Failing at College

The Supreme Court recently made two important decisions affecting (not impacting) post-secondary education in America: eliminating the use of race as an admissions tool, and denying President Biden the authority to waive accumulated student debt. Both are major changes, and welcome ones in my opinion. But both the policies in question and the courts decisions addressed the symptoms of our failing system of college and university education, not the sources. There is a real post-secondary educational problem: there are too many students, paying too much tuition, and receiving too little education. Those students accrue too much debt, which is currently federally-secured. You can see the problem: they’re never going to pay it off, and you and I are on the hook for it. How did we get here?

Like most debacles, it’s not just one thing, but there is one important and often-overlooked cause: failing to understand the dynamics of the situation and correctly define the problem. What is post-secondary education for? Why does it even exist? Universities developed out of Catholicism in the Middle Ages, seeking the scholastic trinity of “truth, goodness, and beauty.” Traditionally, there were two aspects to this search. One was to give certain highly-specialized fields of study the time and attention they deserve. Think doctors, lawyers, engineers: you want them well-trained before they ever start in their profession, and you want their professions to grow and deepen.. The second was to provide for a well-rounded individual, thus the Humanities curriculum. Leaders of tomorrow, whether they be politicians, businessmen, or any of the specialties mentioned above, need to have an understanding of human nature, history, civics, psychology, etc. Why? You don’t want a politician who doesn’t understand that “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” You don’t want an engineer who only worships efficiency and neglects comfort. You want a surgeon with empathy, not one who sees his patients as slabs of meat to cut on. Pretty obvious, no?

People who underwent such education were a limited lot. The local butcher, shopkeeper, and policeman were fine without it. Because of the vicissitudes of history, such education was usually reserved to white men of property. It obviously didn’t have to be that way, but it happened nonetheless. And the result of that education played out in an obvious fashion: graduates of this system fared much better than those who did not have access to it. The fact that those graduates also had access to all kinds of other advantages which played a part in their later success was obvious, but sometimes forgotten.

In the mid-to-late twentieth century, the gradual liberalization of society led to calls for greater diversity in college admissions: more women, more people of color. After all, there was no legitimate reason to deny them access as they were just as likely to succeed. The fact that in most cases they were disadvantaged only strengthened the argument.

A little later, state governments decided to remove the stipends they paid to public colleges and universities. Budgets were tight, and politicians saw costs increasing markedly as more people went to college, while the majority of the population still did not attend. Using public funding for the benefit of the few at the cost of the many seemed like a poor policy option. The argument that a more educated populace was better for all sounded vaguely like an analogue to “trickle-down economics.” State governments encouraged state colleges and universities to rely on tuition and to compete, on the theory such competition would improve the results: less cost, better education. But post-secondary education was hardly a free market: high barriers to entry, limited suppliers, limited governmental oversight.

And there were still some proponents of college-for-all. They posit that if a college degree results in higher lifetime earnings, then everybody should have access to it, as that is only fair. See how this view misses the point of post-secondary education as it originally existed: a finishing school for a subset of the population. Most people didn’t need it. But college-for-all types viewed a sheepskin as a credential, not a learning experience: get the degree, make more money. Except that’s not what a college degree represented. It was an education, not a credential.

Meanwhile, the federal government, responding to the notion that college should be available to far more people (if not all), and the fact that a marketplace of colleges competing for students would probably decrease overall attendance, decided to become the guarantor of student loans.

Here’s where the economists are face-palming.

You create an increasing demand for college education, with a limited supply (you can’t generate new schools overnight). You fuel the demand further by offering generous loans packages (rates and repayment schemes no bank would ever offer an eighteen year-old with no job) guaranteed by the federal government (you know, the people who literally print the money), and you tell colleges to compete for students.

The prospective students don’t care about return on investment (ROI), as they haven’t even learned about that yet. The colleges have no reason to limit tuition, since price is no longer a determining factor due to federal funny-money. And since students are the ones making the choices, they look for name-recognition and perks. They’re young adults, they want to impress and be catered to. So colleges which previously took the position “we have an education you need to learn or else” transitioned to “help us find your idea of education (and be comfortable doing it).”

Voila, as they say, you have insane tuition that no one really pays, except the federal taxpayers who get socked after the fact for student debt relief. You have colleges eliminating core curricula and instead offering a smorgasbord of trendy electives which amount to fast-food degrees (high cost, little value). You get serial students with hundreds-of-thousands of dollars in debt and degrees in non-marketable subjects (they never do learn ROI, so they don’t even know what they don’t know).

