caroline bird - college is a waste of time and money

8/8/2019 Caroline Bird - College is a Waste of Time and Money

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College is a Waste of Time and MoneyCaroline Bird

A great majority of our nine million collegestudents are not in school because they want tobe or because they want to learn. They are there

because it has become the thing to do or becausecollege is a pleasant place to be; because its theonly way they can get parents or taxpayers tosupport them without getting a job they dontlike; because Mother wanted them to go, orsome other reason entirely irrelevant to thecourse of studies for which college is supposedlyorganized.

As I crisscross the United States lectur-ing on college campuses, I am dismayed to findthat professors and administrators, when pressed

for a candid opinion, estimate that no more than25 percent of their students are turned on byclasswork. For the rest, college is at best a so-cial center or aging vat, and at worst a youngfolks home or even a prison that keeps them outof the mainstream economic life for a few moreyears

The premisewhich I no longer ac-ceptthat college is the best place for all high-school graduates grew out of a noble Americanideal. Just as the United States was the first na-

tion to aspire to teach every small child to readand write, so, during the 1950s, we became thefirst and only great nation to aspire to highereducation for all. During the 60s we damnedthe expense and built great state university sys-tems as fast as we could. And adultsparents,employers, high school counselorsbegan topush, shove and cajole youngsters to get aneducation.

It became a mammoth industry, with tax-payers footing more than half the bill. By 1970,

colleges and universities were spending morethan 30 billion dollars annually. But still onlyhalf our high school graduates were going on.According to estimates made by the economistFritz Machlup, if we had been educating everyyoung person until age 22 in that year of 1970,the bill for higher education would have reached47.5 billion dollars, 12.5 billion more than thetotal corporate profits for the year.

Figures such as these have begun tomake higher education for all look financiallyprohibitive, particularly now when colleges aresqueezed by the pressures of inflation and adrop-off in their traditional market.

Predictable demography has caught up

with the university empire builders. Now thatthe record crop of post war babies has gradu-ated from college, the rate of growth of the stu-dent population has begun to decline. To keeptheir mammoth plants financially solvent, manyinstitutions have begun to use hard-sell, Madi-son-Avenue techniques to attract students.They sell college like soap, promoting featuresthey think students want: innovative programs,an environment conducive to meaningful per-sonal relationships, and a curriculum so free

that it doesnt sound like college at all.Pleasing the customer is something newfor college administrators. Colleges have al-ways known that most students dont like tostudy, and that at least part of the time they areambivalent about college, but before the stu-dent riots of the 1960s educators never thoughtit either right or necessary to pay any attentionto student feelings. But when students rebel-ling against the Vietnam War and the draft dis-covered they could disrupt a campus com-pletely, administrators had to act on some stu-dent complaints. Few understood that the pro-tests had tapped the basic discontent with col-lege itself, a discontent that did not go awaywhen the riots subsided.

Today students protest individuallyrather than in concert. They turn inward andwithdraw from active participation. They dropout to travel to India or feed themselves on sub-sistence farms. Some refuse to go to college atall. Most, of course, have neither the funds northe self-confidence for constructive articulationof their discontent. They simply hang aroundcollege unhappily and reluctantly.

All across the country, I have beenoverwhelmed by the prevailing sadness onAmerican campuses. Too many young peoplespeak little, and then only in drowned voices.Sometimes the mood surfaces as diffidence,wariness, or coolness, but whatever its form, itlooks like a defense mechanism, and that rings


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a bell. This is the way it used to be with women,and just as society had systematically damagedwomen by insisting that their proper place wasin the home, so we may be systematically dam-aging 18-year-olds by insisting that their properplace is in college.

Campus watchers everywhere know whatI mean when I say students are sad, but theydont agree on the reason for it. During theVietnam War some ascribed the sadness to thedraft; now others are blaming affluence, or say ithas something to do with permissive upbringing.

Not satisfied with any of these explana-tions, I looked for some answers with the jour-nalistic tools of my tradescholarly studies,economic analyses, the historical record, theopinions of the especially knowledgeable, con-

versations with parents, professors, college ad-ministrators, and employers, all of whom spokeas alumni too. Mostly I learned from my inter-views with hundreds of young people on and offcampuses all over the country.

