over 25 is pretty damn hard. So really, if you’re responding to what the market wants, you need smaller class sizes all around, not just in the hard sciences, whose content-driven lectures actually tend to be much larger than the humanities.
slag
Sad to hear that the entire value of my education rests on whether or not it has turned me into a useful tool.
Cat
@10
The market indeed wants these professions badly. The number of CS BS degrees awarded annually is less then that for MDs and a faction of JDs.
Its not the cost of having the programs, its a lack of enrollment. Its half of what it was in 2000.
Getting a BS is worth it, getting a degree in 1900’s Russian Art history is lighting 10 years of your income on fire.
Maybe thats why you see all these articles from BA/MA holders saying college isn’t worth it. I never hear any talk like that from BS/MS/PhD holders. All I hear is how there aren’t enough quality people.
Jason Bylinowski
@ The Spy Who Loved Me
( a non-negotiable starting salary of 28K… )
I don’t get it, is she married with two children? Does she live in Manhattan? 28K is not bad to put a roof over your head for one person. I mean, sure you might consider getting a roommate to help out but I don’t know why 28K would be so horrible, especially for the first year and with no loans to repay.
Mike G
a nation of degree-holders is more apt to be a more rational, thoughtful and culturally rich nation.
Which is why the Repukes sneer at ‘academics’ and exalt willful ignorance.
Many ‘college-degree jobs’ could be done by a smart high school graduate with a few years’ work experience and maturity, but the sad fact is unless you have personal connections, or rare talent and articulateness, you don’t even get a look-in without that degree. The suckful job market is the cherry on this shit sandwich.
The idea of upward mobility for talented eager strivers without credentials is about as real as other ‘American exceptionalism’ myths. We are a credential-obsessed nation, especially when the job market is crap. I graduated two decades ago during the last nasty recession in my part of the country, and I found this really discouraging.
Yutsano
I dunno if this is the answer or not, and I never found out what happened to the program, but when I was a freshman in college I got selected to do a pilot Composition 101 class where we could write about any subject we wanted. We did, however, learn the tools of good writing so we could formulate our ideas in a proper manner. Maybe that’s how it’s taught nowadays, but it was a very great way to learn written communication.
negative 1
The argument for college being a waste generally boils down to this: College is not worth it for everyone else. If anyone truly believes that, start steering your kids away from college. I bet there aren’t a lot of takers.
That being said, I find the ‘not everyone belongs there’ argument about the most condescending thing I have ever heard. Plenty of people leave for plenty of reasons – I worked through my undergrad and grad degrees, left in the middle of the former because I needed money and the latter because I had my first kid. Does that mean it wasn’t for me? I showed up on the lists as a dropout for a year both times.
What if a person goes to college for an engineering degree and decides they hate it? Are they “not made out to go?” Part of the freedom of capitalism is supposed to be the ability to try out these things before you settle on a career. Now? Figure out your life’s path by the time you graduate high school and don’t deviate or else. They’ll still stick you with a $20K bill for something that wasn’t worth $5 and blame it on you because you “weren’t cut out for it”. And to the person at number 8 – I did the same thing, it wasn’t worth a dime, and it still makes me a better person than my professional degree that gets me a comfortable living.
Cat
@18
While you maybe a beautiful and unique snow flake, I think most people want to have a job that allows them to have a family and a sense of stability.
An education, either at university, vocational school, or apprenticeship provides that and should continue to be able to provide that. People are noticing its not and that has them concerned.
PeakVT
Is it worthwhile for everyone to go to college at the price they paid? No, because there are a lot of low-demand fields that people are paying a high price for a degree in. There are also a lot of people who go to a four-year college who drop out for one reason or another, but don’t get a degree for efforts that at a two-year college would earn them an associates. They end up having spent a lot of money without that piece of paper lazy employers use to filter job applicants.
Ghanima Atreides
/yawn
Yet another libertarian reacharound.
You are an unmitigated intransigent spinner, Freddie, like all of your kind.
Are you REALLY unaware of the Obama/Biden early graduation initiative which is currently being tested on eight high schools?
Are you completely unaware of the Obama in intiative to bricolage excess junior colleges into cool into ubercool cutting edge votech trade schools?
AMG you are so fucking dishonest. 2k words of meaningless libertarian bulshytt talking.
You just said the same thing you always say…..x is B.A.D. and we dont know how to fix it.
Go back to your Yglesias libertarian circle jerk where you belong.
cyntax
There’s a lot of interest in student-selected content, and the internet just makes that easier. In my experience, students react very positively to being able to choose what they write about. Having said that, the teacher has to adequately prepare them for it, and it does present a real opportunity for students to get side-tracked.
One of the tricky things about teaching writing is that many students think they won’t do much writing once they get to their jobs, but a lot of that has to do with how little academic writing looks–on the surface–like writing in the private sector.
Walker
@Yutsano
Most modern universities have freshmen seminars. These are small topics courses in some area of interest — philosophy, sociology, science, mathematics, engineering — and involve writing papers about that subject. Students can enroll in whichever one they want, but availability is up to whatever faculty offer.
