So I really like and respect your writings on higher ed, Noah, and I am desperate to read that poem, which gets at something I wondered about with this piece: the subject is college but not knowledge! From my position as dean the key component part I am required to deliver is a curriculum, is teaching. (You mention teaching twice but not as an activity.) In my decades in higher ed I have seen a reduction in that teaching component compared to all the other goods college is supposed to be delivering now: a sense of identity, belonging, skills for social mobility, a premiere residential experience (at some places), access to sporting events (at some places), access to Greek life (at some places), etc. So from my perspective it bears noting that my small component -- delivering a curriculum, supporting excellent teaching and the delivery/transfer of knowledge to hungry young minds -- is still what we should do and I don't blame graduates for being sad that they're getting less of that for the money.
Oh and PS -- humanities majors are in fact rising at many places, including UUtah!
I find it a little weird to see the survey response that college is not worth the cost "because people often graduate without specific job skills..."
People, you know you can pick your own major, right? So, maybe just don't make bad choices?
Like I painfully recall switching majors because I wanted to be sure my degree that would line up to a job. And I say "painfully" because in the 90s I switched from Math (too theoretical) to Business and then watched my math friends make crazy money as Wall St quants. Sigh.
There's another aspect of our elite universities that needs to be considered,, which is their role as research and entrepreneurial centers of excellence.
You make a convincing case that the elite 12 don't do a good job in creating an economically diverse student body. But these same elite institutions and their graduate schools and often their hospitals are among the greatest assets of the country. And often are crucial to the economy of a city. What would Boston be without Harvard and MIT or Philly without UPenn?
I'm sure you recognize all this, but as criticism grows of the elite 12, we need to remind people of this other important aspect.
Great article but I think it is a little over-optimistic about how universities operate. I am adjunct at a four-year commuter university. I started the program while working (and raising a family), attending the school as a graduate student and then doing the adjunct work because I enjoy it. I am by no means an expert, so these are just my impressions.
In our university adjuncts teach about 40% of the student hours and are about 3% of the budget. So basically, a substantial portion of your teaching is done on a fraction of your overall budget. This kind of highlights the value placed on pure teaching and I suspect it is not uncommon. I know a lot of adjuncts, who would like to be more like tenured or even non-tenure track professors get upset about this, but adjuncting has never been a high paying or prestigious occupation (really more a side-job). Honestly, I think a better system would have fewer adjuncts and fewer tenured track professors and more non-tenured, teaching focused professor.
But this would only work well if actual education of students was the highest priority. I would say education of the student body is almost never the highest priority at any University...it's what generates student hours and, therefore, money. Education is the means to funding the truly high priority stuff.
What seems to be a high priority is the other stuff, and this varies by college. Sports at many colleges are a huge priority. Most colleges value prestige programs such as engineering, hard sciences, etc. They try harder to teach in these programs, but really it is not about education but more about the prestige associated with the program. Most four-year colleges place at least a moderate value (and some a very high value) on research. Finally, over the more than a decade that I have been in higher education it seems like indoctrinating students into a pre-identified, nearly religiously sacrosanct set of beliefs is among the top priorities (although this is often exaggerated by the political right).
This is what I see as problem one and really is about the incentives of the university staff. Administrators want to grow the university and increase its prestige. Tenured faculty vary. Some want a very easy job (the lazy ones) or want to focus on research and building their prestige (the more ambitious ones or the ones needing to make tenure) and many, but not nearly enough, want to educate their students. The proportion of each varies but I think most professors would agree that educating students is under-emphasized.
On the bottom end of the hierarchy things differ. Non-tenured faculty want to be treated like tenured staff and adjuncts want to be treated like non-tenured faculty. Again, many in both groups want to educate their students, but not all. Often these groups are not the sharpest or most motivated faculty, but I do think they value the teaching they provide.
The second set of issues is related to the students. As Noah points out they often have unrealistic expectations, both of the colleges and their ability to succeed with minimal efforts. I have so many students who claim they are going to be lawyers, and almost none succeed because they lack either the intellect, work ethic, or both. However, they can take loans, tell themselves they will have high-paying jobs so they can afford extra loans to live better, and then be horribly disappointed by reality. They also do not want to take difficult but high-paying jobs (due to the work ethic issues). People underestimate how many of these types of jobs exist, and many do not require a four-year degree.
I don't know what to do about this problem either as it is human nature. The students that fall into this group are not bad, or unintelligent, they are just lying to themselves (something we all do). The only way I could see to address this is to dial back loans for living expenses (which is for many students more than half of what they borrow and seem to be a favorite for those with questionable work ethics as they can take loans instead of working while going to school) and/or do a better job of ensuring loans go to those who will finish (because not finishing and taking the loans is disastrous) and are able to pay.
