High Costs of Education

A larger proportion of students than ever attend college in the United States, yet the top colleges have become more and more selective. It’s an age of scarcity and an age of plenty. College is also an increasingly more expensive proposition, with tuition alone around $10,000/year at state colleges and over $30,000/year at private institutions. It’s a huge leap of faith; to take on tens of thousands of dollars in debt as a teenager, to study something that may or may not still prove interesting to you four years down the road, let alone relevant in a world where technology “disrupts” industries on a regular basis. This choice doesn’t impact the student alone. For many parents, having “boomerang kids” has become the new normal, delaying their retirement so that they may support the (now fully grown) baby birds that have returned to the nest.

Of course, the arguments for attending college are well-worn axioms. College graduates experience significantly lower levels of unemployment; the pay gap between college grads versus those without a four-year degree has risen every year since 1980. Some studies have even shown that the decision not to go to college has an opportunity cost as much as $500,000 over the course of a lifetime. When compared to the average debt a student assumes (now hovering around $37,000), the cost becomes negligible.

And there are the less tangible benefits that also play a role in the decision to go to, and stay in, college. There is a pervasive cultural narrative that college is the only way to acceptably enter the middle class, a narrative propagated by higher-ed PR campaigns. Colleges also provide an easy opportunity to socialize and network, a must when personal referrals make you twice as likely to be interviewed and 40% more likely to be hired. College graduates are also more likely to vote, have better health, and report higher levels of happiness than those who have only a high-school degree. There are also the experiential factors to consider; college can be transformative for some students, allowing them to discover new passions and instilling a life-long love of learning.

Of course, college is not a magical panacea. Colleges often fail to train students in the real-world skills they will need at professional jobs, with as many as 4 in 10 students graduating without the higher-level reasoning skills required to be successful in white-collar jobs. Even in booming areas such as software programming, college Computer Science curricula have the effect of driving away a lot of potential programmers. As a consequence, the industry then meets its demand for programmers either through