I have a colleague offering a seminar in computer science this spring. The university told us this was the first time this subject has ever been part of a freshman seminar.
PeakVT
I think this is an immensely important question:
Is any (western) country addressing this problem well? Germany? Sweden?
slag
@18
This is a strange argument to make at a time when the most highly educated among us are the ones who are also the most responsible for our current economic situation. If we’re going to get out of our current cultural-political-economic morasse and onto a more stable path, education absolutely must be about more than teaching/learning a market trend-worthy skillset.
mantis
What do you think of corporate-sponsored summer programs for incoming freshmen students, usually from underserved communities? I have some professional experience with these, and I’m curious about your take as someone who works in this area. I could provide more specific details about the programs over email.
cyntax
Germany certainly is but they have strong unions, good trade/vocational schools and programs, and trade policies that ensure a good job market for people with such skills. I imagine Sweden is similar…
Will
As with most things, it depends. I went to an elite performing arts institution that cost an absolute f*cking fortune, even after scholarships, etc. I excelled in the program. It did not make one bit of difference when I entered the real world. Twelve years later, not only am I still paying off my still-massive debt, I am not working anywhere near the field I originally chose. That is not an accident–I found over time that I simply could not find enough paying work to continue pursuing that career.
Today, I actually have a good job in a field I have no degree in. To look at the money I piss away every single month on student loan payments for a degree that did not even get me anywhere, man that is upsetting.
College would have been good for me, I suppose–just not the college or major I chose.
P.S. — I’m not entirely full of regrets. After all, I met my wife of 12 years at our school. She’s worth every penny ;)
Yutsano
I know in Germany, at least, by the time you reach high school level, you’re required to choose what your career path will be. This will also determine if you go to a trade high school, an academic high school, or a high school for business. (I may have those divisions wrong, so someone feel free to correct me.) And the end point is not college for all of them, however changing your determination is very difficult.
Ghanima Atreides
@Freddie
This post has the exact same formula as your last one, just swap Conor for Matt.
AMG you are boring Freddie.
Are you entirely unaware of the Obama/Biden early graduation program which is being tested in high schools RIGHT NAOW?
Are you both entirely clueless about Obama’s initiative to bricolage excess jr. colleges into cool cutting edge votech academies?
All you posts have the same format– X is BAD, but we dont know how to fix it. Well Obama knows how to fix it.
And you fucking intransigent libertarian bulshytt talkers can go whank each other off someplace else.
DecidedFenceSitter
@25 PeakVT
Exactly. The question is a straight cost benefit analysis. Is it worth it to get 100K+ of debt to be a journalist? Probably not. However, I distinctly remember listening to an article months ago on NPR where I got to hear someone complain about this very fact.
Chris
For my money, the biggest problem isn’t whether or not people can go to college. The problem is that it’s become harder and harder to earn a decent living without a college degree.
Sure, not everyone’s cut out for college, no arguments there. But what are they supposed to do with their lives then? In the old days, it was possible for people with blue-collar jobs (in no small part thanks to strong unions, strong regulations and a strong welfare state) to work in relatively “low” positions their entire life but still have a dignified retirement. Can you promise the same to someone who’s my age (early 20s) and just started out as a steel worker?
Because that’s the other side of the equation. When brilliant minds offer the world their newfound wisdom that “not everyone can go to college, you know,” the immediate response should be “okay. What happens to those who don’t?” And if there isn’t a good answer, they those guys aren’t worth listening to.
EDIT: Or what Kirk @ 13 and FPFWT @ 16 said.
Ghanima Atreides
Freddie, this is the exact same post as your one about Conor.
Obama is already doing something. Are you really unaware of the Obama Biden early graduation initiative that is being tested in eight states.
Jason Bylinowski
I’ll tell you what, I consider myself lucky as a student in my mid-thirties that I was able to find a job that pays decently for my region. If I hadn’t I’d still be longing for a degree instead of actually getting it done. Myself and my wife both are really the college type, you know, but circumstances were weird for many years and we’re just now getting caught up. We both graduated from the school of hard knocks first.
After many years of struggle and a few really bad years which I thought was pretty indicative of the remainder of our hard-scrabble existence, I think we somehow both learned a ton about ourselves and as a result we were able to both get pretty good jobs by the sheer force of our life experience and that intangible but perceptible aura of credibility that only years of hard work can give you.
There are probably many people out there who didn’t learn the “lessons” of poverty as we did. Hell, I struggled with addiction and depression for years myself: do I really count as a successful up-from-his-bootstraps story in the end, when I’m still making barely 50K, and still not graduated with a mere BA degree from a state college? Maybe put me in the undecided category as yet, eh? All I know is that there are people out there who have it much worse, and we feel very lucky that I can pursue my somewhat directionless dream of finishing school without breaking the bank. At least our little family finally has some potential for upward mobility. And, I mean, screw all the McMansions and Lexuses and gated communities: we just want to not worry about month to month survival anymore, to be able to save enough to be out of debt and cared for in our retirement, and to have enough left over to support our few hobbies; that is our standard for making it.
