Category Archives: Student Life

“Dean Dad” at Confessions of  Community College Dean (now at Inside Higher Ed) had a sobering post yesterday about college graduates, “Class Dismissed.”  Here are the opening paragraphs:

Half of new bachelor’s degree grads are either unemployed or underemployed, according to the Associated Press.

The market isn’t ready to absorb them. Specifically,

According to government projections released last month, only three of the 30 occupations with the largest projected number of job openings by 2020 will require a bachelor’s degree or higher to fill the position — teachers, college professors and accountants. Most job openings are in professions such as retail sales, fast food and truck driving, jobs which aren’t easily replaced by computers.

I had to smile at “college professors” making the list. When I entered graduate school during the first Bush administration, we were told that a great wave of faculty retirements was on the horizon, and that we’d be in high demand be the time we got out. We all know how that played out. It’s entirely possible that college professor positions will open in great numbers, but only if you fail to differentiate between adjunct and full-time positions. And having adjunct positions available hardly gets around the “underemployment” issue.

And if you don’t think college professors can’t be replaced by outsourced workers, well….

Speaking of bad news, CBS Sunday Morning had a surprisingly good story about the high cost of a college education, “Some hard lessons about college costs.”  Click the link to see a link to the video; here’s a pretty good quote though:

“In other industries, we found ways to produce things using fewer labor hours, using more technology,” said Sandy Baum, a senior economics fellow at George Washington University (which, at $55,000 a year, is pretty pricey). “We haven’t really figured out how to do that in education.”

The result? College tuition has risen as twice the pace of inflation. In fact, they’ve doubled in 10 years.

Baum also said the increased cost is not due to faculty being paid lots of money: “Faculty salaries have been pretty stagnant. But their compensation goes up when health care costs go up.”

Add to that the increasing number of administrators (for both good and bad reasons), athletics, and college spending on “lifestyle” amenities like posh dorms and workout facilities and you start to see why college costs more than it should.

Obama was out and about yesterday talking about the problem of student loan debt and the need for colleges/universities to keep costs down.  There were numerous reports on all this; this piece from NPR, “Negotiating The College Funding Labyrinth,” is pretty typical.

I don’t disagree with a lot of what’s here.  College does cost too much, students are borrowing too much, and there is a lack of transparency regarding the cost of higher education, particularly at private institutions where it is common for students to negotiate what they pay based on how much they can afford.  This is all a problem.

However, there are two things that are always always always left out of these stories.  First, the reason why college costs so much– or at least the reasons why public institutions cost so much– is because the government (mostly at the state-level) has stopped funding higher education.  Imagine the difference it would make if the feds kicked in a few billion dollars into public higher ed in this country:  for a tenth of what we’re spending on the military, I think we could have a system in the US where attending college was virtually free.

Second, student loan debt is too high in part because too many students borrow more money than they need because the loans are easily available and young people don’t necessarily think long and hard about the implications of paying back loans.  And I say this based on experience:  in my MFA program, I took out student loans, much of which I used to pay legitimate expenses of course, but much of which I used to do things like buy speakers for my stereo.  Of course, I still have those speakers, so maybe it was a worthwhile investment.