With a college degree giving graduates less of an edge in the employment hunt, the value of college as consumption is catching up to its investment value.
Study and class attendance have fallen as a share of a student’s time, and that hurts their preparation for the work environment, according to The Washington Post:
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But the working world is unstructured, with competing priorities and decisions that need to be made on the fly. College is very task-based: take an exam, finish a paper, attend a club meeting, go to practice. The workplace is more of a mash-up of activities with no scheduled end.
The ambiguity and workflow of a post-graduation job has little connection to life as college students lived it since entering the education system. To that extent, college has failed to condition students to the rigor of reality.
Most writing about higher education only accounts for its monetary or societal value. Society benefits from highly educated members and graduates earn higher salaries from the education they gain in college. There’s another motivation for attending college, however: the campus experience is fun.
Recreation centers with rock-climbing walls and lazy rivers, movie theaters, and attractive campuses with comfortable dorm rooms can attract students to enroll. Some research even suggests that students are “more willing to pay for these non-academic aspects of colleges than typical academic aspects.”
As a college degree becomes a requirement for a job instead of a signal that the applicant stands out among his or her competitors, academics don’t have to drive a college. The “academic experience” where a student makes friends, enjoys four years with less intellectual rigor, and leaves with a degree lets some colleges compete for students who have other goals in sight.
Smaller, regional state schools can’t compete on long-term value like other schools with tradition, prestige, and a world-class academic climate. What they can do is capitalize on a shorter-term consumption appeal to students who don’t value intellectual rigor to a similar extent.
Amenities spending is an easy target for higher-education reform, but it isn’t a leader in driving up costs. Colleges and universities want to attract and please students. If students want to study less and enjoy the college experience more, that demand will get satisfied. As the amount of time that students spend studying declines, though, college might not be preparing students for the future as much as they should.