One final thought...so many programs currently in most universities are not linked very well to skills or knowledge that will generate a return for the student (I am looking at you "Critical Studies"). These programs should exist as they provide a valuable check on many of society's inequities. But they should also be much smaller in terms of size and student hours and more selective in how loans pay for the education.
The same could be said to a large extent about some other humanities programs and few, but still a substantial number, of social science programs. I am not saying these programs do not have value, only that most of them seem to attract the students most likely to regret taking out large loans to fund them. At the end of the day those of us in higher education should place the highest priority on these students' well-being (kind of like medicine's first do no harm principle).
I have a lot of thoughts on this. Before I list them, I would like to point everyone towards Slate's latest podcast episode, The Weeds, about the student loan crisis our country is experiencing. It goes a long way towards explaining how a nasty confluence of events, including poor public policy and great lobbying by greedy banks and very greedy universities, caused tuition costs to skyrocket and debt burdens to expand dramatically.
Note: I myself owe a ton of student loan money, having entered college in 2001 and continuing on to graduate school in 2005, believing what I had been told by my Boomer parents without question: get into the biggest name university you can to maximize your success in life. Following this advice has dramatically impacted my life (read: close to ruined, financially), and it's taken me years of struggle to even remotely right my own ship, sans a house or a family.
Anyway, back to what I see as the causes of this:
1.) The insane cost, expected debt burden, and now-proven inability on the part of policymakers to provide relief is a major deterrent to taking on a college education. This, coupled with comically low acceptance rates at elite schools that tend to cost the most, and one wonders how anyone of college age thinks they can attend a "school of their dreams" at all.
2.) The 2008 financial crisis disabused many Millennials and Gen Z'ers that the woefully out-of-date lessons Boomers had been teaching us (go to college, be successful!) held much water. One could expand this analysis, as Noah does in his article, to include a number of socioeconomic factors, but to me, this was the start of the sea change.
3.) Outside of a handful of elite, big-name schools that the "chattering class" Noah mentions cannot shut up about because they all mostly went to those places, America is chock full of excellent public schools, 2 year colleges, and other opportunities for advancement that mostly fell by the wayside over the last twenty or thirty years. Why? Because there is nothing Americans cannot vulgarize with money and elitism, including education. Noah also mentions a decline (and regret amongst those who get them) in humanities majors. Well, that isn't because humanities are not worth it, it's because we do not have good incentives to promote humanities majors and then support them with good jobs after college. And, as some commentators are pointing out during the WGA/SAG strikes and looming AI in the art world, a society without good humanities results in a less human, more brutish and stupid society. Think about that as our airwaves are flooded with game shows and reality TV this fall.
4.) Despite the over-simplified lessons we were taught, college degrees are not plug-and-play. You still have to go out there and hustle to get anything going for yourself these days, and I am not sure that back in the 60's, 70's, and 80's, this was as much the case. When I talk to older Boomers about their experiences, they mostly say they never thought twice about tuition, because there wasn't much of it to worry about, and they knew that after graduation they would be able to kind of mosey into jobs wherever they wanted, free of crushing debt and able to take risks. If a college-degree-requiring job didn't work out, they could always join a union or try something creative to make a living.
I've read Sandel and Markovitz's books on the perils of the Meritocracy run amok, and weighed that against the experience my grandfather had after WW2 attending the University of Michigan (he just showed up after moving to Ann Arbor with his family, talked to the dean, asked for in-state tuition because he'd just moved to town, and was admitted that day). The American economy back then was just such a wildly different place, and our younger generations frankly do not live in that world anymore. Like most things, America has done a poor job of updating our expectations or addressing these problems with sound public policy meant to shape society in an optimal way. I see that as the primary reason why trust in education has started to drop, and frankly, I think that we are all to blame for this trend.
Highly stratified systems like US (with Ivies +) and UK (with Oxbridge) worked well when the proportion of young people going to college/university was small, but the model can't be scaled because it's based on huge endowments of land and financial assets that can't be replicated.
Are people who attend ivies more likely to enter academia? If so, that could explain why those who just missed the cut made similar money. Academia is a high prestige but relatively low income career
I went to several Ivy League schools, but I'm old and out of boredom I've been watching some YouTube etc lectures, often from much less famous colleges. And to be honest there's really no difference in the quality of lecturing. Of course the famous college professors I'm sure do better research and publishing but that really doesn't affect students. But I'm sure by far the biggest difference in educational experience is the quality of the student body, which makes a huge difference. That's why I think tinkering with the student body to reach diversity or fundraising goals is always going to negatively affect the learning experience.
