Controversies about higher education on both sides of the Atlantic revolve around the extremism of the woke Left, symbolised by encampments by protestors against Israel’s war in Gaza, DEI, and affirmative action.And media attention focuses on top universities like Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and their British equivalents, because many elites are themselves graduates of these institutions.
But most college students attend public universities or less selective private colleges.While the progressive capture of higher education is a problem, the bigger problem is the fact that too many young people are seeking college degrees.
Most applicants to universities hope that degrees will allow them to get good jobs with good pay, not the life of the mind. And the lifetime earnings of college graduates until recently have been higher than those of people with less extended formal educations.
There are two explanations of this very real college premium. The “human capital” theory holds that a four-year undergraduate education, even in the absence of specialised graduate or professional training, equips college graduates with skills that enable them to take advantage of the demand for their skills in the labour market. The “screening” theory holds that employers arbitrarily favour college graduates over non-college graduates, using otherwise useless diplomas as filters to reduce the number of applications they consider for open jobs.
The problem with human capital thesis is that the demand for college graduates is much smaller than the supply.According to a recent report by Strada Education Foundation and the Burning Glass Institute, 52 per cent of college graduates are employed in jobs that do not require a college degree a year after graduation, and many remain underemployed for the long term.
Given the fact that the college premium for many workers has dwindled or vanished, why are we subjected to a constant barrage of propaganda by educators, employers, and politicians who claim that sending a greater share of young people to universities is not only necessary for them to join or stay in the middle class but also for economic growth?In the idiom of business journalism, each of these pro-college interest groups is “talking its book.”
Universities make money, not by guaranteeing good jobs for their graduates, but by admitting more students or raising tuition fees.Because the generations that follow the postwar Baby Boom are smaller, many colleges and universities face declining enrollment numbers.Exaggerating the benefits of a college diploma is good business for the revenue-hungry higher education industry.
Employers, as we have seen, can use diplomas to weed out non-graduates from an imposing stack of applications.In addition, employers can claim that they are forced to pay non-college-educated workers less because they lack human capital.This blames the victims, when the actual cause of low wages in the US and similar societies is not the allegedly inadequate skills of janitors, fast food workers, construction workers, and others, but their lack of bargaining power because of de-unionisation, mass legal and illegal immigration, and other structural factors.
You might think that elected politicians, at least, would have an interest in preventing the children of their constituents from wasting time and money on a four-year degree that results in a job at Starbucks or Walmart.But almost everyone involved in politics, from politicians and their aides to donors and activists, is a college graduate.And many do not encounter any members of the non-college-educated working-class majority, except in interactions with menial servants or service providers:maids, nannies, gardeners, drivers, home delivery workers.
Because all of the successful people they know are graduates of colleges and universities, often selective and expensive ones, the governing elite tends to assume that a diploma is the only ticket to economic success and security. This is true even among leaders on the political Left, which in decades past included trade union politicians and rural leaders who did not attend college.
For these reasons, most educators, employers, and politicians continue to peddle the cure-all of college for everybody.But this panacea is actually a poison.
For one thing, deferring parenthood until after the acquisition of a degree ensures that many people will never have as many children as they prefer and that, absent ever-increasing immigration which comes with problems of its own, national fertility will decline.
Meanwhile, the competition of too many people with degrees for too few jobs that require them contributes to the toxic woke culture among the young and educated.What better way to eliminate your rivals in ruthless competition than to signal your own superior virtue by endorsing every fashionable cause, from climate change to DEI?
There will always be a need for institutions that can provide specialised training, or careers in scholarship for the minority of people in the nation who are academically gifted.Still, an enterprise oversupplying products in a dwindling market – while still managing to disappoint many of its consumers – obviously can’t survive in the long run. You don’t need a college degree to understand that.
