The cost of college is exploding. A bachelor’s degree doesn’t always prepare graduates for 21st-century jobs. But college is valuable, especially for students from modest backgrounds, and losing sight of the real benefits of higher education is shortsighted.
First, every community needs home builders, bank tellers, and auto mechanics. Skilled trades can offer respectable salaries and benefits for apprentices fresh out of high school. A quick search of Washington, D.C.-area trade job listings for electrician and fire suppression system apprentices reveal salaries for recent high school graduates on par with entry-level congressional staff salaries.
Many blue-collar sectors, especially highly skilled manufacturing, face persistent labor shortages. Home builders, for example, are graying, while the largest wave of millennials are finally settling down in the suburbs and shopping for starter homes. The average electrician is 55 years old.
Concurrent with labor shortages in skilled trades, tuition costs are exploding, well outstripping growth in wages. In some cases, annual tuition at a community college costs an amount equivalent to state university’s tuition a generation ago. Reining in tuition inflation and minimizing student loan debt should be a top priority for higher education leaders.
Don’t get me wrong: Higher education pricing is distorted, and arguments defending higher education often rely on increased income earning potential or long-term professional opportunities greater than cash outlay for tuition. However, lifetime earnings with a degree really depend on factors like school, major, and the amount of student loan debt a graduate must repay.
Higher education’s benefits are greater than a boost in one’s lifetime income, though. The most important and oft-overlooked benefit of higher education is its capacity to transform the opportunities available to students from modest circumstances — college is a great socioeconomic leveler. For students from humble origins, college offers an open door to a better future.
College also shifts one’s perspective of what is possible to accomplish in life. It puts a person in touch with people who demonstrate the good one can accomplish in one’s sphere of influence. It inspires. Plus, college opens opportunities for particularly ambitious students to develop the skills and professional networks necessary to transform the communities they are from if they choose to return.
Educated workforces attract economic opportunities for entire regions. For example, Amazon included a highly educated workforce as a key factor in choosing the city where the company will build its second headquarters. And as Richard Florida recently discussed in City Lab, the presence of an educated workforce is typically also a key factor for entrepreneurs launching new businesses. Educated populations reinforce economic growth.
In the future, students will undoubtedly enjoy a range of education funding options and post-secondary career training, like Purdue University’s new tuition cost share program or paid apprenticeship programs. But for now, college remains the best-charted path to an upward career trajectory and the best opportunity to contribute to a better future for the people around you. When individuals can cultivate their abilities, entire communities can be turned around.
These are the greatest gifts education gives us: the power to raise up individuals and the tools to restore struggling communities. In an era when swaths of urban neighborhoods and old industrial towns wrestle with unemployment, addiction, and despair, we need the hope education can provide now more than ever. We need college now more than ever.
