Go to College, If Only Because It Makes Looking at Data More Fun

Higher Education, photo of the Campanile at CAL by kajmeister.

If you had studied Economics, you would know why giving substantial tax breaks beginning in the 1990s for 4-year undergraduate degrees ultimately raised the prices of 4-year undergraduate degrees. If you had studied Communication Studies, you’d be able to spot the rhetorical fallacies of Ivy League graduates who now grouse about the decline of education. You’d know that the Wall Street Journal’s college ranking system based on ROIs uses circular logic. If you’d studied Statistics, you’d wonder why journalists only refer to data showing the last five years, and you’d quickly learn that “public confidence” is not the cause of the decline in enrollment. English major? you’d see how different motivations drive people’s choices. Gender or Multilcultural studies? You’d notice the change in who graces the mastheads of universities today. College is useful for a lot of reasons.

There has been a bunch of — academics might say a “plethora” — of articles recently whining about how people have decided college is a bad idea, how careerism is ruining college, and how it’s just no good (or fun) anymore. I beg to differ.

Despite the narrow-mindedness of the East Coasters who write these articles, a college education should not be brushed aside. We need to put the dreaded “careerism” into perspective. College does now cost a boatload of money, so it can’t just be about football or parties or even protests. You can actually learn something, if nothing else, about how to be inquisitive about why other people don’t want you to go to college.

When was the last time people actually went to college because they thought reading old books was its own reward?

Erik Baker, Harvard lecturer on history.

The Ivy League Myopia of Disillusionment

In a Harper’s article, Professor Erik Baker provides a classic version of this disillusionment story. He begins lamenting that no one “believes” in college anymore, citing a recent Gallup poll that found those who have “a great deal” of confidence in higher education has dropped. He further cites as evidence the use of lower-paid faculty adjuncts in place of full professors, the increased use of ChatGPT for cheating, and the brouhaha about campus protests. He then goes on to quote Marxists, mention famous books from the 1980s, and discuss the history of the Gilded Age and the Industrial capitalists–all stuff that only a Ph.D. would think are valid arguments to support a point.

Baker’s not the only one riding this hobby horse. A couple of weeks ago, a New York Times op ed headline claimed that “careerism is ruining college.” Isabella Glassman wrote:

When I pictured myself in college, I envisioned potluck picnics and late nights listening to Taylor Swift, overanalyzing class crushes. Maybe even joining a Quidditch team.

From the NYT op ed, “Careerism Is Ruining College.”

Instead, Isabella sadly found herself crying when she didn’t make the undergraduate law journal and upset that she had to take economics because that’s what friends who made the real money seemed to be taking. But, darn it! she didn’t like business, although everyone around her seemed to. She was more interested in law school and was excited to be chosen for a callback interview for the undergraduate law review. But Darn it! She thought preparation was stupid, so she flubbed the interview. Bummer! Who wants to do this stinky college thing anyway?

The problem, first of all, is that these anti-college diatribes are written by people who successfully navigated their Ivy League schools. Baker is a graduate of Harvard now teaching at Harvard. Glassman is in law school after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania (another Ivy League school). They made it, so what’s their beef? And, not to put to fine a point on it, getting articles published in the NYT and Harper’s will be big boosts to their career. Sounds like careerism is alive and well for them, despite the protesting.

Good ol’ Harvard Classics we know and love, Milton, Egmont Etc. From Macrolit.tumblr

Plus, if you read their articles, they’re full of logical fallacies, bait and switch tactics, and cherry-picking the data. For example, Baker said that college-educated people are increasing losers in the “winner-take-all economy.” Proof, he says, is that the share of college-educated people who fall below the middle class has “doubled” in four decades.

I’m a curious person–did college make me that way or did I go to college because I’m curious? hard to say–anyway, I dug around for the data. It’s true. There are 9% of college-educated people heading households in the bottom quintile of earnings now vs. 4% in the 1980s. Technically, that’s double, but it’s still not much. There are also 91% of households now with college-educated heads who are in or above the bottom quintiles. The vast majority of college-educated households, according to the study, succeed better than the non-college-educated heads. Being college-educated led to more success, just didn’t guarantee it. That’s a little different from equating college with failure.

