Is College Worth it? Ask the wrong question, get the wrong answer

Is College Worth It?  That’s the lead article in this summer’s Notre Dame Magazine.  Not surprisingly, the author’s answer is “yes” — both because of the usual statistics that college graduates outearn high school graduates by an amount greater, in present value terms, than the present value of the tuition paid out for their degree, and because a college graduate is a “better person” in various ways for having studied the liberal arts. 

But that’s the wrong question.

How about:

Is it the right thing for society for so many jobs to be deemed “requiring a college degree” that objectively do not? 

Are we really producing college graduates in a proper proportion when so many jobs that are not even considered to require a college degree are filled by college graduates who cannot find employment in their field of study?

Is it right for a student “at the margin” to be pushed into an uncertain path at college instead of a skilled trade?

Does it really make sense for our postsecondary education system to be “one size fits all” in which students studying business, the liberal arts, engineering, etc., all follow the same four-year path?

Is the “go away to college” the most cost-sensitive and suitable manner of transitioning young people from high school to the working world?

Is our division of the learning that takes place in high school vs. in college sensible and appropriate?

The key questions that a simple “yes or no” on college doesn’t answer is this:  What are the things a young person should learn in order to go out to the working world, and what is the best and most cost-effective way of providing opportunities to learn those things and to demonstrate to future employers that one has, in fact, learned them?  And I doubt that, for most people and most courses of study, a traditional four years of class-taking, dorm living, and party- and football-game attending, funded by student loans and the Bank of Mom and Dad (whose own loans, as PLUS loans, second mortgages, borrowing from retirement savings, or otherwise, are not even included in loan tallies but cause their own hardship in compounding their inability to retire on a sufficient nest egg), is truly the right approach.