Sly
Not really, once you move beyond the consultant culture that dominates the educational debate.
The fundamental problem is that the majority of middle-class secondary schools prioritize college admissions and… that’s it. Get as many graduates into college as possible. I don’t know of a single school district that tracks the graduation rates of students they send into two or four year post-secondary programs. They don’t do this because they don’t have to do it. There’s simply no practical incentive. But college acceptance provides an easy to use, if inherently flawed, statistic. Schools even advertise it to (wealthier) families into the district.
But getting into a post-secondary program and completing a post-secondary program are two different things, and the college admissions process doesn’t reflect this nearly as well as it should. Part of the reason is that looking for a simple metric to gauge the probability of post-secondary success is a futile endeavor: there simply aren’t any. This is because different post-secondary programs will have different skills expectations.
But the more pernicious reason is the utter disconnect between secondary and post-secondary systems. They simply don’t talk to each other in most cases. Which is both stupid and sad, because there needs to be some kind of institutional communication between the two to establish a more robust curriculum. You can even accomplish this within state departments of education, since they bring together the state university system and the state K-12 system.
This is the weak link in the chain. Its not going to be strengthened by focusing purely on the deficiencies of secondary schools. Work on this link, and most other issues, like remedial education, tend to get easier to reconcile.
BO_Bill
College is a pillar of the Progressive ‘religion’. We are taught that paying Martin to talk at us can change our intellect, and make us all the same. It is Logical that the true achievers in our society, take Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, show up, hear the words, and drop out to pursue their passions.
Our society is struggling with the uncomfortable Truth that intellect is inherited.
Barry
Cat @19, re: Engineering, CS degrees: “The market indeed wants these professions badly. The number of CS BS degrees awarded annually is less then that for MDs and a faction of JDs.”
So, we should see skyrocketing starting salaries for CS grads, right?
RSA
Right, and that’s a tough one. Who’s the most successful poor person you know? I suspect this question might throw a lot of people, because in America success tends to mean making a lot of money. But a little bit of thought suggests that there doesn’t have to be such a close connection.
scav
One thing I learned in college is that a strict cost-benefit analysis was not the way to run your entire fucking life. Shows you how old I am.
Martin
No it’s not. Finding adequate coverage of technical writing and presentation in the Humanities can be damn hard because the instructors don’t know the subject matter that the students should be writing about, and that’s what many employers want, not poetry.
Agreed on the 25 limit, though.
MBunge
Since MattY is the origin of this post, I suppose someone should point out that while decrying the push to make everyone go to college, he simultaneously promotes economic policies that make it harder for many of those without college degrees to get ahead.
Mike
slag
@BO
It is rather ungenerous of you to insult your parents this way, BO.
Brachiator
I would also pay more attention to these clowns if they reported that none of their children were attending college, or that they pulled them out of college.
Of course the other side of the coin is this: I recall that Google gives strong preference to employees with PhDs. And they are hiring.
This gets to the heart of the false dilemma posed by these pundits. While a college degree does not guarantee that a person will find a good job, a good education, however obtained, may make you a more informed citizen and a better person.
And it may give you more options. A college friend went to law school, but later became a business writer for the NY Times. Another started out as a teacher, and later became a pediatrician. Several co-workers, retired or laid off from the aerospace industry later worked as software developers and analysts. All these people found it much easier to enhance their skills and change jobs than people who only finished high school.
On the other hand, I’ve known people who claim that the only education you need you can get from studying the Bible and working a trade. No wonder they don’t want their kids taught biology or the Devil’s handiwork, evolution.
Education is not mere ornamentation.
Lastly, I wish that more posters on the Internet knew about “rhetorical devices.” It often makes for more amusing and informative reading.
karen marie
All the arguments against college that I have read pretty much boil down to the fact that college graduates wind up with huge debt. It’s indisputable that college graduates make more money than non-college graduates. Even secretarial positions now oftentimes require a college degree, which is pure insanity.
I can’t speak to the motivation for this flood of anti-college talk, but by making college education not just a financial hardship but psychologically difficult is a win for those who want to keep the riff-raff out.
Perfect Tommy
Another anecdote for your collection:
Before College: 35 yr old commercial fisherman/bouncer
After College: 41 yr old meteorological programmer for NASA
YMMV
Woodrow L. Goode, IV
There’s a related issue here: 99.4% of the people working in “Human Resources” departments should be executed for gross incompetence.
Now that the manufacturing economy has been destroyed and the construction industry has been decimated, it has become impossible to get a decent-paying job without a degree. It’s the first hoop the glorified secretaries from Personnel require applicants to jump through.
Don’t have it? Maybe you can get a contract-hire gig– or go through a temp agency that takes 30% off the top. Maybe you’re just structurally unemployed.
And, no the solution isn’t the “lifetime learning” or “job training” that idiots like Bill Clinton proposed. My industry (tech) saw a lot of people go and get degrees so they would be qualified.
Guess what happened? The Nurse Ratcheds who know nothing about the jobs they’re filling– making them totally incapable of assessing resumes– just raised the hoop. The requirement for a bachelors in Computer Science is now followed by the words “MBA preferred”.
