The Case Against Alphabet Soup

Given my own alphabet collection of degrees, people are surprised when I suggest that college may not be the end all and be all.

I just came across a recent article by John Stossel in which he argues that college can be a scam. I couldn’t agree more.

From what I’ve seen, it seems like people often go to college or pursue graduate work when they can’t think of anything else to do. It’s a respectable, if expensive, punt.

Even at the graduate school level, I continue to meet people who have no idea of what they want to do. How smart are we/they if we/they think it’s a good idea to spend/borrow a ton of money for something which has an undefined purpose? Typically, a wise investment means knowing something about the sinkhole into which one’s throwing one’s money. Better yet, it shouldn’t even involve a sinkhole.

In the past few years, I spent almost two years witnessing the antics (yes, antics) of an ivy league school and I spent a short sabbatical at a prestigious Catholic university, both in the US. The fact that the universities are businesses aimed at generating profits was impossible to miss.Whether it was the tuition, the ridiculous book prices and requirements (always the latest version of the professor’s own textbook), or the seemingly never ending add-on costs, it was hard to get the feeling that the process was truly about education.

Don’t get me wrong. I think education is an excellent thing, I just don’t think that many institutions of higher learning are engaged in this particular endeavor. As Stossel notes, literacy rates at Harvard have fallen in the past 15-20 years. How is that possible when information is more accessible than ever before? Or is it because the information age belies the fact that access to information has little to do with understanding information and being able to use it?

If someone wants to make money, there are arguably better ways to do so than by going to college. Just ask Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Richard Branson, and a whole host of people with decent bank accounts.

If someone, particularly a woman, is looking for a spouse, there are less expensive and less stressful ways to do so. Here’s where colleges and universities really make their money. More than 50% of their students are women. However, this same group of students is far more likely than their male counterparts to decide to either forgo or limit their careers for their families. That’s fine, but that’s a lot of money to have spent on something that is little more than a whim. And it’s even worse if the money spent was borrowed. Then, the same women who simply wanted to get married and have a family saddle that same family with onerous debt and even have to work when they’d rather be at home with their children or perhaps work less.

It’s time for an honest discussion about higher education. It’s one thing if it’s real education in that it forms the individual and helps the individual to be a better thinker. It’s also useful if it provides a specific job skill. But when it fail at both or provides a job skill that ends up not suiting the student (e.g. lawyers who don’t want to be lawyers), then we ought to question the whole thing, particularly how much of it is supported by excessive personal debt and government subsidies.

So let’s say someone’s not ready to study beyond high school and it’s not the right time to get married. What to do? Work. Do a service project. Live abroad. Do something that makes you a better person. (Going to college won’t accomplish that.) Maybe take a few business classes at a community college and start a niche business.

Or even drop out of college:

Entrepreneur Peter Thiel, who got rich helping to build good things like PayPal and Facebook, is so eager to wake people up to alternatives to college that he’s paying students $100,000 each if they drop out of college and do something else, like start a business.

“We’re asking nothing in return other than meetings so we make sure (they) work hard, and not be in school for two years,” said Jim O’Neill, who runs the foundation.

The most indicative statistic from Stossel’s article? In the US, there are 80,000 bartenders with college degrees. Now, if those degrees represent intellectual formation, that’s one thing. If they are simply failed and expensive job training, there’s a problem. Some might even call it a scam.