Glassman, meanwhile, points out that computer science majors have doubled in ten years, proof of increasing “careerism.” I looked at those statistics, too. Career-oriented majors in that study, like business and engineering degrees are down, while CS is up. That’s partly because the number of Computer Science majors was one-fifth the size of business majors to begin with. It doesn’t take a college education to know that there are a lot of jobs opening in high tech and more now than there were. Instead of grousing about all the CS majors, Glassman might want to take interviews more seriously in the future.

Lastly, about that Gallup poll? It is true. Republicans have soured on college. Pretty flippin’ ironic, since JD Vance went to Yale, the Bushes went to Yale, Peter Thiel went to Stanford, Ron DeSantis went to Harvard AND Yale — we can play this game all day. It’s hilarious that they say YOU shouldn’t go, after they did. They bash the elite schools they attended with unmitigated pleasure.

But also, people who don’t have a college degree more often now think it’s a bad idea to have a college degree. A while back, when I managed a staff, a new hire with only an undergraduate business degree told me it was useless to have a master’s degree. (Note to young new hires–not the best idea to tell your boss that your boss’ degree is useless.) I did notice that this person was slow to pick up instructions, took longer to finish assignments, and did not know how to present their work. If you don’t know why you should get a college degree, then don’t do it, but don’t knock it until you tried it.

The Bogeyman of Careerism

The big scary word from these recent diatribes is “careerism,” that buzzword that means when you get out of college, you have to get a job. It is a pain. Nobody likes it. Wouldn’t it be great to just study old books forever? (Baker somehow found a way to do it.) But Baker and Glassman and others are wrong that it’s new or part of the asset economy. My grandparents made my dad study business even though he wanted to read Russian literature. My mom, a humanities professor, bitterly complained throughout the 1970s and 1980s about the engineering and business students who came to her classes and didn’t appreciate art history. She really didn’t like me abandoning Virginia Woolf for banking; it’s okay Mom, I’m back to writing about art and history! Careerism isn’t new. Grousing about how no wants to pay people to study and teach old books isn’t new, either. It’s just that now, the humanities teachers complain about STEM students instead.

They do have something of a point. On the opposite end of the spectrum, The Wall Street Journal recently released its college ranking system. Number two on its list, between Princeton and Berkeley, is Babson. Babson? What and where the heck? Turns out Babson is… a business college! The WSJ method for college ranking is based on lifetime earnings. I suppose I should not be surprised, but defining college’s value only on its ROI (how much you will make compared to how much you spent) is the definition of careerism. If you are a hammer, then everything else looks like a nail, and a teeny tiny business school is going to be nearly as good as Princeton and Berkeley to attend. (No offense to Babson students who, I hope, get a good education!) Actually, the coolest think about Babson is how little the students that Babson uses on their mastehead look like people who own the WSJ. You Go, Entrepreneurial Girls!

It’s Not About Harvard and It’s Not About Football

The funniest thing about the way the WSJ looks at college is the gulf between what they think people should get out of it (lifetime earnings) and what they think people should do while they are there (watch football). Check out this recent headline story that specifically tweaks Harvard.

The story is about how students who were applying to schools in the northeast–i.e. Ivy League–are now applying to the southeast. Let’s break this down, too. First, you don’t “choose” to go to Harvard; Harvard chooses you. Everybody not at Harvard likes to beat up on Harvard, especially editors who write headlines. Secondly, you might choose these southeastern schools simply due to cost. They are cheaper. It’s not so much that people are going because they want to watch those big ol’ football teams. Some do, certainly; kids like Glassman wanted to have fun, play Quidditch, go to Taylor Swift concerts. By the way, 73% of those Georgia Tech students, whose population is increasing, study engineering or computer science, just in case there’s a concern about careerism.

The football/college link in the minds of the public is also frustrating to me. Even searching articles about “college” required me to wade through dozens about college football rather than actual college. I like football, personally, but talk about the tail wagging the dog! And even at my alma mater! There was a big to do here last week because ESPN College Game Day finally staged a show in Berkeley when Berkeley was playing Miami (Cal lost by a whisper apparently due to poor refereeing, according to local writers). The students apparently rushed the barricades — of the sports show! (What do we want! ESPN! When do we want it! Now!)