I have a bet with the one woman in the field who has a brain (she’s close to 60 and is as appalled by this as I am) that, by 2015, we’ll start seeing requests for a Ph.D. or a J.D. added to the MBA. The only reason she took my bet is that she thinks it’ll be 2020.
I know 23 people who have a net worth of over $1 million and got it from tech. Only 9 could get hired today– their resumes would instantly get dinged. (Art history, communications, psychology, or just dropouts). And this is in a field that was largely built by dropouts (Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Michael Dell, Larry Ellison don’t have bachelors, Jany Yang and David Filo of Yahoo quit a master’s program; Larry Page and Sergey Brin bailed on their doctorates.)
I have to fight Personnel every time I want to hire to let me write the ads, and I have to visit everyday around mail time to make sure they haven’t “removed unqualified candidates.”
(And don’t get me started on the use of scanners and text searches on resumes, meaning that your resume doesn’t even get read. If it doesn’t include the exact words in the ad, it won’t be seen.)
Best of all, most computer science programs don’t teach the skills companies use– or if you graduated five years ago, they now use different technology. This is a field where experience and certs should rule– but it doesn’t.
I tell kids “Unless you want to be a doctor, where the quality of instruction really matters, get the cheapest degree you can. Go to community college for the first 60 credits and finish at a state school or a degree factory (some do flat fees). Get the piece of paper for the gatekeepers and just make sure you learn your trade.” You’ll get dinged for having a bad degree, but you won’t be a quarter million in debt, either.
My friend, the millionaire lawyer, has similar advice. Unless you want to be a professor or a corporate attorney who doesn’t actually practice, he says any degree will be enough, because you learn skills by going to court, and that a stint with the public defender’s office or some non-profit that files suits to help people will be better.
The only real value to a degree from a good schools is the friends you make. I went to school with a former White House Chief of Staff and the head writer for one of AMC’s prestige shows and my name can bring them to the phone. Matt Yglesias will live partly off he word “Harvard” and partly on his friends.
This shouldn’t be how it is, but it is. College is both fundamentally worthless and absolutely necessary.
srv
Why are Peter Orszag’s two decade old slides relevant? That’s back when there was a middle class.
Well, that worked out great in the last decade or so. College prices have sky-rocketed, more than medical care and housing. What is the reality college graduates won’t be any more upside down than mom & dad’s mortgage and unemployable to boot?
Wages have been sticky for nearly a decade, and will remain so. There will be no ‘decent’ living for most regardless of degree or not. That is the new reality. The Capitalists have no intention to invest in this country and their sockpuppets in government have no intention to require them.
FlipYrWhig
No one would give a ripe rat’s ass about anything Matt Yglesias had to say about any subject whatsoever if he hadn’t gone to Harvard. He’s smug and unfocused yet cocksure about everything he opines about. His own idiosyncratic slightly liberal-ish “wingnut welfare” career indicates nothing about anything. His whole world is defined by mutual backscratching by graduates of elite universities. That’s kind of a flaw in his analysis of educational issues. Plus, he still hangs out with Megan McArdle.
Cat
@39
I think for CS degrees as stayed steady while other program’s starting salaries have gone down.
Software Engineering is one of the highest paying jobs in the US and has several 100k people in it. This is even in the face of H1-B abuses and outsourcing in droves.
The problem is not all CS graduates turn into Software Engineers. There are lots of lower paying jobs CS graduates end up in for a variety of reasons in the IT fields.
cyntax
@42. Martin
No, really. Most of the rest of the disciplines don’t see teaching writing as part of their job. You can go talk to them–I have.
Barry
“The market indeed wants these professions badly. The number of CS BS degrees awarded annually is less then that for MDs and a faction of JDs.
Its not the cost of having the programs, its a lack of enrollment. Its half of what it was in 2000.”
If enrollment has gone down by half, in a world which uses more software, and more complex systems, then we should see radical salary increases. Especially since in the past decade we’ve seen massive business migrate to the web, as the web has gone from ‘read a tutorial on http tags’ to ‘be able to handle a boatload of complex software and make sure it all works’.
stuckinred
This is an interview with the outgoing chancellor of the University System of Georgia. The first African-American and first non-doctorate chancellor.
“Knowledge on the job is fleeting. You can learn job knowledge if you’re smart enough to learn. You can learn enough to be effective at just about any job. But what you can’t learn is how to write, how to comprehend and how to think. … My sense is if you understand culture, if you understand politics, if you understand anthropology, you are in a much better position to lead organizations than if you understand a narrow discipline.
Q: It may surprise people hearing this from an engineer.
A: I’m a reformed engineer.”
Lydgate
I read the article and had some real problems with it as I usually do with these sorts of articles. It is never clear to me how much they adjust for other factors when describing the monetary rewards of a college education. Take for example the difference in dishwashers’ salaries: Is this higher because the individual has a college degree or are there other important factors at work such as the fact that college educated dishwashers may live in higher wage parts of the country. Also, I’ve never seen one of these articles that makes it clear to me whether the socioeconomic status of the college graduate prior to matriculation is taken into account. If someone can point me to studies that tease out these sort of factors, please let me know.
