More on the Costs of College Education
“I’m cleverer, true, than those fops of teachers, Doctors and Magisters, Scribes and Preachers… For this, all pleasure am I foregoing: I do not pretend to aught worth knowing” –Goethe, Faust
Update: I went ahead and posted sample cases in the next post. Note that the negative case will still require an iota of research on your part.
But anyway, there are three things that make for a good debate topic: it needs to be relevant to the people debating it, have interesting research to be done for both sides, and be able to come to a not-unreasonable conclusion within the confines of the debate. The resolution “Resolved: The costs of a college education outweigh the benefits” gets two out of the three, and that ain’t bad. It is important that students be able to perform a cost/benefit analysis on furthering their education before they bury themselves in debt prior to even attempting to start a career. I’ve got students who want to get doctorates in stuff without really knowing stuff yet and probably not grasping how much more gratifying it is to have gainful employment is than paying to be a student. But since so much of the value of this topic is going to be derived from researching it, and not from debate rounds devoid of depth or clash, I’m not actually going to case something together this time… as noted above, I’ve done it anyway. But here’s some thoughts and links to get you started if you want to actually do some thinking about your future beyond that:
A typical affirmative case is going to pull up increasing college costs, decreasing college standards, and say that the average story is not that great and getting worse. A hyperbolic affirmative will dredge up tales of students racking up six-figure debts before being reclassified as “emerging adults*” — like Paris Hilton, but without the celebrity factor. They may even go so far as to blame student loan debt for precluding a romantic happily ever after. An unusual-because-it-comes-off-as-horrifyingly-sexist tactic would be to point out that the benefits of a college education will be increasingly mitigated by college-educated women becoming full-time moms instead. A serious inquiry into the affirmative position would reference Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft or something similar to provide a counter-narrative to the general belief that a college education is necessary to make somebody employable at any decent wage, even if it isn’t an argument in and of itself.
Generally, the negative should be able to get away with a simple (capitalist) analytic: the issue isn’t that the cost outweighs the benefit generally, it’s that people generally aren’t savvy consumers. Any investment in the self — whether by pursuing higher education, or starting a business, or taking private oboe lessons — should ultimately come down to a personal cost/benefit analysis. And if that projects higher costs than benefits, it’s not because it’s bad to pursue higher education or start a business or take private oboe lessons, but because they were Doing It Wrong — at least from a cost/benefit analysis point of view. You want to know what Doing It Wrong sounds like? It’s getting a bachelor’s in art from a private college with a whopping $0 of scholarships. Pro-tip: art students have an 11% chance of going on to do art professionally, even from the expensive college — and most of them do that by teaching it. Doing It Right, however, is loading up on cheap community college credits to get through the basic classes before going after, oh say, a dual-major of material science and quantum mechanics, with at least 40% subsidized by businesses and foundations — noting that the subsidy doesn’t reduce the net cost, but is born by people and groups that necessarily believe that the benefits outweigh the costs otherwise they wouldn’t invest in it/you. But the point isn’t that a college education is an inherent good, but rather that it is a product of a free market — and if you don’t think the costs of Underwater Basket Weaving outweigh the benefits of such a course then don’t bloody well take it. There are lots of people for whom the benefits of a college education are equal to the costs because they’re paying nothing to not pursue the benefits, and that’s perfectly fine — and frankly preferable to a load of debt for an idle art degree.
The coup d’etat maneuver for the negative, as far as I’m concerned, would be getting to the conclusion that college is least likely to be valuable to the uninformed consumers who do not engage in a cost/benefit analysis and most valuable to the consumers who do — as both sides in the debate have in the course of their research — engaged in a cost/benefit analysis. That the affirmative believes the way they do about their position vis-a-vis the system shows a masochistic desire to either be victimized by their education (when they go to college anyway) or a fear of their freedom to pursue their own goals (by fixating on what they won’t do). For example, they may well find private oboe lessons to not be worthwhile, and that’s fine — but up until now it never even crossed their mind because they had better things to do with their life. If they’ve fixated on the infeasibility of this life-goal, it’s not because it’s actually infeasible but because they want it to be infeasible so they don’t have to explain why they failed to achieve it despite having nothing better to do with their lives. (That’s based on Erich Fromm’s Escape From Freedom; do get it read before you graduate from college.)
* I find it almost impossible to describe how much I despise the notion of emerging adulthood. But I did put in a good attempt. It’s bullshit covering for the parasites who are either shameful wastes of potential or resources, and possibly both. Being an actual adult means trying to stop your parents from sacrificing their future for you.