Elite institutions rely on their brand name, not the quality of their professors, to attract the students and employment premia required to retain their status. They've taken a page from Louis Vuitton and so far it's worked.
College generally pays off, even for Humanities majors (at least if you don’t overburden yourself with debt), but if you’re a Humanities major you have to have some idea of what you want to do after college and maybe do an internship or something during college. If you don’t, then it may be hard to find a good job, and it may have been (financially) better to do a trade school or something.
All that being said, I do wonder if there are civil/societal benefits from people going to college apart from the financial cost! (Of course, that doesn’t mean it’s worth it to financially ruin yourself.)
The fact our universities have become ideological training grounds for the new commissars of the far left is one reason many people have lost respect for them. Zero intellectual diversity, sterile academic atmosphere and overpriced degrees. Can anyone blame the public at-large for falling out of love with our system of higher education?
Great data-based article. Some decidedly not-data-based thoughts:
Quality of education will improve as less kids go to college. Students who are outwardly dismissive of learning and are there only for the signals to future potential employers sap the learning energy and teaching energy from students and professors. Those students shifting away from college to the job market is good for everyone.
I wonder if the social benefit of college is reducing over time as social networks become less place-based.
Firstly, Irrespective of the impressive stats, this is the third article in a week I've seen on some variation of the theme that college is no longer worth it from Noah Smith: Ph.D U. Michigan, Bryan Caplan: Ph.D. Princeton, Richard Hanania: JD U. Chicago. Is the subtext that it's worth it for them, but not for the rest of us?
Secondly, I grew up relatively poor. There's no way I would've had my career if I hadn't gone to college. My kids both went to college and there's no way they'd have their respective jobs if they hadn't. What am I missing? It's worth it for me, but not for other people?
Having asked these two admittedly rhetorical questions, I understand there are lots of kids for whom college is going to be a waste of time and work/apprenticeship is going to be a much better option, but let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
So I really like and respect your writings on higher ed, Noah, and I am desperate to read that poem, which gets at something I wondered about with this piece: the subject is college but not knowledge! From my position as dean the key component part I am required to deliver is a curriculum, is teaching. (You mention teaching twice but not as an activity.) In my decades in higher ed I have seen a reduction in that teaching component compared to all the other goods college is supposed to be delivering now: a sense of identity, belonging, skills for social mobility, a premiere residential experience (at some places), access to sporting events (at some places), access to Greek life (at some places), etc. So from my perspective it bears noting that my small component -- delivering a curriculum, supporting excellent teaching and the delivery/transfer of knowledge to hungry young minds -- is still what we should do and I don't blame graduates for being sad that they're getting less of that for the money.
Oh and PS -- humanities majors are in fact rising at many places, including UUtah!
I find it a little weird to see the survey response that college is not worth the cost "because people often graduate without specific job skills..."
People, you know you can pick your own major, right? So, maybe just don't make bad choices?
Like I painfully recall switching majors because I wanted to be sure my degree that would line up to a job. And I say "painfully" because in the 90s I switched from Math (too theoretical) to Business and then watched my math friends make crazy money as Wall St quants. Sigh.
There's another aspect of our elite universities that needs to be considered,, which is their role as research and entrepreneurial centers of excellence.
You make a convincing case that the elite 12 don't do a good job in creating an economically diverse student body. But these same elite institutions and their graduate schools and often their hospitals are among the greatest assets of the country. And often are crucial to the economy of a city. What would Boston be without Harvard and MIT or Philly without UPenn?
I'm sure you recognize all this, but as criticism grows of the elite 12, we need to remind people of this other important aspect.
Great article but I think it is a little over-optimistic about how universities operate. I am adjunct at a four-year commuter university. I started the program while working (and raising a family), attending the school as a graduate student and then doing the adjunct work because I enjoy it. I am by no means an expert, so these are just my impressions.
In our university adjuncts teach about 40% of the student hours and are about 3% of the budget. So basically, a substantial portion of your teaching is done on a fraction of your overall budget. This kind of highlights the value placed on pure teaching and I suspect it is not uncommon. I know a lot of adjuncts, who would like to be more like tenured or even non-tenure track professors get upset about this, but adjuncting has never been a high paying or prestigious occupation (really more a side-job). Honestly, I think a better system would have fewer adjuncts and fewer tenured track professors and more non-tenured, teaching focused professor.
