Dear Matt,
I haven’t slept more than five hours at a time in the last month, or seen my wife or played with my dogs or done any of the things I enjoy doing. Why? Because I’m working to pay my kids’ college tuitions. I don’t normally have enough time to think big picture or ask myself the obvious questions. But in the shower this morning, it did occur to me: Is this really worth it? What do you think?
Larry K. Wageslave
As with most clear-as-mud dilemmas of modern life, the answer is a categorical “it all depends.” If you’re asking is it really worth it to the admissions office or board of regents or tenured faculty who inculcate our children with seething resentments toward an America that remains decadent and flabby enough that people like them can make decent livings teaching courses titled “The Intersectionality of Bowflex Infomercials”? Then yes, your approaching penury is totally worth it. Queer Theory professors need to eat, too.
If you’re asking is it really worth it for your directionless child, who might benefit (if you’re paying) from a four-to-six-year way station while achieving personal expertise in communicable sexual diseases and early-onset alcoholism before taking on a soul-killing job that will eventually be automated out of existence? Sure, why not—let kids be kids.
Is it worth it for you? I wouldn’t bet money on it. Not that you’ll have much left once you put a few kids through college. By now, anyone who has paid the scantest attention to the world of higher education—if “education” isn’t too strong a word for it—can recite the racket’s agitprop, such as the study from Georgetown researchers which holds that over the course of a lifetime, college grads earn $1 million more than their high-school-only counterparts. This doesn’t explain why my high school-grad auto mechanic (who could likely buy and sell me) quietly snickers every time I, a college grad who majored in journalism and minored in film, gullibly settle up for overpriced replacement parts that I’m not entirely sure exist. “Scheduled maintenance,” he says with a patronizing wink, while explaining how he topped off my blinker fluid at no extra charge.
But whatever a college education is worth, it sure as hell isn’t worth what we’re paying for it. Over the last few years, a slew of CNBC reporters has detailed precisely how badly we’re getting rooked. Their findings are enough to make a parent with teenagers’ blood run cold. (I belong to this unfortunate demographic.) One report has it that the cost of a year at Harvard, not including room and board, is now $45,278, which is more than 17 times what it cost in the early 1970s. (If it had simply tracked with the rate of inflation, tuition would be just $15,189.)
Ivy Leaguers, however, are hardly the only ones getting soaked. The average cost for private, non-profit, four-year universities was up to $31,231, contrasted with $1,832 in the early 1970s in current dollars. (As college enrollment more than doubled.) If this was all just the normal inflationary toll for doing business, fine. But it’s not. Not even close. Crunching the numbers taken straight out of the College Board’s “Trends in College Pricing 2017” report, CNBC found that the average tuition at a private, nonprofit four-year institution shot up 129 percent between 1988 and 2017, with prices reflected in 2017 dollars. And students at public four-year institutions fared even worse, proportionately. They saw a 213-percent increase over the same period.
So it is small wonder that, as studentloanhero.com reported, the average student loan debt for the Class of 2017 was $39,400. The average! That’s $1.48 trillion in student loan debt, which comes to $620 billion more than the entire credit card debt of the nation. While I enjoy making fun of millennials for obvious reasons (having the audacity to be younger than me, trying to turn our culture into Permanent Brunch, etc.), the college debt they’ve been suffocated with is no joke. It is causing them to put off staple good-citizenship pursuits such as buying a home or making babies. It is difficult for young Kayla to buy formula and diapers when she’s still paying off the “What if Harry Potter is Real” class she took three years ago, the one that helped launch her rewarding career as an underemployed barista with no health insurance.
All because she and/or her longsuffering parents bought into the College Lie: that any college is good and necessary college. This fable, incidentally, has been sold to a public that almost unanimously buys it, as the cost of everything else has gone up exponentially, too. Even with middle-class wages largely stagnant over the last few decades, 21st-century families now spend 75 percent of their discretionary income on housing, health care, and education, as opposed to 50 percent back in the 1970s.
And why do colleges make college so unaffordable? The experts will tell you it’s complicated—resulting from all manner of forces, from increased on-campus amenities (rock-climbing walls, lazy rivers, farm-to-table food plans), to high-dollar athletic programs, to diminished state funding. But adhering to the principle that the simplest explanation is usually the best one, I prefer the one given to my (mostly) trusted colleague, Andy Ferguson, for his essential book, Crazy U. When Andy interviewed Richard Vedder, a professor of economics at Ohio University, who doubles as a scourge and a skeptic of the grifters who populate our venerable institutes of higher learning, Vedder responded thusly: “This is my simple, one-sentence answer to why colleges keep raising their tuition: because they can! I mean, who’s going to stop them? Parents? The government? There’s nothing stopping them—literally nothing.”
And what do we get for our money, higher-ed wise? Not a lot, in many cases. As The Wire reported, when professors and authors of the book Academically Adrift Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa surveyed 3,000 students on 29 campuses, they found that 45 percent of students showed “no significant gains in learning” after two years in college. And 36 percent showed no gains at all over the entire four years. Or, as the Chronicle of Higher Education put it: “They learned nothing.”
Shamus Khan, a sociology professor at Columbia University, took an even more cynical slant while looking at the same data: “I am a college professor … I cannot help but think that I am part of a great credentialing mill … Colleges admit already advantaged Americans. They don’t ask them to do much or learn much. At the end of four years, we give them a certificate. That certificate entitles them to higher earnings.”
More cynical still—once you start with the higher-learning cynicism, it’s hard to stop—comedian John Mulaney, who graduated as an English major from Georgetown, recently and nicely summed up the entirety of his college career:
Or as Mulaney described graduation: “Walking across a stage … hungover, in a gown, to accept a certificate for reading books that I didn’t read … My family watching as I sweat vodka and ecstasy, to receive a four-year degree in a language that I already spoke.”
Of course, if you ask me, as the father of two sons nearing college age, if I’ll play along with the college charade, my simple answer will be, yes, of course. As long as the collective delusion is collective, I have little choice. For I am an American. A genetically-encoded believer in the Ponzi scheme that economists and bubble-inflators call “greater fool theory,” which as defined by the hive mind at Wikipedia, goes like this: “The price of an object is determined not by its intrinsic value, but rather by irrational beliefs and expectations of market participants. A price can be justified by a rational buyer under the belief that another party is willing to pay an even higher price. In other words, one may pay a price that seems ‘foolishly’ high because one may rationally have the expectation that the item can be resold to a ‘greater fool’ later.”
Do I honestly expect my future college-educated kids to find an extra million or so in earnings, “fooling” some future employer? Not especially. Not in today’s unpredictable job market, where entire industries are thrown on the scrap heap before the ink even dries on a diploma. I don’t anticipate their college education giving them a head start. I just pray it’ll get them to the starting line, with everybody else. I have no hope of gaining them advantage. I just hope to avoid saddling them with disadvantage. And I will hemorrhage money to that end. Much as in an earlier, more direct time, a Little Italy grocer might pay a mob boss off for protection. Not to get rich. Just to stay in business.
Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at [email protected].