Think College Isn't Worth it? Do The Math.
Misplaced Grievance About Higher Education
I just read an article on LinkedIn extolling the virtues of companies that no longer look for college degrees, let alone, transcripts or GPA’s, when hiring new employees. Learning… that stuff is so last decade.
One of the companies cited was Walmart. I don’t know. Is it surprising that a global retail behemoth would prefer to have employees whose minds have not been polluted by such demonic disciplines as literature, philosophy, sociology, or history. Far better, perhaps, if you’re going to be stocking shelves or beating some food manufacturer down on price, to be well-versed in higher level, thinking. You know, like “if we pay them $.02 cents less a unit we can boost your margins by 17%. “ Heady stuff!
Why, I wondered, would a journalist who probably has their job because they studied journalism at a university opine on the virtues of devaluing education? I’m sure they meant well. They probably offered their article as solace and succor and solace to young people and families who have been fed a steady diet of stories about how ridiculously expensive college has become, how everyone is buckling under their student debt. It has to be in our top five list of national whines. “Geeze, these universities are so damn expensive that it’s not even be worth it worth it to go to college these days.”
Newsflash: It is.
The two very basic facts that you need to know are: 1) The average university graduate has a debt of $33,500 a year after they leave college; and 2) the average college graduate will earn $1.2 million more over their lifetime than a high school graduate. That’s it. What else do you need to know? While you will pay and likely borrow for the asset that is your college education and degree, you will get an enormous return on that payment.
Sure, I could wax poetically about the character you’ll build, trying to balance your work waiting tables or dealing with jerks at the call center, with the deliverables that your professor’s demand at the end of the semester, usually all at the same time. I could reminisce about the joys of spring break, camping in the mountains or bumming around Mexico for 10 days, eating fish you caught yourself, maybe snuggling up with some young honey you met while traveling. I could talk about carefree afternoons, shooting hoops at the gym, biking a trail, playing pool at the student center, or just lying around your living room with your roommates, sipping cheap bourbon and playing a spirited game of RISK!. But those are ancillary benefits.
The real thing you need to know is you’ll acquire, on average, $35,000 in debt, but you’ll get, on average, $1.5 million more in income over the next 60 years. Sure, it might be useful to be able to work out the rate of return on that investment over an average lifetime. Or to understand the other benefits enjoyed by a college graduate relative to their peers, things like happier families, lower divorce rates, longer, better vacations, better overall health, less obesity, and happier kids.
It is true that college can be hard. Some students struggle with academic expectations while many students have serious financial challenges. I left home at 18 with a little over 500 bucks and a greyhound ticket to Tucson. I got into the University of Arizona at a time when the semester tuition was considerably less in adjusted terms than today. But it wasn’t nothing, and I had to pay my rent, utilities, tuition, books, food, etc. I was occasionally hungry. I had my power cut off more than once because we got behind paying the bill. I was evicted and had to sleep on a friends couch for a few months. I never had a car and never had money to fly home… wherever that was. Worse, I was occasionally ashamed, and afraid to be as poor as I was. But mostl I was busy as hell, and joyous.
Twenty years after graduating, halfway through my working life, I found myself back at college, managing an MBA program at Colorado State University. My students were “do-gooders,“ mostly returned Peace Corps volunteers and students from developing countries who wanted to learn social-entrepreneurship to make the world a nicer place. Tuition had gone up quite a bit since I’d been a student, even at public universities, and I had many in my program who were living very close to the bone. I had students from Ghana, India, Kenya, and even Bhutan, whose families had little or no financial resources to support them. I had American students who had no money in the bank and no family support who had to borrow money to get through. It pained me to see the sacrifices they made, but they supported each other and found a way to get by. I was comforted by the fact that they didn’t seem as broke ass as I had been 20 years earlier. But, come the end of the month, many of them didn’t have two nickels to scrape together, and if there was freed food to be had anywhere, they were packing it in. And yet, I think if I asked any of them today about their time getting that master’s degree, “joyous” would be one of the main descriptors.
The United States has an education system that is the envy of the world. If you’re rich or if you’re a genius - but mostly if you’re rich - you can go to Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, or Yale. If your middle class, hard-working, and smart, you can go to any of a thousand excellent public or private schools. It’ll cost you some, but you’ll have to shop around and do a little math. You can work and make some money. You can live 4 in a 1-bedroom as one of my students did. You can eat the cheapest food you can find and sacrifice your nutrition for a couple of years. And, yes, you may end up with some debt that may take you 5 to 10 years to clear up.
But that debt is manageable if you don’t insist on paying extra for so-called prestige or going to an overpriced private school. People like to say, “that’s a really good school,” even if there’s very little difference in the quality of instruction or professors regardless of where you go. Our higher education system is so competitive and so fecund that you’ll get amazing scholars and teachers wherever you go. Even if you’re poor, if you have your stuff together reasonably well, if you worked at all in high school, and if you’re willing to work while studying, you can get into many public institutions that are far less expensive, but that have excellent teachers, labs, support, systems, and facilities to get you to through college.
I experienced that myself in the 1980s and I saw that more recently while working at Colorado State. Our public universities are teeming with students who are the first in the entire history of their family to attend college, kids who come from no money at all, earning a four-year degree that will quite literally change the trajectory of their lives and their own kids someday.
One cannot ignore the reality that many Americans started college at private diploma mills or disreputable institutions that led them to unmanageable debt. Just as many may have attended a fancy private school when their local state college would have given them just as good an education. Many did not graduate and do not make enough money to manage their debt. For this significant minority who tried and failed, we should eliminate or at least restructure their debt so that their lives aren’t unmanageable. As a nation, we can afford it. It is morally right and ultimately good for the country.
But for those who have yet to attend, please do not give in to the incessant whining about how expensive university study is. It is unbecoming and incorrect. If you believe that borrowing a little bit of money over four years so that you can be smarter, wiser, and have a better life isn’t worth it, you may not be college material.