My unnerving conclusion is that studentsare sad because they are not needed. Some-where between the nursery and the employmentoffice, they become unwanted adults. No onehas anything in particular against them. But noone knows what to do with them either. We al-ready have too many people in the world of the1970s, and there is no room for so many newlyminted 18-year-olds. So we temporarily getthem out of the way by sending them to collegewhere in fact only a few belong.

To make it more palatable, we fool our-selves into believing that we are sending themfor their own best interests, and that its good forthem, like eating spinach. Some, of course,learn to like it, but most wind up preferringgreen peas.

Educators admit as much. NevittSanford, distinguished student of higher educa-tion, says students feel they are capitulating to akind of voluntary servitude. Some of them talkabout their time in college as if it were a sen-tence to be served. I listened to a 1970 MountHolyoke graduate: For two years I was reallyinterested in science, but in my junior and senioryears I just kept saying, Ive done two years;Im going to finish. When I got out I made up

my mind that I wasnt going to school anymorebecause so many of my courses had been bull-shit.

But bad as it is, college is often prefer-able to a far worse fate. It is better than thedrudgery of an uninspiring nine-to-five job, and

better than doing nothing when no jobs areavailable. For some young people, it is a grace-ful way to get away from home and becomeindependent without losing the financial sup-port of their parents. And sometimes it is theonly alternative to an intolerable home situa-tion.

It is difficult to assess how many stu-dents are in college reluctantly. The conserva-tive Carnegie Commission estimates from 5 to30 percent. Sol Linowitz, who was once

chairman of a special education committee oncampus tension of the American Council onEducation, found that a significant numberwere not happy with their college experiencebecause felt they were there only in order to getthe ticket to the big show rather than to spendthe years as productively as they otherwisecould.

Older alumni will identify with RichardBaloga, a policemans son, who stayed inschool even though he hated it because hethought it would do him some good. But fewerstudents each year feel this way. DanielYankelovich has surveyed undergraduate atti-tudes for a number of years, and reported in1971 that 74 percent thought education wasvery important. But just two years earlier 80percent thought so.

The doubters dont mind speaking up.Leon Lefkowitz, chairman of the department ofsocial studies at Central High School in ValleyStream, New York, interviewed 300 collegestudents at random, and reports that 200 ofthem didnt think that the education they weregetting was worth the effort. In two years Illpick up a diploma, said one student, and I canhonestly say it was a waste of my fathersbread.

Nowadays, says one sociologist, youdont have to have a reason for going to col-lege; its an institution. His definition of aninstitution is an arrangement everyone accepts


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without question; the burden of proof is not onwhy you go, but why anyone thinks there mightbe a reason for not going. The implication isthat an 18-year-old is too young and confused toknow what he wants to do, and that he shouldlisten to those who know best and go to college.

I dont agree. I believe that college hasto be judged not on what other people think isgood for students, but on how it feels to the stu-dents.

I believe that people have an inside viewof whats good for them. If a child doesnt wantto go to school some morning, better let him stayhome, at least until you find out why. Maybe heknows something you dont. Its the same withcollege. If high-school graduates dont want togo, or if they dont want to go right away, they

may perceive more clearly than their elders thatcollege is not for them. It is no longer obviousthat adolescents are best off studying a core cur-riculum that was constructed when all educatedmen could agree on what made them educated,or that professors, advisors, or parents can be ofany particular help to young people in choosinga major or a career. High-school graduates seecollege graduates driving cabs, and decide itsnot worth going and drop out.

If students believe that college isnt nec-essarily good for them, you cant expect them tostay on for the general good of mankind. Theydont go to school to beat the Russians to Jupi-ter, improve the national defense, increase theGNP, or create a new market for the artstomention some of the benefits taxpayers are sup-posed to get for supporting higher education.