Cat
@slag
Define educated? You’ll never get two people to agree on it.
Even then, I disagree with your premise. Its not education or lack there of that is our problem. Its the fact the majority of the politicians are people who cravenly pursue power at any cost. You can’t educate that out of them, is a character flaw.
Omnes Omnibus
@ stuckinred:
That is the premise behind a liberal arts education.
srv
@ Barry
Those who are working in the right areas and willing to travel can make a lot of money. I have a 25yr old relative with a non-science degree and he’s making ~90K coding drupal infrastructure. Turning away unsolicited jobs/contract work in every week.
stuckinred
Omnes Omnibus
Yep and this fellow has made quite the transition in 5 years. Now he’s taking over the Atlanta Schools!
slag
BO would agree with that. I, however, am a liberal. As such, I believe that both nature and nurture play a role in making people who they are. But then, I’m speaking only from my own experience of having perpetually evolving character flaws.
slag
@54
I like that dude.
Taking the long AND wide view. That’s a conversation about education worth having. All these others just seem to end up exactly where they started.
Cat
@Barry
H1-B visas and outsourcing are keeping CS salaries down, but they are still growing even the current economic climate.
CS salaries are still constrained by the demand for their product. If you lose money writing the code, why even bother writing the code in the first place?
Ruckus
Woodrow L. Goode, IV
I like your style.
Having run across this issue in looking for jobs 6-7yrs ago I concur that the hiring practices of many, many companies are crap. They seem to be looking for wallpaper not substance. Is it that substance is too hard to measure, or even find? Or is it that looking at paper is just much easier?
Cat
@slag
Being a liberal doesn’t mean you have to believe every single person is capable of redemption. We are talking a few 1000 people out of a population of 300,000,000. These are the extreme outliers, so you shouldn’t expect them to conform to the norm.
Brachiator
@Cat:
Defining educated is hard. Defining “uneducated” is probably simpler. It’s not the presence of a college degree that counts here, but the absence of ongoing intellectual curiosity.
It’s also hard to sustain a utilitarian argument in which a person gets just enough education to get a “good” job. How good is good? When does good become the rut that you get stuck in?
It also seems to me that the days when good jobs (especially union jobs) were accompanied by regular salary increases are gone. This makes it harder to fit a defined level of education with long term employment prospects.
Martin
However it’s not indisputable that unfocused college graduates make more money than focused non-college graduates. And this reveals the big lie in the college debate. Anyone who is focused in their career aspirations, whether they are college bound or not is going to make more money than someone who is not. Sure, some will fall into it, but the notion that college magically makes you valuable to society is bullshit.
But if you’re tackling this problem at age 18:
Then you’ve already failed. College is not the time to discover expression and critical thinking. Refine it, sure, but if you can’t think critically by 18, we’ve failed you. And that truly is the problem with the US K-12 system. Standardized testing is like cyanide for critical thinking – kills it dead. And by 18, it’s a coinflip and years of work to restart that stalled engine.
Martin
I’d argue a stagnated, non-entrepreneurial marketplace is what killed CS salaries. If all you’re doing is slogging out shitty enterprise software, you’re going to get the same shitty pay as all the other enterprise workers. The smartphone app market is the best thing to happen to CS salaries since the internet explosion. Suddenly there are interesting things to do again, and interesting things require talent, and that’s what you pay for.
slag
Actually, yes it does. But…
If you’re going to be in the business of throwing away people, it would be better for me if it weren’t the people who end up having the a lot of control over my socio-economic system.
Lydgate
@Martin
Agreed. The idea that college is the time to learn to think critically is ridiculous.
And, actually pretty awful for a democracy.
slag
@66
Probably. But at least a coinflip is a chance.
burnspbesq
@Woodrow L. Goode IV:
“corporate attorney who doesn’t actually practice”
Somebody’s an idiot here. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume.it’s your friend, who I would guess is a plaintiffs’ PI lawyer based on his absolute lack of understanding of what non-litigators actually do.
Martin
I agree. ‘Educated’ is the point where you no longer need an external driver. An educated person will value life-long learning, seek it out, and have the necessary base skills to do so successfully in whatever form is appropriate for that person. I’ve met plumbers that are clearly more educated in the sense that they are experts in their field than a few PhDs that I’ve met that couldn’t seem to make heads nor tails out of anything, and proclaimed that their PhD meant that they arrived, they were done, and they wanted their full reward now.
Morat20
Regarding CS degrees: A BS in Computer Science is generally worth a few years of experience. Graduating with one — if you’re from even a semi-decent university — means you know how to code in three or four languages (which means picking up new ones is easy, and life as a programmer means you’re more likely than not to have to learn new concepts and languages often enough), you’re familiar with the modes of thought required to program (state machines, logical operations, boolean expressions), you’ve had practice with a variety of basic data structures, you understand how they work and when to apply them….
