When parents and teachers urge kids to go to college, they visualize the success stories: kids who graduate on time with marketable degrees. If every student fit this profile, college would be an outstanding personal investment. Unfortunately, most students don’t fit this profile, and their returns are mediocre or worse. Indeed, plenty would be better off skipping college in favor of full-time employment. What’s going wrong? BRYAN CAPLAN, professor of economics at George Mason University and the author of “The Case Against Education: Why the Education System is a Waste of Time and Money” (Princeton University Press), out now, outlines the five worst things about today’s college education.
1. A majority of college students don’t finish on time — and a large minority never finish at all.
Since the bulk of the payoff for college comes from graduation — not mere years of attendance — dropping out of school is like bankrupting a business. In both cases, you sacrifice years of savings and toil and walk away with scraps. And while under-achieving high-school students occasionally blossom into star college students, this is rare.
In school as in life, the best predictor of future performance is past performance. Think about high-school students in the bottom quartile of math scores. Nowadays, almost half try college; but when they do, only one in nine manages to graduate. College major is also a reliable predictor of student success. Degrees in engineering, computer science, finance and economics all pay well, boosting earnings by 60 to 70 percent. Degrees in fine arts, education, English, history and sociology do about half that.
Since all majors require four years of coursework and four years of tuition, the payoff for the average graduate with a low-earning major is unimpressive. And the payoff for below-average graduates in such fields is terrible; many end up working in jobs like waiter, cashier and cook that they could have easily done with no college at all.
2. Most of the curriculum is neither socially useful nor personally enjoyable.
Schools teach some skills almost every job requires — especially literacy and numeracy. But after the final exam, students never again need to know most of what they learn. Think about your years of coursework in history, social studies, foreign languages, higher mathematics, art and music. Colleges offer some majors — like engineering and computer science — that train students for well-paid careers.
Yet after graduation, plenty of students can safely forget their major; think about fields like history, literature, sociology and communications. Of course, every school subject leads to employment on occasion; at minimum, you could go on to teach the very subject you studied. But that’s a very low bar.
When confronted with these observations, defenders of college often protest, “The point of college isn’t to prepare students for jobs; it’s to enrich their lives.” But how often does this enrichment actually occur? Professors suspect — and researchers confirm — a dismal picture. In class, most students are bored, if they even bother to attend. As famed Harvard professor Steven Pinker confesses, “A few weeks into every semester, I face a lecture hall that is half-empty, despite the fact that I am repeatedly voted a Harvard Yearbook Favorite Professor, that the lectures are not video-recorded and that they are the only source of certain material that will be on the exam.” After graduation, few college graduates devote more than a tiny fraction of their leisure time to abstract ideas or high culture. School doesn’t have to be enjoyable. But if it is neither enjoyable nor useful, how can it be anything but wasteful?
3. The “hidden benefits” of college are mostly wishful thinking.
Remember the surly kid in the back of the classroom who kept asking questions like, “When am I going to use trigonometry in real life?” Teachers’ stock reply is, “What’s important is that you’re learning how to learn.” But are they right? Can teaching students anything really make them better at everything?
Educational psychologists have searched for education’s hidden benefits for over a century, and their answer is decidedly negative. In a wide range of experiments, “transfer” — the ability to independently apply your knowledge — is very low.
Teachers routinely hope, of course, that after years of study, everything will finally click in their students’ minds. The typical outcome, however, is merely that the knowledge students don’t regularly use slips away. And unless you have a very unusual job, you’re unlikely to regularly use trigonometry, history, foreign language or sociology.
How, then, do people get good at their jobs? The same way you get to Carnegie Hall: practice. You don’t become a skilled pilot or obstetrician by thinking about thinking or learning about learning. You become a skilled pilot by flying planes and a skilled obstetrician by delivering babies . . . hopefully with an experienced practitioner looking over your shoulder to make sure you don’t kill anyone as you learn. The crazy thing about our society is that you have to study piles of unrelated material in order to convince employers you’re ready to begin on-the-job training.
4. The more education our society has, the more every worker needs to get a job.
Our society may be crazy, but that doesn’t mean employers are stupid. Most of what students learn in school is inapplicable on the job. But high grades and fancy diplomas still certify (or “signal”) worker quality. No matter how irrelevant your coursework is, excellent performance is a fine way to convince employers you’re smart, hard-working and conformist; in short, that you have the makings of a good employee.
Then what’s so bad about all this signaling? The more education the average worker has, the more education any individual worker needs to impress employers. It’s called credential inflation. When few American adults had a high-school diploma, employers took it seriously. This is no longer true, and the reason is obvious: A large majority of applicants now have the degree.
The historical data is striking. Almost half of higher managers and professionals born from 1900-07 never went to college. Only 13 percent of those born from 1964-70 can say the same. Looking at a wide range of occupations, researchers find similarly dramatic patterns. While the average job today is slightly more intellectually demanding than the average job 40 years ago, the main change in the labor market is that you now need college to get the same job your parents or grandparents were able to get with a high-school diploma.
5. Thanks to heavy government subsidies and “locked-in syndrome,” our dysfunctional system is built to last.
Is online education on the verge of radically disrupting traditional colleges? Highly unlikely, for two big reasons. First, unlike books, music or travel — classic “disrupted industries” — higher education is massively supported by all levels of government. In the US, total government support is well over $300 billion a year. When consumers receive the standard product at heavily subsidized rates, we shouldn’t be surprised if they don’t energetically hunt for full-price substitutes.
Second, one of the main traits that students signal with their education is sheer conformity — their willingness to submit to social expectations. In our society, few social expectations are more ingrained than, “Go to college and get a degree.” Parents, teachers and peers reinforce this norm from preschool on. Why can’t an innovative start-up offer an imaginative, outside-the-box way to signal conformity? Because the student who tried it would signal nonconformity!
A real conformist doesn’t look for an easy way out; he complies with society’s expectations without complaint. I call this “locked-in syndrome”: As long as the first people in line for alternative education are nonconformists, employers will stigmatize them — and ambitious students will keep flocking to traditional colleges.
Are there any viable remedies? Yes. A solution for first problem — education that pays poorly from a purely selfish point of view — is already in your hands. If you struggled through high school, college is a bad bet compared to an entry-level job. You’re better off saving your money and gaining real-world work experience. The same goes for low-paid majors. Unless you’re already made of money, either find a more promising major or don’t go to college. “I don’t know what else to do” is a bad reason to do something that foreseeably fails.
The remaining problems with college, in contrast, are too big to solve on your own. Government education policy has to change first. The most tempting reform is to radically redesign the curriculum to make it more socially useful — or at least more personally enjoyable. But if you know how real colleges work, it’s hard to believe they would ever sincerely comply. Sure, administrators and faculty might pay lip service to making college more relevant and fun. But you can’t expect them to follow through. Unless their funding dries up, they’ll keep teaching the subjects they’ve always taught using the methods they’ve always used.
What’s the alternative? Simple: Dry up the funding. Since we don’t get much per tax dollar, we should cut taxpayer support. This would have obvious drawbacks if college were a fine-tuned system for turning unskilled youths into skilled adults. In the real world, however, cutting spending doesn’t just save taxpayer money; it also puts a brake on credential inflation. Waiter, cashier and cook are already common jobs for college graduates. As long as we keep churning out more college graduates, this problem is only going to get worse. Instead, we need to admit that far too many kids go to college. Cutting government subsidies is the quickest way to make them reconsider.