This is an unsteady moment for higher education, and amid the pandemic aftershocks, demographic pressures, and self-inflicted wounds, we will definitely see more colleges close or restructure with layoffs — even colleges with recognizable names. When cultural institutions or industry sectors get wobbly, the media has a tendency to pile on, declaring doom.
A recent example appeared in the The Wall Street Journal, which explored “why Americans have lost faith in the value of college” — a story that starts at the beginnings of “college for all” in 1965, and uses a broad brush to paint American higher education as a bloated system suffering from its own blunders. It hits on a theme frequently seen in both mainstream and social media lately: College isn’t worth it.
The reporter Douglas Belkin quickly recaps 60 years of higher-education history, drawing a thread through the demise of vocational education, the digital revolution, the missteps of intransigent faculty and profligate administrators, the disappointments of employers, and the disengagement of students cheating their way through school.
Now, the ideal of “college for all” has become “broken for most,” Belkin writes, as employers ditch degree requirements, and Generation Z students and their parents are looking for alternatives to college.
“Whatever comes next,” Arthur Levine, president emeritus of Columbia University’s Teachers College, tells Belkin of Generation Z, “it’s not going to come soon enough for them.”
For many of them, “what’s next” will continue to be college.
In relating how we got to this place, the Journal’s essay has little room for nuance, which is what we need when talking about the future of higher education and whom it’s for.
“We’ve kind of been on the college-for-everybody bus for decades, and it has paid off for the economy — I don’t think there’s any doubt about that,” says Brent Orrell, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) who has long researched and worked in the areas of job training and work-force development. The college-for-all push swept in some people who weren’t ready, couldn’t really afford it, and perhaps didn’t have a clear idea of why they were going — people who wound up dropping out or underemployed, burdened with debt. In the national conversation, “the net result seems to be for the pendulum to swing completely in the other direction, to say college doesn’t work and it sucks,” he says. “And that’s just equally as bad.”
Orrell’s latest report argues that college graduates clearly get a “significant earnings premium,” and garner many frequently cited quality-of-life benefits, too — like working for companies that provide more supportive environments or having better health outcomes. More broadly in society, college graduates strengthen communities through their wealth and civic participation, the report notes, and institutions of higher education drive economic growth and improve quality of life.
We need to communicate that there are a lot of different models for a successful life.
Yes, colleges have their problems. They have made both common and extraordinary missteps in managing their finances, overbuilt campuses into a deferred-maintenance crisis, and accumulated significant debt, with the burdens often passed on to students in the form of tuition increases. They have erected bureaucratic barriers for students, and often have been willing participants in a system that exacerbates the distance between high- and low-income students, with non-white and low-income students carrying more significant debt. Meanwhile, many colleges have settled into their role as a mere signal to employers, while touting the value of “college for all,” which has overshadowed the need for vocational hands-on learning, rudimentary practical skills, and alternate pathways, like apprenticeships.
But despite its problems, American higher education has demonstrated its usefulness and is still valued by large swaths of the American public — in a Chronicle survey of the public perception of college, nearly 80 percent of those who had graduated said college was worth the cost, while about the same share of all respondents would recommend it to a friend or relative. Many institutions are holding steady in enrollments, and some are even doing very well. And although many employers (even state agencies) have dropped degree requirements amid the enthusiasm for skills-based hiring, companies are largely still hiring people with college degrees. A college degree may be just a signal, Orrell says, but employers in the knowledge economy see the undergraduate degree as the “closest approximation to life in the work force that you can be without actually being in the work force.”
“I think they look at the completion of a degree as indicating in a certain kind of mind, a kind of intellectually curious person, which when you boil down all of the noncognitive attributes that employers say they value most, that’s a lot of it,” he says.
Ideology and Self-Interest
So why is the narrative focused on the negative outcomes? In part, Orrell believes, we’re already evolutionarily programmed to look for danger and threats, and many families have been especially wary since the Great Recession. (Not to mention that there has been a good bit of instability in American policy, geopolitics, and the work force since then.)
The stakes — and the consequences — of the decision to enroll in college are part of what drives an outsized focus on outcomes. Or rather, one outcome, which is a high-paying career — a singular goal Orrell sees among many young people through his work at AEI. “People have other priorities, and we need to communicate that there are a lot of different models for a successful life,” he says. “You may prioritize a lower standard of living in exchange for more freedom to live the way that you want to live.”
Ultimately, the report notes, the discussion needs to shift away from an either-or frame to focus on the individual goals of students, and what path might best lead to those goals. This is not a quick decision based on the average salaries of majors or other misleading data, but a long process of reflection and dialogue.
“Students have to be basically accompanied in this journey by adults who are wiser or more experienced, not there to say, ‘This is what you should do,’ but rather helping them to surface these long-term, durable interests,” Orrell says. “The big shift that we need to make is simply to value that kind of conversation.”