My favorite part of that was the nebbishy civil engineering student, Daniel Villasenour, winning a hundred grand in an ESPN kicking contest, wearing a pair of ratty old Van’s. I hope Villasenour makes a zillion dollars as an engineer. The ESPN hosts were surprised at Cal’s student enthusiasm. I watched the camera panning the Cal cheerleaders and students and thought, I wonder if Pat McAfee realizes that even those CAL cheerleaders had high school GPAs over 4.0 and a stack of completed AP classes.

And Now For the Real Statistics…

What has changed the dynamics and driven some of this distaste is the cost issue. College was expensive for my parents and for me, but it was “you have to work while you’re there” expensive. It wasn’t the down payment for a house (or purchase of an entire house in Nebraska) expensive. The average cost for a public 4-year school has reached about $15k, while private schools are averaging $40k. Whoever is paying that forty-five grand a year for tuition at University of Pennsylvania or Harvard has no business thinking that college should be about watching football or going to picnics.

Why so expensive? Combination of factors. College costs soared in the ’80s and ’90s because (a) more people wanted to go at a time when (b) fewer state taxes were allocated to state universities, raising their tuition costs, and (c) national tax rebates simply allowed colleges to raise prices to cover the rebates. If you ever took a Microeconomics class, think of how the helicopter dropping money on a stadium causes hot dog prices to increase. If you give everybody money for a Thing, the price of the Thing goes up. Colleges also now provide a LOT more services (medical, housing) including giant marketing and advertising departments to recruit students. And the big problem is people do go and they do pay. Those prices at the southeastern schools are going to start rising faster than elsewhere, mark my words.

Is college enrollment down as was claimed, and because public confidence is down? Raw numbers of people attending college are, of course, way up since 1960 as the population has grown. All those extra people gotta fit somewhere. However, one of the recent college “cliffs,” i.e. drop in attendance, can be traced to a decline in the birth rate during the Great Recession of 2008-2011. There are relatively fewer people of college student age now than there were just a few years ago. Another drop came with the disruption from COVID; those attending high school in 2020-2022 may simply not be ready for college as their older siblings were. For comparison, the enrollment rate was 45% in 1960 and peaked at 69% in 2018, but has now dropped to 62%. Fewer people are choosing college but there are also fewer people of college age.

Yet notably, 37% of people who went to college in 1960 did not graduate; nowadays, it’s 17% who don’t graduate. That suggests to me that people don’t start now and pay that $15-$45k for even the first year unless they think about finishing. That’s good news, surely?

Life magazine: The Ivy League look, Princeton 1962.

There’s also those other demographics that haven’t been mention in any of these articles. In the 1960s, twice as many men as women were earning degrees. By the mid 2010s, the same rate of women and men had degrees. Today, slightly more women than men are enrolled and graduate. If you think about non-white attendees, all those statistics are even more pronounced.

College has indeed changed, but not because of careerism. It costs more, but the demographic breakdown of the student body is different. That second part is a good thing.

The fact is that educated people make more money, even when they don’t have business degrees. Educated people make a society better. Do they pay history professors enough? They never have; they never will. Students do need to plan to get a job after graduation. So do those who don’t go to college.

At the very minimum, people who can see through false arguments are better equipped to make decisions on their own behalf. We all know that fake information is increasing and increasingly toxic, even though a recent study at New York University found that while a tiny fraction (3%) of social media accounts are toxic, they produce 33% of the content! People need to be able to sort through the lies. Also, universities need to be around to do useful research.

Most of all, learning things which are interesting, developing the muscle of curiosity will lead to more curiosity on the job, which leads to more success. Not everybody is cut out to sit in a classroom, enjoy completing lab experiments, or write long papers. But there’s a little too much “sour grapes” in the polling of people who don’t have degrees who then say that a degree isn’t worth much. And there’s a “bite the hand that feeds you” going on with those who have degrees suggesting that others shouldn’t get them.

Hmmm…. maybe we should all just read Aesop’s Fables and save the forty grand…

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