Nor should we expect to bring about so-cial equality by putting all young people throughfour years of academic rigor. At best, its aroundabout and expensive way to narrow the gapbetween the highest and lowest in our societyanyway. At worst, it is unconsciously elitist.Equalizing opportunity through universal highereducation subjects the whole population to theintellectual mode natural only to a few. It vio-lates the fundamental egalitarian principle of re-spect for the differences between people.

Of course, most parents arent thinkingof the higher good at all. They send their chil-dren to college because they are convinced

young people benefit financially from those foryears of higher education. But if makingmoney is the only goal, college is the dumbestinvestment you can make. I say this because ayoung banker in Poughkeepsie, New York,Stephen G. Necel, used a computer to compare

college as an investment with other investmentsavailable in 1974 and college did not come outon top.

For the sake of argument, the two of usinvented a young man whose rich uncle gavehim, in cold cash, the cost of a four-year edu-cation at any college he chose, but the youngman didnt have to spend the money on college.After bales of computer paper, we had ourmythical student write to his uncle: Since yousaid I could spend the money foolishly if I

wished, I am going to blow it all on Princeton.The much respected financial columnistSylvia Porter echoed the common assumptionwhen she said last year, A college education isamong the very best investments you can makein your entire life. But the truth is not quite sorosy, even if we assume that the Census Bureauis correct when it says that as of 1972, a manwho completed four years of college would ex-pect to earn $199,000 more between the ages of22 and 64 than a man who had only a high-school diploma.

If a 1972 Princeton-bound high-schoolgraduate had put the $34,181 that his four yearsof college would have cost him into a savingsbank at 7.5 percent interest compounded daily,he would have had at age 64 a total of$1,129,200, or $528,200 more than the earn-ings of a male college graduate, and more thanfive times as much as the $199,000 extra themore educated man could expect to earn be-tween 22 and 64.

The big advantage of getting your col-lege money in cash now is that you can invest itin something that has a higher return than a di-ploma. For instance, a Princeton-bound-highschool graduate of 1972 who liked foolingaround with cars could have banked his$34,181, and gone to work at the local garageat close to $1,000 more per year than the aver-age high-school graduate.

Meanwhile, as he was learning to be an


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expert auto mechanic, his money would be tick-ing away in the bank. When he became 28, hewould have earned $7,199 less on his job fromage 22 to 28 than his college educated friend, buthe would have had $73,113 in his pass-bookenough to buy out his boss, go into the

used-car business, or acquire his own new-cardealership. If successful in business, he couldexpect to make more than the average collegegraduate. And if he had the brains to get intoPrinceton, he would be just as likely to makemoney without the four years spent on campus.Unfortunately, few college-bound high-schoolgraduates get the opportunity to bank such alarge sum of money, and then wait for it to makethem rich. And few parents are sophisticatedenough to understand that in financial returns

alone, their children would be better off with themoney than with the education.Rates of return and dollar signs on edu-

cation are fascinating brain teasers, but obvi-ously there is a certain unreality to the game.Quite aside from the noneconomic benefits ofcollege, and these should loom larger once thedollars are cleared away, there are grave diffi-culties in assigning a dollar value to college atall.

In fact there is no real evidence that thehigher income of college graduates is due tocollege. College may simply attract people whoare slated to earn more money anyway; thosewith higher IQs, better family backgrounds, amore enterprising temperament. No one whohas wrestled with the problem is prepared to at-tribute all of the higher income to the impact ofcollege itself.

Christopher, author of Inequality, a bookthat assesses the effect of family and schoolingin America, believes that education in generalaccounts for less than half of the difference inincome in the American population. The big-gest single source of income differences, writesJencks, seems to be the fact that men fromhigh-status families have higher incomes thanmen from low-status families even when theyenter the same occupations, have the sameamount of education, and have the same testscores.

Jacob Mincer of the National Bureau of

Economic Research and Columbia Universitystates flatly that of 20 to 30 percent of studentsat any level, the additional schooling has been awaste, at least in terms of earnings. Collegefails to work its income-raising magic for al-most a third of those who go. More than half

of those people in 1972 who earned $15,000 ormore reached that comfortable bracket withoutthe benefit of a college education. Jencks saysthat financial success in the U.S. depends on agood deal of luck, and the most sophisticatedregression analyses have yet to demonstrateotherwise.