In short, a BS in CS gives you not just a solid background in actual practice, it should — if you paid attention — give you a solid theoretical background as well. A Master’s goes into more depth, obviously.
*Most* of the truly rock-star coders I’ve met are people who have an engineering, science or math background (including computer science) — I’ve met some with an unrelated background who got truly good through constant practice and self-study.
However, even those rock stars — I’ve noticed a lot of odd blind spots. I’m *good* as a programmer, but I wouldn’t call myself a rock star — yet I get dragged in on design and implementation because I have the theoretical background my fellow coders — whose degrees are in ME, EE, AE, and in Physics — don’t.
Some people are quite capable of teaching themselves to be truly excellent coders. Some people need to be, well, drilled in it — like any degree program does on your focus. But the actual degree is useful. It covers a lot of ground that self-study doesn’t. I’ve seen a lot of truly great programmers make boneheaded mistakes that just sit there, glaring, the middle of otherwise elegant and inspired code.
Don’t even get me started on the guy who came up with a radical and very impressive bit of optimization to get around a problem that wouldn’t have EXISTED if he’d known a bit more about data structures in the first place. Or the guy I’m currently cleaning up after, who did an excellent job — but obviously never took an OOD course in his life.
burnspbesq
I find it somewhat odd that we are 70+ comments into this thread and no one has said anything about national service as an alternative to shoving hordes of 18-year-olds who have no idea why they are there into lecture halls.
Ghanima Atreides
/yawn
freddie, this is same post regugitated. just swap Matt for Conor.
n/e ways, obama got this.
quit pretending you libertarian asshat, there is an eight state test program addressing this.
Freddie deBoer
Just to respond to some general sentiment, I don’t think saying that everyone is not qualified for or interested in a college education amounts to cutting them loose or abandoning them. Far from it. A large part of my desire to rebuild structures for uneducated workers is precisely so that they don’t get abandoned, and of course I support a robust social safety net that provides for those who the economy leaves behind.
To say that everyone deserves equality of opportunity and to realize a certain socially-defined minimum of security in major areas (such as food, shelter, education, and health care access) is not to say that everyone can or should follow the same path, or that every mechanism that lifts some is the right mechanism for everyone.
Cat
Because saying politicians are people who as a whole are craven power seekers who can’t be ‘educated’ to not act that way and so shouldn’t be in power is the exact same thing as “throwing away people”.
Maybe you should give that “liberal handbook” to someone with a bit more critical thinking skills because I imagine you misread parts of it.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
I know every time this subject comes up the Humanities folks chime in about the value of liberal arts degree. Honestly, I learned how to write a clear essay in high school AP English. That was sufficient to give me decent technical writing skills. With only one exception (the class that introduced me to Alan Ginsberg’s poetry), my college liberal arts (particularly humanities and English) classes were a useless waste of money. Reading literature is fun, but you can do that without going a hundred thousand dollars into debt. Those classes certainly didn’t teach me to think or analyze. Science and mathematics, especially statistics, were much more useful for that.
Cat
Its to soon to tell IMHO. I’d have to dig, but I believe I saw that most apps don’t even cover development costs of the proverbial “guy in the basement” software company.
At 1.99 a sale you need 200k sales to come close to replacing that boring enterprise job. Even if you can churn an app out in 3 months that means you need 50k sales for each app.
It still feeling kinda gold rushy out there. I’m hearing conversations from friends of friends about people wanting to get into the mobile app business and with no app ideas and no experience releasing product let alone product in the mobile market.
slag
Look–It’s not my fault that your arguments tend toward nihilism. If you choose to minimize the role that our current educational system has played in creating the world in which we live, that’s up to you. Personally, I think we can do better. And a big way we can do better is by fully realizing the value of education beyond its economic ROI.
KXB
I fall on the side of thinking that higher ed is over-rated and certainly over-priced. I got a BA (with honors) from U of Chicago, and an MBA from a prominent East Coast school. I am still paying off my MBA loans 9 years after I graduated, and I am doing the job I was doing before I got the MBA. My BA just gathers dust in a basement. Whenever I get a call from some eager young student from my college asking for a donation, I have to politely say no. I don’t want to actively discourage someone else’s kid from pursuing college, but I cannot give more money to an institution that did not pay for me.
Aside from technical fields or medicine, a BA does not have much value to either the one graduating with it or the company hiring the graduate.
KXB
BTW – the dollar value of outstanding college loans now exceeds total credit card debt.
timb
I will say this guy: David Autor, the MIT guy cited by Leonhardt is almost always wrong on anything he writes for my profession….what that means for the rest of the story is debatable.
Omnes Omnibus
@ Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony: Of course your experience with education is exactly that which every other person experiences. Right?
