College – Opportunity, Burden or Disappointment

 

Russia is hurling hypersonic missiles into Ukraine. China’s building new military capacity almost as fast as her economy is sinking. The Middle East is a chaotic fireball. And the United States is turning even more dramatically against itself. Upward mobility in the US is eroded beyond recognition, and education is caught between disdain and necessity. Oddly, as we need more specialized, educated minds than ever, our “throw the baby out with the bathwater” approach to immigration – in a nation in which the number of live births per couple has fallen well-below replacement value – we’ve made it exceptionally difficult for new potential citizens to move here. Not just at our swarming southern border, but for highly educated STEM experts as well through more traditional passageways. There are hundreds of thousands of STEM jobs we cannot fill with local graduates.

Just as a US citizen can travel to Germany for an excellent college degree, where tons of degrees and courses are taught in English, for less than $1,000 in annual fees, that same US citizen can stay here and borrow themselves into debtor’s hell (over $40K for average undergraduate degrees and up to serious six figure for professional/graduate degrees) for the same degree. We desperately need more doctors, but while a few universities (like NYU) charge no tuition for MD candidates, most young doctors are in that six-figure category.

The college and university headlines that dominate the United States are either about athletic competition or scandals. Should we have college admissions tests? Why are Pac 12 universities moving to expand the Big 10? Which rich folks used wealth to get their privileged children into top schools, and which were convicted in the process. But as UCLA Education Professors, Stephen Handel and Eileen Strempel, tell us, writing for the February 13th Los Angeles Times state, these realities are nothing more than distractions “from higher ed’s real problems…

“It is not that testing battles and elite admissions have no importance. Rather it is the fact that higher education has a much bigger set of challenges, including degree completion, affordability and a rapidly sinking reputation.

“Nationally, only about 6 in 10 students who enter college ever earn a credential or a degree in six years, and far fewer graduate on time (four years), the National Student Clearinghouse found. According to the University of California public dashboards, 72.9% of UC students graduate in four years; Cal State’s dashboards show a rate of just 35.5%. Completion rates for students from low-income, historically underrepresented or rural backgrounds are even lower.

“Those students who leave frequently carry with them a trifecta of dismay: some college experience, loan debt and no degree. The result? We now have more than 40 million Americans with some college and no degree to show for it.

“Higher education’s struggles have not gone unnoticed. The percentage of Americans expressing confidence in our colleges and universities has sunk to a new low of 36%, down from 57% about a decade ago. According to a recent survey, at least half of currently enrolled high school students — the traditional cohort entering colleges and universities — are less interested than ever in taking the time or paying the money to earn a college degree.

“And those who do enter college face threats to their basic needs that undermine their ability to complete a degree. A 2023 California Student Aid Commission Report revealed that an appalling 53% of respondents identified as housing insecure, while 66% were food insecure.

“At the same time, many studies, including a 2024 report from Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce, affirm the substantial economic value of earning a postsecondary degree. This is in addition to other benefits including better health, higher levels of voter participation and volunteering, greater job satisfaction and greater social mobility.

“So how do we give more Americans access to those benefits? Not by obsessing over big-name institutions’ use of the SAT or ACT. These schools and their testing (or lack thereof) appear to entrance the media. But the extremely competitive Harvards and Stanfords of the world account for just about 4% of U.S. college students. For financial and other reasons, the majority of Americans will not pursue an elite college education.” Yet elite colleges are probably more generous in scholarships than most higher-ed institutions.

Families are borrowed to the hilt these days, as the aggregate of student loan debt as of the close of 2023 was $1.6 trillion compared with $1.079 trillion in aggregate credit card debt. What will seriously further complicate this set of problems is the advent of artificial intelligence, a technology that is rapidly replacing not just manufacturing jobs with robots but skilled professional jobs from finance to design to medicine. While some degrees might not seem relevant – like English or philosophy – surprisingly they do teach young minds how to think and write. Yet an undergraduate degree in basic business or marketing, with rare exception, does not accelerate a needed expertise.

While there is a political movement for both public (even California) and private employers to drop college education requirements unless truly required, there is little evidence that this tact is taking root. “A push by some companies—including IBM, General Motors, Google and Walmart—to eliminate degree requirements aims to expand the pool of potential employees. Yet the share of jobs that went to nongraduates barely budged after the requirement was lifted, according to a new analysis. The data suggest there is a large gap between discarding requirements and offering jobs to applicants who not long ago wouldn’t have gotten a second look…” Lauren Webber in the February 16th The Wall Street Journal.

Yet we are looking at a MAGA backlash against science and medicine. Increasingly, legislatures and courts are determining which medicines are safe, which health restrictions make scientific sense and which scientific “facts” can be relied on. Overruling PhDs in specialized administrative agencies. Some folks even continue to challenge evolution itself. We seem to be sliding back to the famous 1925 Scopes trial. Imagine what would happen if colleges and universities were free to qualified students. What would that look like? Oh, we sort of did that with the post-WWII GI Bill that send hundreds of thousands of Americans to college… which preceded the period of greatest growth in American history.

I’m Peter Dekom, and of late, we seem to have developed an uncanny ability to shoot ourselves in the foot… and points north.