When parents and teachers urge kids to go to college, they visualize the success stories: kids who graduate on time with marketable degrees. If every student fit this profile, college would be an outstanding personal investment. Unfortunately, most students don’t fit this profile, and their returns are mediocre or worse. Indeed, plenty would be better off skipping college in favor of full-time employment. What’s going wrong? BRYAN CAPLAN, professor of economics at George Mason University and the author of “The Case Against Education: Why the Education System is a Waste of Time and Money” (Princeton University Press), out now, outlines the five worst things about today’s college education.
1. A majority of college students don’t finish on time — and a large minority never finish at all.
Since the bulk of the payoff for college comes from graduation — not mere years of attendance — dropping out of school is like bankrupting a business. In both cases, you sacrifice years of savings and toil and walk away with scraps. And while under-achieving high-school students occasionally blossom into star college students, this is rare.
In school as in life, the best predictor of future performance is past performance. Think about high-school students in the bottom quartile of math scores. Nowadays, almost half try college; but when they do, only one in nine manages to graduate. College major is also a reliable predictor of student success. Degrees in engineering, computer science, finance and economics all pay well, boosting earnings by 60 to 70 percent. Degrees in fine arts, education, English, history and sociology do about half that.
Since all majors require four years of coursework and four years of tuition, the payoff for the average graduate with a low-earning major is unimpressive. And the payoff for below-average graduates in such fields is terrible; many end up working in jobs like waiter, cashier and cook that they could have easily done with no college at all.
2. Most of the curriculum is neither socially useful nor personally enjoyable.
Schools teach some skills almost every job requires — especially literacy and numeracy. But after the final exam, students never again need to know most of what they learn. Think about your years of coursework in history, social studies, foreign languages, higher mathematics, art and music. Colleges offer some majors — like engineering and computer science — that train students for well-paid careers.
Yet after graduation, plenty of students can safely forget their major; think about fields like history, literature, sociology and communications. Of course, every school subject leads to employment on occasion; at minimum, you could go on to teach the very subject you studied. But that’s a very low bar.
When confronted with these observations, defenders of college often protest, “The point of college isn’t to prepare students for jobs; it’s to enrich their lives.” But how often does this enrichment actually occur? Professors suspect — and researchers confirm — a dismal picture. In class, most students are bored, if they even bother to attend. As famed Harvard professor Steven Pinker confesses, “A few weeks into every semester, I face a lecture hall that is half-empty, despite the fact that I am repeatedly voted a Harvard Yearbook Favorite Professor, that the lectures are not video-recorded and that they are the only source of certain material that will be on the exam.” After graduation, few college graduates devote more than a tiny fraction of their leisure time to abstract ideas or high culture. School doesn’t have to be enjoyable. But if it is neither enjoyable nor useful, how can it be anything but wasteful?