Freddie deBoer
You guys realize that your assertions are of little value in the face of peer-reviewed numerical data about the college wage premium, right? I’m happy to hear dissenting opinion, and I think it’s foolish to entirely discount anecdotes when getting at the truth, but to continue to dispute the overall net financial benefit of a college degree to most who have them, in the face of all data, I think is a mistake.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
Omnes…
‘Exactly’, no. However, my experience isn’t uncommon. When I was in college and since, I have heard college administrators and liberal arts professors pontificate on the value of a liberal arts education. There is certainly evidence that people with college degrees earn more and have a lower unemployment rate than people without them. However, when this evidence is presented, it isn’t broken down by type of degree. When it is broken down by degree, liberal arts doesn’t look so great. I think those degrees aren’t worth the debt, and I certainly know people who made that mistake and agree with me.
Lydgate
@Freddie
Can you please point me to these peer reviewed studies that control for other factors? I have not seen any article about the wage premium that talks about other variables. It is more like correlation=causation in all these articles I’ve read.
Lydgate
@Freddie
Can you please point me to some of these peer reviewed studies that you write about? I asked about this in my previous comment.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
It would appear that I am stuck in moderation. The point I was trying to make is that the data on the college wage premium and the lower unemployment rate among college graduates doesn’t break it down by type of college degree. When it does, liberal arts looks less valuable.
I haven’t used the liberal arts portion of my education in the work place. All the liberal arts graduates I know ended up un- or underemployed. I don’t think it is worth debt. Other degrees are worth it.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
Why am I in moderation?
KXB
“You guys realize that your assertions are of little value in the face of peer-reviewed numerical data about the college wage premium, right? ”
Does the data distinguish between a BA in English vs BS in Accounting? Or are all degrees thrown into one giant pot?
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
Omnes,
No, other students have different experiences. My experience, however, is common. The people I know who have had buyer’s remorse about their education have all been liberal arts majors. I expect this is why.
The data does throw all degrees in one pot and they clearly aren’t equal in value.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
Omnes,
No, other students have different experiences. My experience, however, is common. The people I know who have had buyer’s remorse about their education have all been liberal arts majors. The data does throw all degrees in one pot and they clearly aren’t equal in value. I would provide a link done in 2011 by the University of Nevada, but I keep ending up in moderation. The liberal arts majors had some of the highest unemployment rates.
Cat
Omnes Omnibus
@ Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony: In some ways it does not surprise me that LA majors have higher unemployment rates coming out of school. A liberal arts education is not a preparation for a particular job. It, if done well, does develop a set of skills and a way of looking at the world that can make a liberal arts graduate a very valuable employee for the right employer. Also, I have known an awful large number of technical majors who could not write their way out of a wet paper bag, who had non-existent critical reading skills, and who knew nothing about any area outside of their technical world. In addition, I would suggest that education is worth more than the sum total of a person’s earnings. Finally, it takes all kinds; if a liberal arts education wasn’t for you, that doesn’t mean it is not for anyone.
KXB
“I would suggest that education is worth more than the sum total of a person’s earnings.”
Shouldn’t it be at least worth its cost? A liberal arts degree that in the 1970s cost $5,000 is one thing. A liberal arts degree in 2011 that costs five or six figures is quite another.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
Omnes,
I don’t disagree about problems with technical degrees. Certainly those students need more coursework in writing, and some in critical reading. However, a lack of knowledge about anything outside of their technical area is more of a social handicap and demostrates a lack of curiosity (or perhaps Asberger’s). Forcing them to take a literature or humanities class isn’t going to cure that.
Maybe WP won’t have a snit fit over this link, from the New York times. When less than half of humanities majors are in a job, any job, that requires a college degree, is it worth going into debt over? I don’t see how it could be!
By the way, I’m not saying that literature and poetry aren’t worthwhile. I read a lot. It is the value of formal coursework that is questionable.
Omnes Omnibus
@ KXB: Over a lifetime? I would guess one tends to get one’s money back. I will also point out that my experience with a liberal arts education was at a small liberal arts college, one with approximately a 10:1 student faculty ratio. One that provides at least some financial aid to 93% of its students and guarantees that, if a student is accepted, the education will be affordable with student loans as a comparatively small part of aid package. My undergraduate experience may have been different than that of most students. YMMV and obviously does.
KXB
Omnes,
Are you willing to advise a young adult to take on tens of thousands of dollars in debt over a “guess” that one tends to get one’s money back? In other areas where people spend a lot of money, or borrow it, there is a lot of time taken to see if there will be value. The cost of a car, house, certain surgical procedure – all are subject to cost scrutiny. Why is education so special that it can charge a tremendous amount of money for an education that may not cover costs?
When universities were the only place to get access to large volumes of data and research – you could make that case. But when the Library of Congress is accessible to a 12 year old in Oregon with a smart phone, can universities make that case of being “special” anymore?
Omnes Omnibus
@ KXB: It would depend on the student. I would also note that the stats to which people have linked have shown job placement and earnings immediately following graduation. It would be interesting to see if things change a few years later. Ultimately, I am a very happy with having pursued a liberal arts degree at a liberal arts college. I would advise a student similar to the person I was at 17 to do what I did. As I said above, YMMV.
RSA
In what sense does a college education not cover costs? I don’t know of any data on people who have gone bankrupt because of college loans, and since these can’t be discharged by bankruptcy, I’d guess it would be hard to tell. Is the argument that some people could have made more money if they hadn’t gone to college? I could believe that, in some cases, but the data Freddie points to says that it’s not generally the case.
