May 18, 2010, 03:00 PM ET

The Real Value of College

By Kevin Carey

With Jacques Steinberg's piece in last Sunday's Times (Plan B: Skip

College), the "Is college really worth it?" meme seems to be in full flower, in
part because it's an interesting issue and in part because the media suffers
from a fatal weakness for novelty and *counterintuition. But most of these
discussions suffer from confusion about what question they're actually
trying to answer. In roughly ascending order of importance, here's how
various people are framing the issue:

• counterintuitive = contrary to an intuitive believe or to common-sense

expectation. intuitive. Intuitive = using or based on what one feels to
be true even without conscious reasoning; instinctive : I had an
intuitive conviction that there was something unsound in him. He had
an intuitive grasp of people’s moods.
• The ability to understand something immediately, without the need
for conscious reasoning. We shall allow our intuition to guide us.
• A thing that one knows or considers likely from instinctive feeling
rather than conscious reasoning. Your insights and intuitions as a
native speaker are positively sought. He works according to intuition.
• Intuition = instinct, intuitiveness, sixth sense, divination,
presentiment, clairvoyance, second sight, ESP (extrasensory
perception). This confirms an intuition I had.

Is college for everyone? This is a dumb question. Of course college isn't for
everyone. Just last week, the Post profiled 17-year old high school senior
Bryce Harper, who definitely shouldn't go to college. Instead, he should (and
will) become a professional baseball player and earn millions of dollars. The
number of good career paths that don't require a college degree is small and
shrinking but not non-existent. Some people start families, others aren't
smart or hard-working enough enough to complete college-level work.
Defining the question in absolute terms does little other than identify the
questioner as a *sloppy thinker.
*sloppy = careless and unsystematic; excessively casual: Your speech has
always been sloppy.

Does everyone in college need to be there? Again, of course not. There are
19 million people in college; obviously some of them shouldn't be.

Is going to college a bad decision for some students? Sure. Going to college
incurs time and money costs, and produces benefits of various kinds. There's
no upper bound on costs so logically they can exceed benefits. Borrowing
tens of thousands of dollars for a substandard nursing degree, for example,
is a bad idea. The average lifetime earnings *differential for college
graduates still exceeds the average cost of college by a substantial amount
(the exact figure is subject to debate) but those are just averages.

*differential = a difference between amounts of things = The differential

between petrol and diesel prices.

(Johns Stossel thinks that because there are some students on the wrong
side of both averages—costs too high, benefits too low—this proves that
college in general is a *"scam." His article does prove something: John
Stossel is a *hack. This we already knew.)

*scam = a dishonest scheme; a fraud

*hack = a writer or journalist producing dull, unoriginal work. A person who
does dull routine work.

Are too many students going to college? This is a question actually worth
asking. The Times article cites several credible academics, plus Charles
Murray, answering "yes." Economist Richard Vedder, whose work I find
thought-provoking if not always convincing, notes that 15 percent of mail
carriers have bachelor's degrees. "Some of them could have bought a house
for what they spent on their education," he says. But the *optimal number of
postal carriers with bachelor's degrees surely isn't zero. That's because of
the specific nature of the college experience.
*optimal = best or most favourable; optimum
*Matriculating at a university isn't like buying a car. Anyone with enough
money can buy the nicest car available, at any time in their life, regardless
of what cars they have or have not bought before. College, by contrast, is a
process and an experience associated with a great number of prior and
subsequent *contingencies: You can only go to college if you successfully
engage in various previous activities, and various subsequent options are only
available to those who complete college.

*matriculate = 1. (no obj) be enrolled at a college or university: He

matriculated at Edinburgh University for a degree in pure science. 2. (with
obj) admit ( a student) to membership of a college or university.
*contingencies = chance; occurence

Some students, moreover, are far more vulnerable than others to the policy
choices likely to result from our collective understanding of these questions.
Statistically speaking, my daughter will almost certainly go to college. First-
generation students, by contrast, along with those who come from from low-
income backgrounds and bad high schools, stand at the precipice of non-
attendance. The way we think about college matters for them in profound
ways.

Which is why the conventional approach to higher education has been, and
should continue to be, *expansive. It's a cliche, but it's true: College opens
the door to opportunity. Not for everyone and not always, but very often and
certainly often enough. Crucially, there's no way to know for sure ahead of
time exactly who will benefit. Attempts to do so *invariably *discriminate
against the *marginalized students noted above. So we accept some
inefficiency and additional societal expense, because the net result is
positive and the people who benefit the most on the *margins from
expansiveness need it the most and deserve it the most. We're a wealthy
nation and a surplus of enlightened mail carriers seems low on the list of
problems to solve. How many of them, in *retrospect, regret their degrees?

*expansive = thorough; wide –ranging

*invariably = always
*discriminate against = make an unjust or prejudicial distinction in the
treatment of different categories of people or things, especially on the
ground of race, sex or age: existing employment policies discriminate against
women.

It would be possible, of course, to carry an expansive policy too far. But as

David Leonhardt notes, income data show that the returns in the job market
to a college degree relative to lesser credentials have steadily increased
even as access to higher education has grown at the same time. And we
should take seriously the collective wisdom of millions of college-educated
parents who consider no option other than giving their own children a chance
for higher education. This isn't just about status and social norms; it
represents a rational and highly informed estimate of cost, contingency,
opportunity and benefit, all pointing in one overwhelming direction. For the
last century America has led the world in expanding access to successively
higher forms of education. Does anyone seriously believe this was, in
retrospect, unwise?