Other factors, often sitting beneath the surface of the discussion, are also driving the negative view of college. Of course, ideology and politics — mentioned early in Orrell’s report — are among them, with Republicans losing the most confidence in higher education. The biases aren’t always elucidated in the media. In November, Newsweek reported on a survey of 70,000 small-business employers that had concluded that “Most Companies Say College Isn’t Worth It for Their Employees.” The story neglected to mention that both of the companies involved in conducting the survey have an ideological bent, with one seeking to “connect reliable job seekers with serious companies without all today’s woke nonsense,” as its founder describes it.
A narrative that argues college isn’t worth it undermines the argument for reform and will push more institutions into closure.
The other agenda under the surface: a longstanding drive to get a piece of the hundreds of billions of dollars swirling around the higher-education space. A number of companies are in the business of making money by offering alternatives to college, or supplemental academic courses or programs. They benefit from the narrative that higher education is too slow, too distant from the workplace, and too ineffective to offer students what they need to find a good job.
The Journal quotes Ryan Craig, managing director at the investment firm Achieve Partners, about the potential for apprenticeships in the United States, certainly a great model for postsecondary education. While Craig seems to genuinely believe in apprenticeships, he is also invested in forming intermediary organizations that would allow apprenticeship programs to grow. Chapter Two in Craig’s latest book, Apprentice Nation: How the ‘Earn and Learn’ Alternative to Higher Education Will Create a Stronger and Fairer America, tallies “what’s wrong with college” and concludes that it would be easier to scale up the apprenticeship model than rely on colleges to change.
“Today, colleges are nearly as closed off from the real world as they were one thousand years ago when Bologna, Paris, and Oxford emerged as cloistered communities of knowledge preservation and learning during the Middle Ages,” he writes. “No one has ever gone broke betting against the pace of change in higher education.”
There isn’t always this same skepticism for the emerging for-profit alternatives. Several years ago, Craig was touting (and investing in) coding boot camps as a “faster + cheaper” alternative to college — something that students who couldn’t get into selective universities might consider as a gateway to a first job, he said at the time. But boot camps, once seen as a “disruptor” that would blow up job-training models and the higher-education space, have run into a series of problems related to their recruiting practices, costs, and post-graduation outcomes — a main reason why Craig has shifted to endorsing the apprenticeship model, where the employer, and not the student, assumes much of the financial burden.
Michael B. Horn, a fellow and former executive director at the Christensen Institute — whose founder has expressed doubts about the future of American higher education, with his 2013 prediction that 50 percent of colleges would go bankrupt sometime this decade — recently walked back the institute’s enthusiasm for boot camps. Horn argued that their failure had to do with competition in the direct-to-consumer market — even from stereotypically sluggish universities that had partnered with boot-camp companies, some putting their reputations at risk — but didn’t discuss the pervasive questions about the quality of boot-camp instruction, the brittle skills some students were learning, and the questionable placement rates, even among boot camps the institute had previously lauded.
But this narrative has been known to take hold over the years, even among those who work within higher education. More than a decade ago, when massive open online courses and badges started arriving on the scene, people like Joseph E. Aoun, president of Northeastern University, said those alternatives would herald “the end of higher education as we know it.” (If applications are any indication, his own university appears to be doing better than ever.) At the time, my colleague Goldie Blumenstyk and I wondered whether all this talk of reinvention was mainly aimed at students who don’t have the resources to get into top-tier colleges. The same dynamic is at play today. While some people will buy the argument that college isn’t worth it, wealthy and connected families know better: They will continue to spend huge sums to get their kids into the “right” school and the “right” program.
The country has spent the past 80 years making enormous investments in its higher-education infrastructure. Why would we toss it aside, even rhetorically, rather than put more effort into fixing it?
The current pressures are likely to force change, and many difficult but clear steps could help colleges survive and improve their outcomes: know the revenues, costs, and mission-relevance of your academic programs, and make the necessary adjustments. Deepen the interactions that students have in advising and career counseling, going beyond superficial conversations about majors and outcomes. Do away with the barriers to transfer and other bureaucratic hassles, often set up by the institutions themselves. Reform the incentives for faculty to emphasize teaching, and offer more training to help them improve at it. Form partnerships with other colleges to share resources (even courses), make more connections with community organizations that can offer opportunities to students, and incorporate more hands-on learning outside the classroom. Much of the time, colleges just need to get out of their own way to pull off these moves.
But they also need the public’s support to make these shifts — and a narrative that argues college isn’t worth it undermines the argument for reform and will push more institutions into closure. Once those institutions are gone, they will never return.
In many ways, the conversation about college resembles the national conversation about government. Like higher education, government is unimaginably large and complex, and the scope of its functions and impacts are difficult for the average person to understand. With a 50-year narrative about “broken government,” accelerating in the Reagan era, many Americans now believe that we should privatize core parts of it or just throw the whole thing out.
The views on higher education and government are equally short-sighted, Orrell says. “We’ve been through these cycles before, and my response is always, You’re gonna have to show me this disaster that you think has occurred,” he says. “Because when I look around the United States of America, I do not see a disaster. I see the most successful society in human history, in terms of elevating the well-being of its people. And government has played a big role in that.”
