Even More on the Costs of a College Education

January 17, 2012

Having judged a couple rounds of Public Forum on the issue of Resolved: The costs of a college education outweigh the benefits I decided I should spend a bit more time trying to elevate the discourse. It was, after all, predominantly statistics on one side and platitudes on the other with nobody really talking about how their plans for their lives were being impacted by the discussion. And frankly kids, if you don’t care then what makes you think you can make me care?

So here’s what I recommend: On the negative, talk about what you intend to study in college. Talk about colleges you know you can afford and colleges you doubt you can afford. Talk about the job market being forecast for the skill-set you intend to develop. Show that the cost/benefit analysis works for you. Then, for your second point, turn and call up Paulo Freire’s interest in relevant dialogue as a vital part of education, education made valuable because action can be taken based upon it. The point behind this tactic is to pull the affirmative team onto your territory: the affirmative will be able to talk about the ruination of people blindly following a cultural narrative, but everybody in the room is capable of running a cost/benefit analysis so why listen to evidence about people who (obviously) can’t? Reject the affirmative’s over-aggregated evidence and insist that they have a meaningful, personally relevant discussion. That case might look something like this:

This debate topic asks us to perform a cost/benefit analysis on a “college education.” And the affirmative wants (or will want) you to believe that a college education is a generic thing; expensive information dumped into a brain, then stamped with a diploma and sent out into a hostile and unwelcoming job market. And that might be true if we weren’t actively doing a cost/benefit analysis. It might be true if we were the sort of people who buy used cars on eBay based on their hood ornaments. We’re not. We’re debaters. We’re researchers. So,

Point One: Here’s more specific research.

Engineering degrees are relatively welcome in the job market. Any of Chemical, Electrical, Mechanical, Biomechanical, Material, Aerospace or Computer engineering have median starting salaries of over $50,000. I’m planning on going into insert your intended major here, my partner’s interested in insert something else here, they both come up around insert number near the top of the chart here. Conversely, Social Work, Elementary Education, Culinary Arts, and Child and Family Studies are hovering down near starting medians of $30,000. So not all paychecks are created equal: this isn’t a surprise.
Harvard is running at costs of around $50,000 per year. Insert reasonably aspirational brand-name college here is over insert a year’s worth of undergraduate tuition here per year. But for us insert your state residency group-identifier, insert a local state-supported university you might be willing to go to if you get jack-all in grants and scholarships from the aspirational college is coming in at a paltry and a year’s worth of their tuition per year. The big name universities cost more: this isn’t a surprise. Though I admit that them costing that much more is.
Overall, the point here is that there are plenty of rigorous degrees with generous paychecks available on the one hand, and not-outlandishly-expensive universities available for people who want to go into, for example, elementary education on the other. But above and beyond that, there’s even existing research on popular jobs for graduates by university! It turns out that a locally-popular university produces a lot of lowly job with small paychecks with a median pay of the small paycheck as well as some rather more glamorous job you might want (paycheck) and job you don’t want but pays more (paycheck). Specific research produces a veritable cornucopia of personally relevant and interesting information we can plan our future actions against.

Point Two: Ignore coarse aggregations.

We readily acknowledge and concede that there is a lot of student loan debt in America today, that there are a lot of expensive colleges willing to take however much money we can borrow (and then some) today, and that there are a lot of people who choose a college based on the brand name of the institution — and possibly the institution’s athletics department — rather than performing a critical cost/benefit analysis of what sort of educational benefits the institution can genuinely offer them. But here’s the thing: we think everybody in this room is smarter than that.
We want this debate to be relevant and meaningful to us here in this room. That’s how this debate will maximize its educational value. As Paulo Friere said, “there is nothing… more real or concrete than people in the world and with the world; than humans with other humans.” I’m not here to bandy questionable statistics and dubious cultural platitudes. I’m here to discuss how I’m going to make the transformation from adolescence into socioeconomic adulthood. And I earnestly invite the affirmative to join me in this discussion because I suspect that they’re in a similar situation to me and my partner here, and there is hopefully much we can learn from each other as peers.
But, conversely, if we get stuck on high-level aggregate statistics, distorted by people who — unlike everybody here — didn’t do a critical cost/benefit analysis, then this debate round will be idle chatter since there’s no generic college education, no generic college graduate that we could actively emulate. As Freire says,

“When a word is deprived of its dimension of action, reflection automatically suffers as well; and the word is changed into idle chatter, into verbalism, into an alienated and alienating “blah.” It becomes an empty word, one which cannot denounce the world, for denunciation is impossible without a commitment to transform, and there is no transformation without action.”

We don’t want alienation, we want transformation and to get that transformation we need information granular enough to formulate personal actions on, unlike the frightful aggregated statistics that clutter magazines and news articles. We think that everybody in this room is smarter than that, so we should elevate our discourse to also be smarter than that.

For the people who take the time and effort to do the research before-hand, the benefits of a college education can readily outweigh the costs. In the same way nobody in this room would buy a used car — certainly not at full price — on eBay, we shouldn’t be talking about degrees that we here don’t intend to pursue at institutions we certainly won’t be attending. We’re all too smart for that, and discussing ways other people are wasting their money is of no particular benefit to anybody here.

