When the benefits of college are discussed in overall terms and averages, the benefits of attending college for an individual student can get exaggerated.
As Megan McArdle noted in Bloomberg, average earnings for male college graduates were 40 percent higher, and increased to 90 percent by 2005, yet the proportion of male graduates didn’t increase. Costs have gone up, but so has the availability of financial assistance.
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Rising college costs, then, can’t be blamed for keeping men from a college degree.
A working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research tried to explain why, then, more men aren’t getting a degree.
The problem, it appears, stems from the individual benefits of a degree.
“The overall financial return from a college degree has not gone up nearly as fast as some of the individual returns. While we’d like to think of enrolling in college as a guaranteed route to a stable, well-paying job, in reality it’s more like a lottery ticket. There are good jobs out there that are available only to folks with a college diploma. But not everyone with a college diploma gets one,” McArdle wrote.
The creeping college premium isn’t evenly spread. More of the benefits go to the high-earning graduates. An average, then, can be high, but misleading on the individual level because the average high-earning graduate differs in study, interests, and location than the average low-earning graduate, for instance.
Students, as the paper notes, mitigate the risk in two ways. They drop out, or they take a job that doesn’t require a degree. When they realize that a college degree isn’t going to boost their earnings, students don’t bother to finish the degree, and pursue something else. If they don’t realize it until post-graduation, when they can’t find a job in their field of study, they find another job that doesn’t utilize all their skills.
If the paper can be broadly applicable, McArdle wrote, it “implies that the gains from pushing marginal students into college are likely to be small, for both the students and for society; those students are more likely to drop out or graduate but reap little or no wage premium for their degree.”
With six-year graduation rates at four-year colleges at 59 percent as of 2013, “college for all” could negatively affect potential students. With government financial assistance, college access isn’t a heavy barrier. The problem has become a social imperative to push all high-school students into higher education, instead of providing alternatives to achieve success.
Stating that all students, or everyone who wants to, should attend for college receives wide societal approbation. It signals that the speaker wants opportunity and social advancement for everyone. However, limiting acceptable pathways to college at the expense of everything else, while loading down a student with debt to chase a degree they don’t always get, is counterproductive. Idealism can exacerbate a problem while disparaging work that doesn’t require a degree.