In comparison with the examples of cars, houses, and surgeries, I expect that people make the same judgment about a college education. They ask, “Can I afford it?” and then “Is it worth it to me?” If someone goes bankrupt because they bought a $100,000 car, I’d say they made a mistake, but it’s much harder to make that same judgment about someone who chooses some life experience (college) and doesn’t go bankrupt. Unless a lot of people who went to college are unhappy about having done so, but I haven’t seen any surveys about that, either.
Steve in Sacto
If the net present value of the earning premium of a college degree is over $500K (see chart here), taxed at just 15% the Federal government stands to make over $75,000 (NPV) from a college education. Why isn’t tuition for all seen as a good long term government investment?
slightly-peeved
An aside – people talk about the value of a liberal arts education for general intellectual development. Some bloggers (such as Yglesias, and especially mcardle) could have used a bit more math at college from what i’ve seen.
Australia has a strong system of unions and a lot less of a stigma for not going to college. Our former PM. Paul Keating never went to college.
murbella
/yawn
More libertarian circle jerk. Such a bore.
President Obama is already on this since 2010.
Eight states are currently participating in a trial Early Graduation Program, and in the same states excess jr. colleges are being made-over into cool cutting edge votech academes.
But libertarians don’t read i guess. ;)
murbella
You know…..this post reminds me of something…oh yes.
/yawn
Don’t you have anything better to do than pimp your libertarian homeboiz with formula posts?
I’m ‘fraid Coles latest desperate search for an honest libertarian is once again, an Epic Fail.
brettvk
I’m really impressed with the technical expertise re education in this thread — no snark. As a non-parent I’ve only ever thought about the US educational system in its direct impact on my life, which has been mixed, to say the least.
When I read the initial post I had a much simpler take on “not everyone needs [should be] in college.” Like the parallel meme “not everyone should own a house,” I see it as a message from our overlords to prepare us for the liquidation of the US middle class. Pretty soon the serious people, and then the rest of us, will all agree that too many of us have been allowed to aspire to education and housing that we, as a nation, cannot afford.
Incidentally, I’m my neighborhood a $28,000 starting salary with no student debt is beyond our dreams. $28K is where many people end up if they can keep the same job for a few decades.
murbella
not exactly. not every one needs to go college and take on ginormous debt.
Obama’s plan that i LINKED that is being TESTED in eight states allows kids that want to to graduate with 3 years of highschool. Then they can go to a cool trade school and be earning in 2 years. That puts them in the job market three years ahead of the college prep crowd.
Do you know why Yglesias and Freddie and the libertarian posse are not in favor of that? Means strong young unions, unions with power.
So the EGP would actually GROW the middle class.
Fight the Power, dude.
sherifffruitfly
I’m all for dumbasses advocating for less education. I and my graduate degree in math greatly benefit from the illiteracy, stupidity, and ignorance of damn near all Americans. Job security for life works for me!
In the immortal words of my dad: I don’t have to outrun the bear; I only have to outrun YOU.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
Just to be clear, I am very much in favor of college education. I just think that some majors and some coursework isn’t worth the price tag.
murbella
Obama’s EGP is pretty elegant really.
Early graduates can take 2 years of votech or a trade school, and hit the job market 3 years before the college prep people can even start paying off their loans.
Freddie, Yglesias and the rest of the libertarian clown posse don’t like this though– because the EGP would greatly strengthen and empower unions, and lower the average age of union workers.
A strong, young, hightech union culture is the libertarian nightmare.
NWBTCW.
Darwi Odrade
Obama’s EGP is pretty elegant really.
Early graduates can take 2 years of votech or a trade school, and hit the job market 3 years before the college prep people can even start paying off their loans.
Freddie, Yglesias and the rest of the libertarian clown posse don’t like this though– because the EGP would greatly strengthen and empower unions, and lower the average age of union workers.
A strong, young, hightech union culture is anathema to libertarians.
RP
Aren’t you assuming your conclusion? Even if I grant that a college education is valuable in today’s market because of a wage premium, that doesn’t say much about whether today’s market makes a lot of sense. Put another way, we’ve gotten to a point where a college degree is very valuable because employers demand them. That doesn’t mean employers are necessarily right to demand them and that we couldn’t come up with a better system overall that serves all of our interests more effectively.
West of the Rockies (formerly Frank W.)
Slag @19 ~ I read your words “useful tool” and immediately thought of Prufrock. There’s one use for an M.A. in Literature. I teach part-time on two junior college campuses and hope each semester that I get a decent schedule, that my classes will make, that I won’t get bumped because a full-timer had a class that did not make… Might it have been different had I gone on and received a Ph.D? Perhaps, but not necessarily. In English (composition/literature), tenured positions don’t grow on trees. Sometimes I wish I’d gotten a degree in the sciences.
West of the Rockies (formerly Frank W.)
Just double-checked. I “misremembered” the line: “… no doubt an easy tool…” No wonder I haven’t got a stinkin’ full-time position!