The Economy & the Meaning of Higher Education

Given the current conditions of our economy, people are beginning to evaluate whether they can send their kids to college (or keep them there). And some are beginning to question what a college degree is really "worth." I have seen this affecting my own current crop of students, some of whom emailed me at the beginning of the semester asking if the university took partial payments because their parents were unexpectedly short. Others are already making plans to go back home to a community college. The crunching in of the economy is exposing the underlying beliefs we have as a culture about education. From a recent article (link):

Percell never dreamed that this is what would happen after she graduated from college. She grew up hearing that education pays. A government study once claimed that a bachelor's degree was worth $1 million over a lifetime. Even political figures like Hillary Clinton were touting the benefits of a college degree. So Percell borrowed enough money to pay about $24,000 a year to attend Rivier College in Nashua, N.H. She's about $85,000 in debt.

"I was told just to take out the loans and get the degree," she said, "because when you graduate, you're going to be able to get that good job and pay them off, no problem." But for three years, Percell has struggled to find a job with her degree in human development. And the recession has made her search even tougher. To pay the bills, she took a low-level desk job with an insurance company, doing work she says she could have done straight out of high school. When asked if going to college was worth it, she replied with an emphatic "No."

My experience as a college student and as a teacher of them now is that most students do come in thinking a college degree grants them an automatic (high paying) job offer when they're done. It doesn't. A college degree (in my opinion) was never supposed to be about automatically qualifying for a job; it was about education and training, you know, life stuff that makes you a better citizen and a better person. It teaches you ways to process and understand the world; to make sense of the way your culture works in relation to the rest of the world; to research and analyze things you're presented with; it promotes critical thinking and questioning; it gives you a richer sense of humanity (ideally) so you can help steer the decisions we make; it teaches cause and consequence, whether that's business or physics. College can help you get a job, but that's not its number one priority--and if you want to go to a university, it shouldn't be yours either. As proof of this, consider the actual number of people who work in the field they got their bachelor's degree in. (Or grad school placement rates!!!!) That figure stands at 20% on average. That means the vast majority of grads go do something in a field they don't have a degree in. This is less true for the sciences, but there is still wiggle room in that field as well.

Unfortunately, the culture we live in likes to promote the idea that universities are about jobs and education is a secondary. Statistically, as the article points out, college grads do earn more in a lifetime than high school grads do. These figures are skewed by a few super high earners; but there have been college dropouts who went on to become super earners as well (Dell computers, anyone?). But super earners are rare anyway. Regular jobs do their part to highlight a college degree. Sometimes this is warranted--other times I think it is unnecessarily trumped up. College degrees are sometimes used as excuses for holding down the wages of otherwise well qualified people ("Well, if you had a business degree, we'd pay you $10,000 more." Really? For doing the exact same job?). In hiring practices it's pretty much accepted wisdom that a college grad will get the job over an otherwise perfectly qualified high school grad. And let's not forget that college grads and those with "some college" are routinely taking over jobs that high school grads used to be able to get. From an article on labor and education (link)--the whole article is good, but it's also very long:

A 2006 paper by Andrew Sum et al, commissioned for the New Skills Commission report Tough Choices or Tough Times, acknowledges that young college graduates "have not escaped labor market problems in recent years. Fewer young college graduates have been able to obtain college labor market jobs, and their real wages and annual earnings have declined accordingly due to rising mal-employment. These young college graduates take jobs that displace their peers with lower levels of schooling."

But another piece of the problem is that sometimes universities and businesses have purposely turned the bachelor's degree into the high school diploma. Lots of students feel they can't get regular jobs without them. Some of this, I think, can be attributed to expectations from business and a misunderstanding about what universities are supposed to do. But sometimes schools and businesses work together to make sure that happens. To give an example, my mother before she retired worked as a sign language interpreter for the school system in our county. She was assigned to a few deaf children and went through the day with them as their interpreter for teachers and friends. In order to be a school interpreter, you had to pass the state exam with a certain score--the same requirement for hospital interpreters, working with the police or in court, etc. You didn't have to have a college degree. There were a lot of interpreters in the system who had graduated high school and who had deaf family members. They were incredibly skilled, because they were bilingual from birth. It was good pay for the area and an important service.

After intense lobbying by Eastern Kentucky University (shame on you, EKU!), the rules have now changed. In order to be certified for the school systems now, you not only have to pass the state exam, but you have to have a bachelor's degree in interpretation. Several people in Mom's school system have to come into compliance or be forced out of their jobs. Are they suddenly less skilled? Is it likely that a "non native" interpreter with a degree and a vocabulary learned while in college will be a better translator than someone with a lifetime's worth of vocabulary? There is one way to solve the problem if you have to come into compliance--get a degree. In the state of Kentucky, there is only one school that offers a degree in sign language: Eastern Kentucky University.

Some people don't belong in college. They would be happier in a trade school. Some people want college to be more than what it is. The girl in the article (and later another boy) complains that her professors misinterpreted the university to her. I doubt that highly. You see, we don't really talk about jobs. We're too busy teaching knowledge. Of course you're going to feel duped if that's not what you came here for. But sometimes the nature of institutions stack the deck against you. It'll be interesting to see what the economic situation means for higher education.

-- DV
**Hat tip to Mad Dog for discovering the original link and forwarding it to me for my opinion.