Americans believe that higher education is wasteful overall, but was a good investment for them personally:
“A majority of Americans (57 percent) believe that the higher education system in the country fails to provide students with good value for the money they and their families spend, according to a survey released Sunday by the Pew Research Center. Three-quarters of those polled said that college is too expensive for most Americans. But among Americans who are college graduates, 86 percent said that college had been a good investment for them personally.”
There may be no contradiction here. First, even if most college graduates got their money’s worth from their college degree, those who dropped out of college after a few years (or attended the bottom tier colleges) may not have. (When I worked for a polling firm, I found that college dropouts were more likely to cut me off in the middle of an opinion survey. Some of these people sounded barely literate. They generally seemed less well-informed than electricians who never attended college).
States spend billions of dollars operating colleges that are simultaneously worthless diploma mills, yet manage to graduate few of their students – like Chicago State University, “which has just a 12.8 percent six-year graduation rate,” and UT El Paso, which graduated only “1 out of 25 students in a timely manner.”
Second, as Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds notes, most people got their college educations long ago, when tuition was lower. As he points out, “college was much less expensive not that long ago.” Tuition has exploded in recent years, along with student debt.
As George Leef of the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy notes, “long-term average earnings for individuals with BA degrees have not risen much and in the the last few years have dipped. Also, degree holders seem to be learning less, as shown by the National Assessment of Adult Literacy.”
Other studies also suggest that people learned more in the past, when colleges didn’t compete for lazy students (who now go to college thanks to taxpayer-subsidized financial aid) willing to pay exorbitant tution by offering loads of classes that require little work and less learning.
“Nearly half of the nation’s undergraduates show almost no gains in learning in their first two years of college, in large part because colleges don’t make academics a priority,” according to a widely-publicized January report from experts like New York University Professor Richard Arum. “36% showed little” gain after four years. Although education spending has exploded in recent years, students “spent 50% less time studying compared with students a few decades ago, the research shows.” “32% never took a course in a typical semester where they read more than 40 pages per week.”
This lack of studying may be a good thing from a self-interested colleges’ point of view. It leaves students with more free time to work part-time or full-time to pay for excessive tuition.
