The Gates Foundation announced a new initiative to fund a lobby that will push to make education the most important domestic policy agenda in the 2008 presidential election.
What? Who could possibly be against this? Of course, I am all for improving our education system, and god knows there are myriad problems to solve. What infuriates me is their metric for success... which is:
All kids should go to college.
Note the semantic difference between this and "All kids should have the opportunity to go to college."
Why get a college degree?
There are two important reasons for going to college::
1 Learning
2. Employment
Learning
If you are self-motivated, college can be a great place to learn things. If you're a Humanities major, it's a tremendous luxury to spend 4+ years of your life sitting around reading and writing about Ulysses or Middlemarch. If you're a science major, you may actually pick-up some hard skills like computer science or lab research experience that aren't easily attainable outside the cloistered walls. But most of this learning is either fluff or arcane. Little, if anything
you study will be of use to you in the future (just ask any 'Gender Studies' major). Unless you are going on to an advanced degree, it's a finishing school to hone the social skills you're going to need in the office when you graduate. Somewhat valuable, but at what cost?
Employment
Anonymous lawyer contends (and I agree) that college degrees play a crucial role in helping employers qualify a prospective employee's intelligence and apptitude for competitive environments. All things equal, you're going to hire the guy from Princeton over the guy from East Akron State. But unless you're coming from a top-tier school, how long does your degree hold a discernible advantage? At what point does the ROI on the money/time invested in second and third-tier college degrees push you into the red?
The problem
The problem with college degrees these days is that the intrinsic, paper value has not kept up with perceived value. Even a cursory glance at the nation's consumer debt shows that the average American has no perception of long-term value.
A year of public college depletes the average American's annual income, while a private college decimates it. And if you want to set yourself apart, you have to get an advanced degree. And even guaranteed windfall degrees like MBAs are now coming under scrutiny as to whether they provide a positive ROI against the lost opportunity and salary of staying with your current career.
So while it may be an unfortunate reality, the stated goal of having "all kids go to college" is a terrible measure of success. It will continue the devaluation of the degree, and infuse cash into a broken and irrelevant higher-education system that could be better spent on more valuable "education".
A solution?
Why not give the kid at South Succotash State majoring in Medieval Studies his $60K in tuition and expenses in an S&P index fund, and set him up with an apprenticeship with an electrician. If he still really wants to study Chaucer after four years, he can probably sit on his duff for an entire year in a European library just living on the interest earned from his work and investments and still be cash-flow positive.
Oh, and he'll have plenty of high-paying, self-employed work available when he gets back.
Probably beats the alternatives