What Is the Real Value of a College Degree?
Over the past few weeks I have seen quite a few articles endorsing the benefits of a college degree, most of which rely primarily on the well-documented financial advantage students receive from holding a pricey piece of sheepskin. Yet as the parent of an intelligent but GPA-challenged high school student who is inching closer to making the big choice, the conversation has been not so much about deciding where to apply, but whether to go to college at all. From certain perspectives, it seems the accomplishment of going to (and, more importantly, graduating from) college is becoming less useful in preparing students for the workforce. The financial burdens are more heavy, options and alternatives practically nonexistent, and yet no one seems prepared to consider the bottom-line question of whether college truly is the best choice for everyone.
Is the narrow binary of go to college/don’t go to college, really the best option we have to offer students of the twenty-first century?
The proof that a college degree increases one’s earning potential is well-documented, and as far as the argument goes, it is a persuasive bit of evidence. The sad reality though, is that the skills acquired when earning a bachelor’s degree are arguably of declining use in contemporary working society. It is the signaling of having a Bachelor’s degree, (or Master’s, or Ph.D., or MBA) which really counts. Despite the stories of brilliant, bootstrapping, entrepreneurial school-leavers, the correlation remains: the more one spends on educational credentials the more exponentially one’s financial prospects improve within the business world. Almost every job (corporate or not), and many internships, now require a minimum of a BA for consideration as a candidate. In most cases, it’s the diploma as a marker, not the knowledge gained in the educational process itself, that grants entry into the system.
Is the narrow binary of go to college/don’t go to college, really the best option we have to offer students of the twenty-first century? There could be worse ways to spend one’s money, (or become indebted for a lifetime) than heading off for four (or five, or six…) years to engage in a little higher education, but to be honest, we just don’t know if there are better ways. We are led to believe that not achieving at least a BA or BS degree dooms one to a life of despair and destitution with no chance of a professional life, career or happiness,[1] but are there alternatives for those who have little to no interest in collegiate life (and its hefty price tag), other than applying for one of Peter Thiel’s Genius Grants?
Today’s students face three specific challenges in regard to higher education after high school. Not all students are affected, but for a majority, all three factors should weigh heavily in the decision-making process:
• Do students have access to funding to get the education they will need to succeed? (Related: Can they get accepted at the schools most suited to their needs?)
• Can students gain the skills necessary to become part of the twenty-first century workforce?
• Is achieving a degree the single best measure of readiness for work?
I. A High Price In Many Ways
A college degree has become the desirable and preferred level of minimum academic achievement. We tell every child they need to go to college, regardless of actual interest or ability to make that choice. Failure to do so is considered a problem with the student, not the system. As tuition and other costs rise, fewer and fewer students are able to go to college without taking on huge debts, which could be with them for decades to come.
If college was accessible to everyone and there were no financial barriers to attend, it would make perfect sense to extend public education for an extra two, to four years of college or professional development programs. Even though there have been recent proposals in the US to lessen direct costs through federal subsidies for community college tuition, public college tuition will never (again) be free, at least not in the US. The costs of going to college are becoming harder and harder to bear for almost everyone. Tuition continues to rise at unprecedented rates and scholarships are challenging to secure, especially for non-high achieving students (unless they are elite athletes). Recent graduates have unprecedented levels of student debt, and unemployment or underemployment for the recently-graduated remains high. These realities are not expected to change or diminish.
Higher education in the US is increasingly becoming a debt trap for many students. Academically challenged students who enroll at for-profit schools (often for online degree programs), find there is little or no genuine skills training, even though they pay hugely inflated prices, which are mostly paid for with student loans. Few students ever expect to be able to repay these loans and even fewer realize that student loan debt in the US is nearly impossible to have discharged through bankruptcy proceedings — lobbying by for-profit schools has helped see to that.
Not So Equal Opportunity
The soaring costs and lagging returns of a college education are directly impacting equality of opportunity in the US today. In most cases, a white student with fair grades and no college degree will still find better employment opportunities than a student of color with a Bachelor’s. Even though more minority students are attending college, graduation rates for students of color have stagnated over the years, while rates for White and Asian students continue to improve. Many more African-American and Latino students can only afford to attend college part-time, while struggling to support themselves (and their families) with low-wage, low-skill jobs and little access to legitimate skills-training programs of any type.
