Opinion

Exactly why is college worth it today?

At a debate last Tuesday in downtown Manhattan put on by Intelligence Squared US, writer Malcolm Gladwell moved the audience to support a ban on college football; his best argument was, roughly, why is a dangerous sport like football tied to higher education at all?

But these days, you’ve got to wonder if much of anything that goes on in college has any useful purpose.

Graduates are leaving school with massive debt and ever-fewer job prospects. What are they spending all that money for?

Rutgers University last week released a study showing the grim picture for those who finished college in the last five years. Only one in two graduates has a full-time job — and 40 percent of those jobs don’t actually require the expensive four-year degree.

Colleges have long held themselves up as places of intellectual pursuits, not factories of future employees. But while universities may not see themselves as somewhere to prepare for a future career, it’s unlikely that students paying more than $100,000 for a four-year degree feel the same way.

Administrators aren’t above stringing the kids along, either. Students studying for a liberal-arts degree often hear they can do “anything” with it. That “anything,” however, could just as easily be nothing.

As for that intellectual growth: A study last year by professors Richard Arum (of New York University) and Josipa Roksa (of the University of Virginia) found that “45 percent of students show ‘no significant gains in learning’ after two years in college.”

Students not only aren’t getting valuable job skills, they’re not even learning rewarding but useless stuff. So what’s the point of college at all? (At least some of those football players manage to go pro — are they the smart ones, after all?)

It’s easy, of course, to say that college is a scam and we should have our children opt out — look at all the success stories of people who didn’t finish college. The challenge would be to find the first parents to start that opt-out revolution. All parents want to give their children a competitive edge in life, and for the last century that has meant attending college.

Maybe it’s time to change the model of what college does for its students. Maybe instead of “Shakespeare in Film” (much as I loved spending afternoons in class watching Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson), we need more courses that focus on resume-building, interview skills or other education often relegated to an understaffed Career Office.

All of college is a career office; it’s time institutions of higher education started accepting that.

Karol Markowicz blogs at alarmingnews.com.

@karolnyc