Why Won’t Colleges Tell Us How Much Their Graduates Earn?
Congress should consider requiring colleges to publish data on salary and employment by major.
The cost of college has more than tripled in the last four decades. 40% of student loan borrowers aren’t earning enough income to make any payment on their debt.
Policy researchers have proposed numerous ideas for addressing this problem. But some of these ideas are unrealistic: ditch accreditation altogether, subsidize everything, scrap the loan system, scrap the college degree, a new agency, one less agency, a new testing system, etc.
In a recent piece for Forbes, I call out a top problem:
By [college presidents’] logic, students take out loans to pay for years of schooling not intended — not even intended — to prepare them to repay those loans.
Just 12% of U.S. colleges’ presidents agree that “Most Americans have an accurate view of the purpose of higher education,” according to a Gallup survey of 706 presidents just out Friday.
Presidents see the goal of college years as having students “become educated citizens, be exposed to new points of view, to become lifelong learners,” according to Terry W. Hartle, of the American Council on Education, in an interview with Inside Higher Ed.
It should go without saying that when median 4-year tuition at private universities exceeds the median value of an American home, students are focused on not just learning, but repaying their college debts.
A relatively simple reform could begin the process of helping students gain the most economic benefit from their education:
What we can do now — very easily — is the simple step of letting students know which majors at which colleges lead to graduation, jobs and incomes. And which lead to never-ending debt.
This disclosure’s just like those Energy Star stickers on appliances, showing their energy efficiency. Shoppers often ignore those stickers and buy low-efficiency appliances for reasons like attractiveness, but at least a family interested in efficiency can know.
Colleges not only oppose this idea, they have been lobbying to eliminate what reporting requirements do exist:
But college presidents don’t want us to know what happens to their students. The same Gallup poll released Friday says 71% of college presidents want lawmakers to get rid of the very limited College Scorecard reporting system, which is already so weak that it’s useless.
Students, of course, should be free to attend college for whatever reason they want. But students taking on a mountain of taxpayer debt, should at least have the chance to know if their major at their college lead to salaries or debt. Students already have general information, that social workers make less than bankers. But in the name of “student privacy” colleges have lobbied to not disclose completion, employment, salary and debt data by college major.
The Act needs to stipulate that if a college wants taxpayer dollars, it needs to report major- and degree-specific completion rates to the College Scorecard, along with corresponding employment and salary data from the Social Security Administration and debt load from the National Student Loan Data System.
All of this [data disclosure] needs to be reported keeping individual students’ data private. That means moving the Scorecard to the Department of the Treasury, which has a great track record keeping tax returns private, and processing data, unlike the Department of Education.
Colleges and universities receive tens of billions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies. Students and taxpayers deserve to know what they’re paying for.