Vedder et al. do make some good observations about college credentialing.

There's a lot to be said for developing more creative, efficient, and flexible
ways of certifying what people know and can do and matching those
credentials up with the emerging labor market—as long as it doesn't have
the effect of shutting students out of future opportunities to advance
further down the postsecondary path.

But in the end, a lot of those questions really come down to whether or not
the solution to various difficult higher-education problems should or should
not serve the narrow interests of institutions and people who enjoy
disproportionate wealth and power in society and have already benefited
from access to college themselves.

If a lot of students enter college unprepared, which they do, we can shut
them out of higher education as lost causes, or we can do the hard work of
fixing public high schools and investing more resources in the community
colleges and open-access public universities that do most of the heavy lifting
in postsecondary education.

If many students drop out of college, which they do, we can can pretend
that this represents fidelity to high academic standards or we can starting
holding colleges accountable for graduating a reasonable number of students
as compared to peer institutions with similar academic missions and
admissions profiles, and do a much better job of giving at-risk students the
academic support they need.

If the ever-growing cost of college pushes more students on to the wrong

side of the cost/benefit equation, which it is, we can pretend that
skyrocketing tuition is an immutable force of nature, or we can create a
more transparent higher education market where colleges have strong
incentives to restrain costs and ban colleges that plunge their students into
unmanageable debt from federal aid programs.

College is extremely important and more people need it now than ever
before. It's noteworthy that the people who argue otherwise are in nearly
all cases great beneficiaries of college themselves.

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Comments

1. debrahumphreys - May 19, 2010 at 08:46 am

Thank you so much for this well-reasoned posting. There is much evidence
(see compelling economic data presented by the Center on Education and the
Workforce at Georgetown at http://cew.georgetown.edu/) to support your
final point that "college is extremely important and more people need it now
than ever before." The Georgetown Center's data make it extremely clear
that, for most students, college is still very much worth the expense in
terms of future opportunities. It is also clear from the economic data that
the American economy will actually be short college educated workers in the
coming years. Some estimate that we will be about 16 million college
educated workers short by 2025. We also know that today's college
graduates will have about 10-14 jobs by the time they are 38 years old
(according to department of labor data). Because of this fact, I am
particularly worried about tracking some students into very narrow training
programs that may prepare them for an initial job, but not for success over
the long term. Of course, the other pernicious part of the argument against
expanding access to college is the idea that those who do jobs like letter
carrying don't deserve the many other benefits of being well-educated!
Having a rich life outside of work or being informed citizens and voters, for
instance. If we care about our future economy and our future democracy, we
need more college students and more college graduates. And, as you say, the
arguments about whether every single student needs to go to college are
just diversions that distract from the more important issues--getting more
students better prepared for success in college, increasing college
graduation rates, and, finally, making sure that all college graduates actually
have the skills and abilities they need. Evidence suggests that they don't
(see data on what employers say about college graduates' skills and abilities
from AAC&U's LEAP intiative:
http://www.aacu.org/leap/public_opinion_research.cfm).

2. mercy_otis_warren - May 19, 2010 at 10:43 am

"Is college for everyone? This is a dumb question. Of course college isn't for
everyone....Defining the question in absolute terms does little other than
identify the questioner as a sloppy thinker."

It seems fair to add that the prompt to much of this discussion was the
warm assertions by Pres. Obama that, indeed, "every American will need to
get more than a high school diploma." ("I ask every American to commit to at
least one year or more of higher education or career training," both 2/2009)
While Pres. Obama included vocational training, one might argue that his own
generalized contention that a high-school education alone was insufficient
for "every American" (apparently including, say, Bryce Harper) is the
reverse of the question above. It's not too far, perhaps, from the idea that
*every* American should commit to a year of college or vocational training to
the idea that "college is for everyone."

"If many students drop out of college, which they do, we can can pretend
that this represents fidelity to high academic standards or we can starting
holding colleges accountable for graduating a reasonable number of students
as compared to peer institutions with similar academic missions and
admissions profiles, and do a much better job of giving at-risk students the
academic support they need."

As usual, I wish Kevin Carey had experience teaching underachieving, poorly

prepared, or at-risk undergraduate students. It would, for this reader at
least, add some heft to his frequent chastisement of, and desire to "hold
accountable," those of us (individuals and institutions) who do.

3. sahara - May 19, 2010 at 10:46 am

Agree! Thank you, Debra, for these links.

4. molly1 - May 19, 2010 at 11:12 am

Thank you Debra for pointing out that letter carriers have just as much
right to a life of the mind and rich intellectual life as someone in the
professions. It was only in the 1990s that political rhetoric designed to
justify increased spending on higher education linked the importance of a
college education strictly to job success and higher incomes. Learning or the
sake of making better decisions and being a better informed citizen is just
as important. As Alexandra Lord's article in the Chronicle points out today,
people outside academia can have all sorts of career trajectories, and they
use their learning in a variety of unexpected ways. Letter carriers, to take
one example, are essential members of the community, who can notice and
raise the alert when elderly who live alone are in trouble, among other
things. I'm in academia, but one of the better read people I know is a letter
carrier; she entered the job for income security, and I suspect she makes
more than many professors.
5. bdr8y - May 19, 2010 at 02:52 pm

This is why I am professionally in love with Kevin Carey!