But this would only work well if actual education of students was the highest priority. I would say education of the student body is almost never the highest priority at any University...it's what generates student hours and, therefore, money. Education is the means to funding the truly high priority stuff.
What seems to be a high priority is the other stuff, and this varies by college. Sports at many colleges are a huge priority. Most colleges value prestige programs such as engineering, hard sciences, etc. They try harder to teach in these programs, but really it is not about education but more about the prestige associated with the program. Most four-year colleges place at least a moderate value (and some a very high value) on research. Finally, over the more than a decade that I have been in higher education it seems like indoctrinating students into a pre-identified, nearly religiously sacrosanct set of beliefs is among the top priorities (although this is often exaggerated by the political right).
This is what I see as problem one and really is about the incentives of the university staff. Administrators want to grow the university and increase its prestige. Tenured faculty vary. Some want a very easy job (the lazy ones) or want to focus on research and building their prestige (the more ambitious ones or the ones needing to make tenure) and many, but not nearly enough, want to educate their students. The proportion of each varies but I think most professors would agree that educating students is under-emphasized.
On the bottom end of the hierarchy things differ. Non-tenured faculty want to be treated like tenured staff and adjuncts want to be treated like non-tenured faculty. Again, many in both groups want to educate their students, but not all. Often these groups are not the sharpest or most motivated faculty, but I do think they value the teaching they provide.
The second set of issues is related to the students. As Noah points out they often have unrealistic expectations, both of the colleges and their ability to succeed with minimal efforts. I have so many students who claim they are going to be lawyers, and almost none succeed because they lack either the intellect, work ethic, or both. However, they can take loans, tell themselves they will have high-paying jobs so they can afford extra loans to live better, and then be horribly disappointed by reality. They also do not want to take difficult but high-paying jobs (due to the work ethic issues). People underestimate how many of these types of jobs exist, and many do not require a four-year degree.
I don't know what to do about this problem either as it is human nature. The students that fall into this group are not bad, or unintelligent, they are just lying to themselves (something we all do). The only way I could see to address this is to dial back loans for living expenses (which is for many students more than half of what they borrow and seem to be a favorite for those with questionable work ethics as they can take loans instead of working while going to school) and/or do a better job of ensuring loans go to those who will finish (because not finishing and taking the loans is disastrous) and are able to pay.
One final thought...so many programs currently in most universities are not linked very well to skills or knowledge that will generate a return for the student (I am looking at you "Critical Studies"). These programs should exist as they provide a valuable check on many of society's inequities. But they should also be much smaller in terms of size and student hours and more selective in how loans pay for the education.
The same could be said to a large extent about some other humanities programs and few, but still a substantial number, of social science programs. I am not saying these programs do not have value, only that most of them seem to attract the students most likely to regret taking out large loans to fund them. At the end of the day those of us in higher education should place the highest priority on these students' well-being (kind of like medicine's first do no harm principle).
I have a lot of thoughts on this. Before I list them, I would like to point everyone towards Slate's latest podcast episode, The Weeds, about the student loan crisis our country is experiencing. It goes a long way towards explaining how a nasty confluence of events, including poor public policy and great lobbying by greedy banks and very greedy universities, caused tuition costs to skyrocket and debt burdens to expand dramatically.
Note: I myself owe a ton of student loan money, having entered college in 2001 and continuing on to graduate school in 2005, believing what I had been told by my Boomer parents without question: get into the biggest name university you can to maximize your success in life. Following this advice has dramatically impacted my life (read: close to ruined, financially), and it's taken me years of struggle to even remotely right my own ship, sans a house or a family.
Anyway, back to what I see as the causes of this:
1.) The insane cost, expected debt burden, and now-proven inability on the part of policymakers to provide relief is a major deterrent to taking on a college education. This, coupled with comically low acceptance rates at elite schools that tend to cost the most, and one wonders how anyone of college age thinks they can attend a "school of their dreams" at all.
2.) The 2008 financial crisis disabused many Millennials and Gen Z'ers that the woefully out-of-date lessons Boomers had been teaching us (go to college, be successful!) held much water. One could expand this analysis, as Noah does in his article, to include a number of socioeconomic factors, but to me, this was the start of the sea change.