But most of todays students dont go tocollege to earn more money anyway. In 1968,when jobs were easy to get, DanielYankelovich made his first nationwide survey

of students. Sixty-five percent of them saidthey would welcome less emphasis onmoney. By 1973, when jobs were scarce, thatfigure jumped to 80 percent.

The young are not alone. American to-day are all looking less to the pay of a job thanto the work itself. They want interestingwork that permits them to make a contribu-tion, express themselves and use their spe-cial abilities, and they think college will helpthem find it.

Jerry Darring of Indianapolis knowswhat it is to make a dollar. He worked with hisfather in the family plumbing business, on theline at Chevrolet, and in the Chrysler foundry.He quit these jobs to enter Wright State Uni-versity in Dayton, Ohio, because in a job likethat a person only has time to work, and afterthat hes so tired that he cant do anything elsebut come home and go to sleep.

Jerry came to college to find workhelping people. And he is perfectly willingto spend the dollars he earns at dull, well-paidwork to prepare for lower-paid work that offersthe reward of service to others.

Jerrys case is not unusual. No oneworks for money alone. In order to deal withthe nonmonetary rewards of work, economistshave coined the concept of psychic incomewhich according to one economic dictionarymeans income that is reckoned in terms ofpleasure, satisfaction, or general feelings of


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euphoria.Psychic income is primarily what stu-

dents mean when they talk about getting a goodgob. During the most affluent years of the late1960s and 1970s college students told theirplacement officers that they wanted to be re-

searchers, college professors, artists, city plan-ners, social workers, poets, book publishers, ar-cheologists, ballet dancers, or authors.

The psychic income of these and otheroccupations popular with students is so high thatthese jobs can be filled without offering highsalaries. According to one study, 93 percent ofurban university professors would choose thesame vocation again if they had the chance,compared with only 16 percent of unskilled autoworkers. Even though the monetary gap be-

tween college professor and auto worker is nowsurprisingly small, the difference in psychic in-come is enormous.

But colleges fail to warn students thatjobs of these kinds are hard to come by, even forqualified applicants, and they rarely accept theresponsibility of helping students choose a ca-reer that will lead to a job. When a young per-son says he is interested in helping people, hiscounselor tells him to become a psychologist.But jobs in psychology are scarce. The Depart-ment of Labor, for instance, estimates there willbe 4,300 new jobs for psychologists in 1975while colleges are expected to turn out 58,430B.A.s in psychology that year.

Of 30 psych majors who reported back toVassar what they were doing a year aftergraduation in 1972, only five had jobs in whichthey could possibly use their courses in psychol-ogy, and two of these were working for Vassar.

The outlook isnt much better for stu-dents majoring in other psychic-pay disciplines:sociology, English, journalism, anthropology,forestry, education. Whatever college graduateswant to do, most of them are going to wind updoing what there is to do.

John Shingleton, director of placement atMichigan State University, accuses the academiccommunity of outright hypocrisy. Educatorshave never said, Go to college and get a goodjob, but this has been implied, and now studentsexpect it.... If we care what happens to students

after college, then lets get involved with whatshould be one of the basic purposes of educa-tion: career preparation.

In the 1970s, some of the more practicalprofessors began to see that jobs for graduatesmeant jobs for professors too. Meanwhile, stu-

dents themselves reacted to the shrinking jobmarket, and a new vocationalism explodedon campus. The press welcomed the change asa return to the ethic of achievement and service.Students were still idealistic, the reporterswrote, but they now saw that they could bestmake the world better by healing the sick asphysicians or righting individual wrongs aslawyers.

But there are no guarantees in these pro-fessions either. The American Enterprise In-

stitute estimated in 1971 that there would bemore than the target ratio of 100 doctors forevery 100,000 people in the population by1980. And the odds are little better for would-be lawyers. Law schools are already graduat-ing twice as many new lawyers every year asthe Department of Labor thinks will be needed,and the oversupply is growing every year.