And here we are. Add in for-profit rip-off institutions, racial gamesmanship, and elite university endowments which border on the obscene, and you have the modern American post-secondary educational disaster. Oh, there are still a small number of professionals earning useful degrees and preparing to be the doctors, lawyers, engineers and leaders of tomorrow. That system still exists. But the rest of the contraption is a very expensive Rube Goldberg device of little value and high cost, in terms of money, utility, and social damage.

As bad as all this sounds, it’s even a little worse because it isn’t that hard to fix. First off, stop treating a college degree as some magic ticket which makes one wealthy. To re-purpose an old campaign phrase, “it’s the education, stupid!” College is not for everyone, and jobs which require a college degree should have some legitimate reason for doing so. People who go to college should pay their own way. Colleges should compete on tuition and graduate performance, and enforce common knowledge standards. Students should be held to standards if they receive any form of financial support. You want specifics?

• Eliminate government subsidies for any colleges with massive endowments. The elite schools can literally afford to cover all their students tuition in perpetuity. Make them do it, or have their students’ rich parents do it. And tax those endowments, please!
• Enforce expanded minimum core curricula for all degree-producing schools as part of accreditation. This is probably still the case, but the standards have become too lax. Every graduate needs to understand human psychology, American history and government, macro and micro-economics, for example. Electives should be the cherry on the top, not the bulk of the meal.
• Require detailed reporting on college costs and outcomes. What percentage graduate, with what debt burden? What are the average salaries of specific degree-holders at the five and ten year point?
• Re-imagine admissions to negate racial, legacy, athletics and other considerations. Applications must be on a common form which erases who the student is, from where they come, etc. Just classes and grades and test results, and if the college so chooses, standardized testing scores. AI can probably help in this process. Use an essay (similarly scrubbed and de-personalized) for a better understanding of the individual.
• Support the growth and success of community colleges. Here is where governmental funding should be targeted, especially for technical topics (e.g., coding, health-care services, law enforcement) and common curricula (finishing school for those not sure whether they want to go the full baccalaureate route). This also provides a window of opportunity to late-blooming students who would benefit from a four-year degree program.
• Tie federal subsidies to compensatory service as an alternative to repayment. You want to pay off your loan, great. If not, you start working for the federal government (or allied state programs) for a few years, either as a pause on repayment or eventually a waiver for it. I keep hearing Millennials complain there aren’t good jobs with great benefits like pensions anymore, while I read pages of empty federal job vacancies. Maybe they haven’t heard of the internet?
• Want to get really radical? Throw out all athletic scholarships (an oxymoron even more ridiculous than military intelligence). All sports at colleges and universities are club squad/intramural/extra-curricular. For the big money-makers, men’s college football and basketball, make the teams simply affiliated with the universities through a financial agreement. The one-and-dones in basketball and the NIL shenanigans in football should be enough to convince even the most ardent fans that student athletes are mostly a thing of the past. This is where the NCAA and courts are headed anyway, so why not embrace it?
• Not radical enough? Tie any federal funding (e.g., research grants, tuition) for colleges and universities to concrete standards promoting the common good. What has your institution done for the local community? How have you enabled academically-gifted but financially-disadvantaged students to enroll and graduate? How are you leading by example in terms of promoting free speech and diversity of ideas? Let the institutions publish their plans and their results, with the government solely giving them an annual pass/fail grade to make them eligible for federal funds.

Tuition costs have increased almost 180% over the past forty years, well beyond the effects of inflation. That spending has gone into endowments, athletics, administrative positions, infrastructure, and student services. Note what is missing: education. No one seriously argues today’s American college graduates are better educated than graduates of the past; they’re just much more expensive. The system as it is is failing.

America is at an inflection point. While more people want to go to college (as a percent of the population), the overall number of young people is declining. Small schools, private schools, and liberal arts schools are in danger of disappearing, as they did not prepare for the future and don’t want to now. The American post-secondary educational system was the envy of the rest of the world. It still is, in an elite sense: twelve of the top twenty universities in the world (according to Times Higher Education) are in America. Those elites who seek advancement are still attending the best schools and getting the best education. The system works for them; it just fails the larger talent pool of American students, their parents, and the taxpayers. Fix it. Now.