Tough times for higher ed: Glenn Reynolds
Not everyone — probably not even most people — will really benefit from college.
Colleges, and graduate programs, are in trouble. Enrollments are falling — and not just at the PC-tainted University of Missouri — student debt is rising, and, worst of all in any bursting-bubble industry, the rubes seem to be catching on. This weekend, walking out of the drugstore, I saw Consumer Reports’ cover story, “I kind of ruined my life by going to college.” It was all about student loan debt and what it does to people’s lives. Hint: Nothing good.
I noted some years ago that trends in higher education couldn’t continue. The cost of college goes up every year; salaries, on the other hand, have grown much more slowly, if at all. This means that where today’s parents might have been able to comfortably fund their educations with loans and part-time work, today’s students can’t. Tuition is too high to cover with a waitressing job, and salaries are too low to comfortably pay back the debt after graduation. Or, sometimes, to pay it back at all.
When I wrote that book, student loan debt was approaching a trillion dollars. Now, Charles Sykes’ new book, Fail U.: The False Promise of Higher Education says that it’s $1.3 trillion, unsurprising given that tuitions of $60-70,000 a year are common now, and most students borrow to cover expenses.
The problem is that neither students nor society are getting their money’s worth.
Politicians sell education as a solution to economic inequality because it has two features that politicians love: It sounds good, and people won’t discover that it isn’t true until much later. Plus, when you push spending on education, you can always count on support from educators, who have a lot of influence in the media.
But as Sykes notes, “college for all” isn’t actually a good idea. Not everyone — probably not even most people — will really benefit from college. Fifty three percent of college grads under 25, he reports, are unemployed, or underemployed, working part-time or in low-paying jobs that don’t require a college degree.
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Perhaps it would still be worth it if college improved students’ minds, but the evidence for that is kind of thin. Undergraduates at major universities spend more time being taught by low-paid adjuncts, who teach 76% of classes. (Universities are always saving money by replacing full-time faculty with adjuncts, but somehow that never brings down tuition. And nobody ever heard of an “adjunct administrator,” for some reason.)
The students aren’t working all that hard, either. The average college student spends just 2.76 hours a day on schoolwork, for a total of 19.3 hours a week. By contrast, they spend 31 hours a week on socializing and recreation.
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And as Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa note in their book Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, they often haven’t learned much:
45% students "did not demonstrate any significant improvement in learning" during the first two years of college.
36% of students "did not demonstrate any significant improvement in learning" over four years of college.
Those students who do show improvements tend to show only modest improvements. Students improved on average only 0.18 standard deviations over the first two years of college and 0.47 over four years. What this means is that a student who entered college in the 50th percentile of students in his or her cohort would move up to the 68th percentile four years later — but that's the 68th percentile of a new group of freshmen who haven't experienced any college learning.
Sykes thinks that online universities will take up the slack, and one of them that he describes, Udacity, is even putting up billboards promising ”Get a job or your money back.”
Can a conventional university make that promise? We may find out soon. Because a huge amount of societal resources is being funneled into a sector that isn’t producing returns commensurate with the cost. That can’t go on forever, and something that can’t go on forever, won’t.
Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor and the author of The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself, is a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors. Follow him on Twitter @Instapundit.
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