The reality is that low- and middle-income students are expected to achieve academically at dramatically higher levels than the sons and daughters of the more well off, who can afford to send their children to elite colleges, even if their GPAs are less than stellar. Economically disadvantaged students must perform better, in less supportive environments, and will still structurally continue to have fewer opportunities for advancement, even if they do manage to graduate.
II. What Did You Learn Today?
College curriculum needs to be more directly mapped to the basic skills necessary for most careers, which it isn’t, outside of certain professions, such as engineering, medicine and law. Essentially, we are confronted with a large scale misalignment of metrics. Colleges and universities continue to proffer classes and degrees that in most instances could have been found in a 1960s-era catalog. Students can complete a degree program and will still often fail to demonstrate they have any marketable skills.
Employers tend to exclude non-degreed candidates who may have better skills and experience, in preference for degree holders who will need training that many employers are no longer willing to provide. Corporate HR departments complain they can’t find candidates who are experienced enough to fill the jobs they are advertising, even though much of what they announce as non-negotiable prerequisites (such as a degree) are actually superfluous to the skill set of the employees they seek.
Not having a degree is primarily used as a disqualifier for entry into the workforce.
Jobseekers without a degree have no clearly legible way of demonstrating their competence in today’s marketplace, regardless of their actual skills and abilities. In the world of employment, not having a degree is primarily used as a disqualifier for entry into the workforce, even for work in which a college degree is inherently useless. Even those with some college credit, who do not graduate, are perceived as having the same level of competence as those with no college experience at all.[2]
Our world is moving towards more work specialization and this is true for all types of work, not just professional, or corporate jobs. White collar jobs require a certain level of technical expertise and many employers despair that recent college graduates not only have difficulty constructing a grammatically correct sentence, but also handling day-to-day workflows and demonstrating good interpersonal skills. Expecting college graduates to understand the basics of how business works, takes time and training from experienced mentors; especially for those who spend their college years taking classes in “Getting Dressed.” The disconnect between what corporate employers want entry level employees to be able to do and what they can actually handle is a widening chasm.
Here’s an interesting fact: even in the twenty-first century we will continue to need skilled-trade workers. With the push for everyone to go to college, fewer and fewer students (especially young men) are going into blue collar jobs, so much so that there is a growing deficit of these types of workers in the fields of construction, utilities, infrastructure, transportation and maintenance. As more Boomers retire, there will be fewer tradesmen to offer training and apprenticeships, and most occupational training programs in high school are now technology-centric. Construction work may fluctuate, but the need to build (or rebuild) will not disappear. Relying on college graduates to run small businesses (not start-ups) in these fields is sometimes a risky proposition. Most MBAs can’t fix your broken water main or build a structurally sound deck in your backyard.
III. Can You See the Real Me?
Employers have become so risk averse that any person who can’t demonstrate their ability to succeed within the narrow confines of completing a degree program is a potential liability, for daring to fall outside the slender boundaries of accepted experience, regardless of actual fitness and qualification to do a particular job. HR managers often refer to this preference of like for like as “culture fit.”
Business is happy to delimit the workforce through the bright line of difference between college degree holder and non-college degree holder, regardless of what’s actually present in those designations. The statistics cited on access and opportunity already show this system is broken. The problems with this inference are coming home to roost, whether we admit it or not.
The Myth of Culture Fit
Let’s take, as a starting point, the increasingly narrow needle companies ask college graduates to thread. Searching through job postings these days can be a tiresome and mystifying endeavor. Companies seeking “rock stars,” “unicorns,” and “purple squirrels” have become commonplace. The problem is, most entry- and mid-level positions do not call for a unique set of abilities, but HR departments thrive on creating endless, bullet-pointed lists of required skills and experience, with a college degree often topping the agenda. Even companies which hire non-college graduates for highly technical positions with regularity (mostly through referrals from current employees) will list a degree as pro forma in outside job postings. Many more people (especially women) will read a job posting and pass over applying because they do not believe they are sufficiently qualified, when in many cases, even skills listed as “required” are more likely “nice to haves” in terms of necessity.
