A struggling economy has a way of making the shortsighted come out of the woodwork and panic about everything. One manifestation of this shortsighted panic is the anti-college movement, the people who have set about trying to make the case that you shouldn't go to college because it's not worth it.
The simplistic argument that the anti-college movement uses is exclusively about ROI, or return on investment. The core of this argument is that college is too expensive, and requires too many people to go into debt in order to pay for it; yet at the same time the jobs after college just aren't there. Too many college graduates aren't 'using their degrees,' working jobs in the service industry, etc. For the anti-college movement, this represents a poor ROI: you go into debt to get a college degree, then you come out with lots of debt and lousy job prospects.
A small part of this argument is true: college is too expensive, and it requires too much debt. We could say the same thing about every single other major investment we make, including buying houses, cars, and stocks: with the exception of the very rich, Americans achieve a high standard of living not on earnings (or any real growth in wages for the last few decades), but on debt.
Those who know something about trends in higher education will almost universally affirm that what's driving increases in college costs is everything but the EDUCATION part of college; but that's for another day. The substantive discussion to be had on the question of college costs and student debt is about how to reduce costs while improving education, two things that, actually, go hand-in-hand.
The anti-college movement is not interested in the substantive discussion, however. They catastrophize the problem of cost in order to suggest, without logical connection whatsoever, that education itself is overvalued. The only way they can make this otherwise inane connection between overspending on college gyms and football press boxes and 'educational' expenses is by reducing the value of a college education to ROI.
The counterargument here is a simple one, in two parts: 1) the value of a college education is not reducible to an equation of how much you paid for college and how much you make afterwards as a consequence of your degree; but 2) even if the value of college could be sensibly measured this way, COLLEGE IS THE BEST INVESTMENT YOU CAN MAKE. To summarize part 2:
1) The unemployment rate of the entire workforce in April was 7.5%. The unemployment rate for college graduates was 3.9%.
2) Not all college graduates currently have the jobs they want in this recession, but all net job gains have gone to college graduates.
3) Last year, a full-time worker with a college degree earned 79% more on average than one without.
4) Despite the high up-front costs of college, investing in a college degree returns better than the average stock market returns since 1950, and more than FIVE TIMES the returns on gold, long-term government bonds, and home ownership.
Of course, measuring the value of education this way is, commonsensically, historically, philosophically, and politically asinine.
For the past 2000 years the fundamental point of a higher education has never been to train people for jobs. Job skills have certainly been a positive externality of higher education; but let's not confuse that externality with the PURPOSE of higher education, which is to broadly enrich our lives and prepare us better for citizenship and social well being.
In light of all this, I'm comfortable suggesting that the ROI argument against going to college is dismissible. The question, then, is why the anti-college movement is so invested in telling you not to go to college. There are several reasons why, reasons that the anti-college movement doesn't articulate up-front. It's time, however, to stop letting the anti-college movement hide behind non-arguments about ROI, and to examine what really bothers them about college.
1) They don't understand the difference between higher eduction and job training, and they want you to be a good little cog. For the anti-college movement, the idea of earning a degree in philosophy and making 40K a year as a bartender is shockingly offensive. The idea of earning a college degree and not sliding into a typical white-collar job--the kind of job that the ROI folks could consider a 'success story' worthy of a college degree--is anathema (even though even most white-collar jobs out there don't require anything nearly as sophisticated as a college degree). If you're not 'using' your college education for you job, the anti-college crowd has absolutely no idea what to make of you. The idea that you might be enriched by that philosophy degree over and above what you do for a living does not register for these people.
2) They think college brainwashes you. The anti-college movement is largely a conservative movement, which means it's afraid that all the indoctrination your conservative parents inundated you with growing up could be countered by learning new things about the world. Large numbers of people who acquire a breadth of knowledge, and the tools to articulate what they know, is a problem for singularist conservatives who believe that American culture is a monolithic thing that should be dictated by one God, one language, one view of history, one view of capitalism, one view of gender roles, and, in too many cases, one race.
3) They think college inhibits entrepreneurship. The anti-college crowd thinks that because people like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of college and became tech billionaires, avoiding college is the ticket to successful entrepreneurship. Stanford (philosophy major) and Stanford Law graduate and successful entrepreneur Peter Thiel is so convinced of this that, if you prove yourself entrepreneurial enough, he will pay you to not get the same world-class education he's received.
4) They believe in the imaginary wall that separates a college campus from 'the real world.' Failing to understand that the idea of 'the real world' is a metaphor and not a physical divide, the anti-college movement struggles to understand the ways in which being successful in college is like being successful in broader life. Things like meeting deadlines, being self-disciplined with your time, learning to adjust to new social settings, learning to get along with a diversity of people, learning to confront difficult truths, learning to speak confidently to a room full of strangers, being held accountable for your work, fitting in healthy eating and exercise habits on a busy schedule, etc. are cornerstones of college success that, for the anti-college movement, clearly have no analogues in the 'real world.'
5) They're white people with privileged upbringings. One thing you don't see very often is someone representing the African-American urban poor or a first-generation Cuban immigrant claiming that college is overrated. That's because people who aren't already plugged into networks of privilege simply by being born have a much more difficult time moving upward in society and getting good jobs and life opportunities. Sure, if your parents are senior partners at a New York City law firm, and you're an entrepreneurial teenager, you've already grown up with a top-tier vocabulary just from hearing your parents talk; you've already learned how to dress and socialize among the elite just by being around your own household; your parents friends and your own friends (who are the children of those living in your wealthy neighborhood) have access to plenty of capital, social and otherwise. You probably won't have a hard time getting seed investment for your idea, whether it's a lemonade stand or tech startup. But if you aren't born into privilege, going to college is likely the only opportunity you'll ever have to get plugged into a network of privilege, to know the sort of people who can get you your first internship leading to your first high-paying job, who can put you in touch with potential investors in you and your ideas, with advisors who can tell you what you need to do to be an engineer, a doctor, a lawyer, etc. So next time you hear someone telling you all about how college is overrated, a poor ROI, etc., ask yourself: is this person from a privileged background in which they already were given the tools, opportunities, and experiences that college provides for the majority of people who go to college?