Now that was kind of a mean thing to do, but if the affirmative is running a boring and predictable case then they deserve it. If the affirmative is wasting everybody’s time saying things everybody knows, then they deserve it. So what we need is an affirmative case that might not deserve it by avoiding mere statistics and instead going after systemics. Let’s try something for the affirmative like this:

This debate topic asks us to do a cost/benefit analysis on a college education — that is, studying at a four-or-more year institution pursuant to a degree. And there are lots of variables in college education: what you study, where you study it, and — most notably — who you are and how you live your life. So we could tell you about the trillion dollars of outstanding student loan debt in this country, and unemployment rates among the “emerging adults,” and all of the average people who isn’t actually any real person in particular. But it wouldn’t really prove anything. So we’re going to tell you something else, something even more macroeconomic and pernicious. But let’s start with dispelling a myth.

First Point: A great company won’t hire you just because you’ve got a degree.

As Simon Sinek says in Start With Why, “Great companies don’t hire skilled people and motivate them, they hire already motivated people and inspire them.” But he’s just an author, don’t trust him — trust CEO (Southwest Airlines) Herb Kelleher “You don’t hire for skills, you hire for attitude. You can always teach skills.” So the fact-and-culture-indoctrination paradigm of education that we high school students are familiar with isn’t necessarily valuable to employers that we’re generally hoping will justify the expense of continued education. Now the negative may claim that a college education is supposed to operate on a transformative paradigm, but the participation of the student is something they can’t guarantee — can’t even prove, really, since we’re all high school students. So what’s the point behind a college degree?
Lots of people, James Miller inclusive, note that “many employers use college as a cheap and efficient sorting device and consider only college graduates when hiring for professional positions.” And we’d worry about that, except we already know that great companies hire motivated people. Sinek eagerly and repeatedly points out that unlike their competition, nobody on the Wright brothers’ aerospace crew had a college education. But really, what the person who wants to demonstrate their motivation by getting a college education should worry about is that “Between 1999 and 2009, enrollment increased 38 percent, from 14.8 million to 20.4 million.” (National Center for Education Statistics) This past year, the Oregon State University system clicked past 100,000 enrolled students for the first time. (KGW) Point is that the signals are getting weaker.
But what does the college education actually signal these days, anyway? The doctor writing at The Last Psychiatrist observes that “Here’s a little factoid about the medical school I work for: very few graduates go into hang-a-shingle private practice… No one told them how to open an office, hire three therapists and three NPs, bill insurances. But you know who owns all the private psych group practices? Foreign medical graduates, i.e. people who were comfortable “playing without a net,” improvising, seizing opportunity.” Put another way, the signal of a college education is that you’re motivated to work hard to conform, not transform. The people showing that they’re motivated aren’t waiting for somebody else to hire them.

Second Point: Don’t follow the beaten path — find and follow a passion

I could point to lots of people who ditched college as soon as they had a better idea — Gates, Jobs, Zuckerberg — but I’d rather listen to a person who might be loosely described as our peer. Shree Bose, the teenage grand prize winner of the first Google Science Fair, described her process to a TED audience like this: “It was about finding my passion and making my own opportunities when I didn’t even know what I was doing.” Not getting the education first because that’s the order things happen in, certainly not following a prescribed curriculum from the admissions office over the course of several plodding years, but rather finding what needed to be understood and then chasing it, pursuing it, tracking it down and beating it into cognitive submission for her personal edification and the betterment of the species at large.
The Last Psychiatrist looks back at emerging adult Scott, reported about in the New York Times, and observes that “Scott and his friends at the Irish Pub are in the best position imaginable: young, smart, living debt free with their parents. Four of these guys, each borrowing 10k personally (at 4% — $400 a year to pursue your dreams?) they will have 40k startup capital to do anything they want… If they are serious, they cannot fail, and if they do fail, we have the most liberal bankruptcy laws on the planet. The point of those laws is to encourage you to try. All the pieces are in place for success at almost no risk. And he’ll be a better man just for trying.” That’s almost certainly less cost and more benefit than a Geology 101: Survey of Shale course in a lecture hall with 120 other students.

Third Point: Student loan debt effects everybody.

Note how the doctor points out that we’ve got the most liberal bankruptcy laws on the planet? Well one of the things that you can’t discharge is student loan debt. Putting it another way, if you’re one of the students exiting college with a slice of the trillion dollars of student loans, those liberal bankruptcy laws that are there to encourage you to try? They’re not for you after all. And to that end, they’re not for anybody who might’ve read that book, used that app, or admired that photograph that you didn’t think you’d be able to make enough money creating to bother with, either.
Earlier this month, the Christian Science Monitor was shocked to find that “Student financial aid fuels increase in college tuition.” I don’t see why. After all, most everybody who invests in college expects to get a job that gives them a positive return on their investment, loans or not — so their paychecks have to go higher than what they spent on college. But who spends the most on college? The professors with their Piled higher and Deeper degrees that are teaching the courses. When Andrew Kohut (director, Pew Research Center) claims that we’re “better educated than previous generations,” TLP rejects that assertion: “They’re not better educated, they just have more degrees… [and] if we all agree the degree doesn’t mean anything close to what we are pretending it means, then what’s the point of piling on? Isn’t this technically a Ponzi scheme?” Yes: we’re going to be borrowing money to pay our TA’s student loans that were taken out to pay for their Professor’s student loans, which were taken out to pay for their Professor’s student loans, which have been paid off for some time now but nobody ever willingly accepts a pay-cut.

So, to summarize, the rising costs of a college education are increasingly caused by trickle-down debt, not increasing value; the perceived value is being mitigated by the increasing quantity of people in college; and the cost of a college education sets up a diabolical value calculation against what benefits of liberty we might’ve taken the initiative to secure for ourselves and our posterity. If you don’t believe me, just listen closely to the negative team as they tell you how there are such great benefits to outweigh the costs and ask yourself where the little things of not-yet-known value can fit into their calculations.