The disconnect between what HR departments believe is required for any position and what is genuinely necessary has become an unnavigable gulf for many job seekers, but the siren call of culture fit isn’t merely the ambit of the gatekeepers in HR. This unfortunate and mostly meaningless measure of acceptability actually leads to less diversity in the workplace and nowhere is this more obvious than in Silicon Valley, which recruits almost exclusively through internal referrals and a short list of top tier universities, with a strong preference for white and Asian males under 30.
Excluding candidates for lacking obvious affinity to established corporate culture only serves to encourage entrenched stagnation in the workplace. Even a purple squirrel would have a hard time bringing innovative ideas to life in a corporate culture which demands conformity in its employees. Companies say they want diversity and innovation, but do they really?
Additionally, economic factors often tip the scales against students who do not have family financial and social resources to introduce them to the corporate world. The children of high-wealth parents are almost guaranteed a place in the professional realm of their fathers’ (and increasingly, their mothers’) workplaces because they are afforded many more assumptions of competence. This is a benefit that no academically gifted child from a low-income neighborhood can expect, even if they graduate from an Ivy League school. The old boy network is still firmly rooted into corporate culture.
Letting Go and Moving Beyond
Sending our children to college seems like the right thing to do, because having a degree has been a guaranteed path to success in the past. But we need to be bold enough to admit when it’s time to move beyond the Fordist mindset that we can churn out effective, intelligent workers on the assembly line that starts with AP courses in high school and finishes with shiny young graduates who are prepared to enter the world of work with enthusiasm and marketable skills. Many of our best and brightest are dropping out of college or foregoing the experience altogether in an effort to jump start their careers with skills and ideas they have developed on their own.
Business must acknowledge that even they know a college degree is not a one-size-fits-all determination of competency.
Many more students are struggling to stay in college, accumulating debts that will follow them for a lifetime. These students are the ones who most need a fresh new idea for becoming work-ready. Community colleges offer some alternative opportunities, but it’s important to understand that in most cases, these schools offer technical and trade skills training that lead to mostly blue collar jobs, and that’s a good thing. It’s misleading to suggest that spending two years at a community college, then transferring to a full-time degree program at a big university is an easy, common or straightforward process. Even worse, shunting eager, but academically-challenged students into for-profit schools is, for the most part, an expensive and predatory dead end.
More importantly, business must acknowledge that even they know a college degree is not a one-size-fits-all determination of competency. Telling high school students they will be successful if they go to college is a lie, because today that’s mostly true only for the smaller percentage of college students who graduate, and many won’t get that far. There are copious other factors at play, most of which can’t be changed by students themselves and it’s disingenuous to claim differently. Our children fail to complete college degrees for many reasons and most of them have nothing to do with native intelligence, or, an ability to follow through and complete the work.
Colleges and universities need to willingly assess their degree offerings and their value in today’s world, and consider innovative options for improving diversity, not only of the student body, but of curriculum, pedagogy, faculty, learning platforms and overall culture. If we expect everyone to go to college, shouldn’t college be a place where anyone can chose their best way to go?
[1] As a counterpoint we are sometimes offered examples of the outlier entrepreneurs who made it big without a college degree, but the numbers blur the actual rarity of non-degreed success stories in the twenty-first century. Of the current Forbes 400, 27 are high school dropouts, and a further 36 did not finish college. That’s about 15 percent of the world’s richest people, and their achievements are extraordinary. It should be pointed out though, that most of the younger billionaires had access to financial resources and support way above the norm, and most dropped out of top-tier private universities, not community colleges. They generally follow the expected path, just on an accelerated plan.
[2] Full disclosure: I have three years of college undergrad work toward a BFA, with a further two year’s study at an accredited and licensed professional school of art and design, leading to a Graduate Diploma, which was considered an appropriate qualification for my profession at the time I earned it in the mid-1980s. Until fairly recently, not having a degree was never an impediment to an offer of employment in my field.