And its not at all apparent that what isactually learned in a Professional educationis necessary for success. Teachers, engineersand others I talked to said they find that on thejob they rarely use what they learned in school.In order to see how well college prepared engi-neers and scientists for actual paid work in theirfields, the Carnegie Commission queried all theemployees with degrees in these fields in twolarge firms. Only one in five said the work theywere doing bore a very close relationship totheir college studies, while almost a third sawvery little relationship at all. An overwhelm-ing majority could think of many people whowere doing their same work, but had majored indifferent fields.

Majors in nontechnical fields reporteven less relationship between their studies andtheir jobs. Charles Lawrence, a communica-tions major in college and now the producer ofKennedy & Co., the Chicago morning televi-sion show, says, You have to learn all thatstuff and youll never use it again. I learnedmy job doing it. Others employed as archi-


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tects, nurses, teachers and other members of theso-called learned professions report the samething.

Most college administrators admit thatthey dont prepare their graduates for the jobmarket. I just wish I had the guts to tell parents

that when you get out of this place you arentprepared to do anything, the academic head of afamous liberal arts college told us. Fortunately,for him, most people believe that you dont haveto defend a liberal-arts education on thosegrounds. A liberal-arts education is supposed toprovide you with a value system, a standard, aset of ideas, not a job. Like Christianity, theliberal arts are seldom practiced and wouldprobably be hated by the majority of the popu-lace if they were, said one defender.

The analogy is apt. The fact is, ofcourse, that the liberal arts are a religion in everysense of that term. When people talk aboutthem, their language becomes elevated, meta-phorical, extravagant, theoretical and reverent.And faith in personal salvation by the liberal artsis professed in a creed intoned on ceremonialoccasions such as commencements.

If the liberal arts are a religious faith, theprofessors are its priests. But disseminatingideas in a four year college curriculum is slowand most expensive. If you want to learn aboutMilton, Camus, or even Margaret Mead you canfind them in paperback books, the public library,and even on television. And when most peopletalk about the value of a college education, theyarc not talking about great books. When at Har-vard commencement, the president welcomesthe new graduates into the fellowship of edu-cated men and women, what he could be sayingis, Here is a piece of paper that is a passport tojobs, power and instant prestige. AsV Glenn Bassett, a personnel specialist at G.E.says, In some parts of G.E., a college degreeappears completely irrelevant to selection to,say, a managers job. In most, however, it is aticket of admission.

But now that we have doubled the num-ber of young people attending college, a diplomacannot guarantee even that. The most charitableconclusion we can reach is that college probablyhas very little, if any, effect on people and things

at all. Today, the false promises are easy tosee: first, college doesnt make people intelli-gent, ambitious, happy, or liberal. Its the otherway around. Intelligent, ambitious, happy, lib-eral people are attracted to higher education inthe first place.

Second, college cant claim much creditfor the learning experiences that really changestudents while they are there. Jobs, friends,history, and most of all the sheer passage oftime, have as big an impact as anything evenindirectly related to the campus.

Third, colleges have changed so radi-cally that a freshman entering in the fall of1974 cant be sure to gain even the limitedvalue research studies assigned to colleges inthe 60s. The sheer size of undergraduate cam-

puses of the 1970s makes college even lessstimulating now than it was 10 years ago. To-day, even motivated students are disappointedwith their college courses and professors.

Finally, a college diploma no longeropens as many vocational doors. Employersare beginning to realize that when they pay ex-tra for someone with a diploma, they are payingonly for an empty credential. The fact is thatmost of the work for which employers now ex-pect college training is now or has been done inthe past by people without higher educations.

College, then, may be a good place forthose few young people who are really drawnto academic work, who would rather read thaneat, but it has become too expensive, in money,time, and intellectual effort to serve as a hold-ing pen for large numbers of our young. Weought to make it possible for those reluctant,unhappy students to find alternative ways ofgrowing up, and more realistic preparation forthe years ahead.

1975

caroline bird - college is a waste of time and money

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