3.) Outside of a handful of elite, big-name schools that the "chattering class" Noah mentions cannot shut up about because they all mostly went to those places, America is chock full of excellent public schools, 2 year colleges, and other opportunities for advancement that mostly fell by the wayside over the last twenty or thirty years. Why? Because there is nothing Americans cannot vulgarize with money and elitism, including education. Noah also mentions a decline (and regret amongst those who get them) in humanities majors. Well, that isn't because humanities are not worth it, it's because we do not have good incentives to promote humanities majors and then support them with good jobs after college. And, as some commentators are pointing out during the WGA/SAG strikes and looming AI in the art world, a society without good humanities results in a less human, more brutish and stupid society. Think about that as our airwaves are flooded with game shows and reality TV this fall.
4.) Despite the over-simplified lessons we were taught, college degrees are not plug-and-play. You still have to go out there and hustle to get anything going for yourself these days, and I am not sure that back in the 60's, 70's, and 80's, this was as much the case. When I talk to older Boomers about their experiences, they mostly say they never thought twice about tuition, because there wasn't much of it to worry about, and they knew that after graduation they would be able to kind of mosey into jobs wherever they wanted, free of crushing debt and able to take risks. If a college-degree-requiring job didn't work out, they could always join a union or try something creative to make a living.
I've read Sandel and Markovitz's books on the perils of the Meritocracy run amok, and weighed that against the experience my grandfather had after WW2 attending the University of Michigan (he just showed up after moving to Ann Arbor with his family, talked to the dean, asked for in-state tuition because he'd just moved to town, and was admitted that day). The American economy back then was just such a wildly different place, and our younger generations frankly do not live in that world anymore. Like most things, America has done a poor job of updating our expectations or addressing these problems with sound public policy meant to shape society in an optimal way. I see that as the primary reason why trust in education has started to drop, and frankly, I think that we are all to blame for this trend.
Impressive data driven article.
If we’re going to lower our expectations for higher education, should we not reduce our subsidies to it commensurately?
Highly stratified systems like US (with Ivies +) and UK (with Oxbridge) worked well when the proportion of young people going to college/university was small, but the model can't be scaled because it's based on huge endowments of land and financial assets that can't be replicated.
Are people who attend ivies more likely to enter academia? If so, that could explain why those who just missed the cut made similar money. Academia is a high prestige but relatively low income career
I wonder, if college can't get people well-paid jobs, should we be blaming the colleges or the job market?
I went to several Ivy League schools, but I'm old and out of boredom I've been watching some YouTube etc lectures, often from much less famous colleges. And to be honest there's really no difference in the quality of lecturing. Of course the famous college professors I'm sure do better research and publishing but that really doesn't affect students. But I'm sure by far the biggest difference in educational experience is the quality of the student body, which makes a huge difference. That's why I think tinkering with the student body to reach diversity or fundraising goals is always going to negatively affect the learning experience.
Elite institutions rely on their brand name, not the quality of their professors, to attract the students and employment premia required to retain their status. They've taken a page from Louis Vuitton and so far it's worked.
College generally pays off, even for Humanities majors (at least if you don’t overburden yourself with debt), but if you’re a Humanities major you have to have some idea of what you want to do after college and maybe do an internship or something during college. If you don’t, then it may be hard to find a good job, and it may have been (financially) better to do a trade school or something.
All that being said, I do wonder if there are civil/societal benefits from people going to college apart from the financial cost! (Of course, that doesn’t mean it’s worth it to financially ruin yourself.)
The fact our universities have become ideological training grounds for the new commissars of the far left is one reason many people have lost respect for them. Zero intellectual diversity, sterile academic atmosphere and overpriced degrees. Can anyone blame the public at-large for falling out of love with our system of higher education?
The military is still a highly functioning institution that enjoys broad support and respect from Americans, though it has declined since 2019.
Great data-based article. Some decidedly not-data-based thoughts:
Quality of education will improve as less kids go to college. Students who are outwardly dismissive of learning and are there only for the signals to future potential employers sap the learning energy and teaching energy from students and professors. Those students shifting away from college to the job market is good for everyone.
I wonder if the social benefit of college is reducing over time as social networks become less place-based.
Firstly, Irrespective of the impressive stats, this is the third article in a week I've seen on some variation of the theme that college is no longer worth it from Noah Smith: Ph.D U. Michigan, Bryan Caplan: Ph.D. Princeton, Richard Hanania: JD U. Chicago. Is the subtext that it's worth it for them, but not for the rest of us?
Secondly, I grew up relatively poor. There's no way I would've had my career if I hadn't gone to college. My kids both went to college and there's no way they'd have their respective jobs if they hadn't. What am I missing? It's worth it for me, but not for other people?
Having asked these two admittedly rhetorical questions, I understand there are lots of kids for whom college is going to be a waste of time and work/apprenticeship is going to be a much better option, but let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater.