Scattered Thoughts on Higher Education

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"The good news is more young people are earning college degrees than ever before. That's something we should be proud of, and that's something we should celebrate. But more of them are graduating with debt. Despite everything we're doing, we're still seeing too big a debt load on too many young people." - President Barack Obama

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"The sad thing about a guy like you is, in 50 years you're gonna start doing some thinking on your own and you're going to come up with the fact that there are two certainties in life: one, don't do that, and two, you dropped 150 grand on a f***ing education you could have got for a dollar fifty in late charges at the public library!" - Will Hunt, in Goodwill Hunting, to a Harvard graduate student who was embarrassing his friend by spouting off grad school history cliches in an attempt to look intelligent.

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President Obama has made focusing on the cost and value of higher education a significant part of his domestic program. He has spoken out on numerous occasions about the need for increasing federal grants and loans to lower-income students. He is in the process of implementing a federally-backed ratings system of schools. And he has spoken frequently about how important college is. The quote at the top of the post is yet another pronouncement from him extolling the increase in college graduations.

All of those things on their own seem like good ideas. But I tend to think it's missing the point a bit. The higher education system in this country is too rigid and too expensive, and will only be fixed by starting to break it apart.

I will generalize a bit from my own college experience. Feel free to take or leave whatever you want, but these are the facts as I see them.

1. I majored in history in college, and had a good experience, in which I learned a great deal about a variety of subjects. I had at least 6 excellent history professors, all of whom taught interesting, stimulating classes.
2. I read a ton of very good books in college.
3. I worked harder than just about any history major I knew and rarely attended parties.
4. The average GPA is incredibly high these days in American undergraduate universities. One does not need to work nearly as hard as I did to get a great GPA.
5. My GPA and the name of my liberal arts school have been the most valuable things I have taken into my professional life.
6. I had a significant scholarship and need-based aid. I graduated with approximately $60,000 in debt in 2008.
7. Of the non-history courses I took, I look back fondly on exactly 5 of them: a linguistics class, a class on constitutional law, a class on race and politics, an educational psychology class, and a music appreciation class.
8. The best paper I ever wrote as an undergraduate, I wrote as a sophomore.
9. I learned more about formulating a persuasive argument from my own independent reading of books, blogs, and their comment threads than in school.

My conclusions from those facts: as a liberal arts major, I spent at least 4 semesters longer in college than I really needed in terms of my own intellectual development. This cost me roughly $35,000 in debt. The cost was worth it to graduate, but only because the GPA and diploma have made me more employable than I would have otherwise been. If not for the signaling value of the GPA and diploma, I probably could have gotten the exact same intrinsic benefit for much, much cheaper. This would have required the following:

1. A long list of books to read based on areas of interest.
2. A vibrant online community of motivated learners with whom to exchange ideas, perhaps moderated by history "buffs" or enthusiasts.
3. One or two semesters of a "post-high school" program entirely focused on critical reading, writing, and analysis. (Or, alternatively, cover those areas more rigorously in high school.)
4. A la carte access to courses at a major university, or at least similar online offerings.

Those four things would have gotten me 90 percent of the way to the intrinsic benefit I derived from school, at, at the absolute most, half cost. I suspect it would have been much, much lower in cost. Note that this is not about puffing up my own ego. It's about reflecting on where I could have learned the most, or grown the most intellectually. I would have been better off personally spending two additional years in the real world, learning there, reading there, and asking questions there. Instead, I spent an additional two years in the higher education bubble, and paid for the privilege to do so.

The issue in higher education remains that we conflate intrinsic benefit with a signaling benefit. But it goes beyond that. The current model takes our most intelligent, broad-based thinkers (in the liberal arts, at least), and then encourages them relentlessly to focus on an extremely narrow intellectual area for 5-7 years, in order to pursue a limited number of jobs in a field that just produces more of the same. It's a tremendous, systematic squandering of human capital.

This is not a particularly conservative line of thinking from me, but my point is that we should be thinking a lot about ways to get at the intrinsic benefits of higher education at a lower cost than what we are doing today. Decentralize this process and let a hundred flowers bloom.

Some potential objections, and my rejoinders:

1. It's different in the sciences! Absolutely. But the need for longer educational programs in more complicated fields can be addressed by more on-the-job training, or employer-sponsored education. In other words, it makes sense, on some level, for Intel, Google, and Microsoft to be paying for top-notch professors of computer science and engineering than it does for Stanford and Princeton. It would also make sense to move some of the current federal outlays on need-based aid ($50 billion+, according to the New America Foundation) into direct research expenditures, instead of counting on a Rube Goldberg-style web of cross-subsidization.

2. There is a real social benefit to college! Balderdash. There's a real social benefit to interacting with other people in all sorts of settings. Such a benefit does not require geographic isolation, class affinity, or age similarities. In fact, limiting interactions to only fellow students is part of why inequality is growing in America. Colleges become areas of sorting, and people who aren't part of it have a major disadvantage. (See Charles Murray's Coming Apart for more on this.) And even without the sorting problem, this is not a good enough reason to crush an entire generation with six figures of debt.

3. What about professional degrees? Law school? Medical school? Business school? All could be dealt with on more of an apprentice model, supplemented by a la carte coursework. Medical school is already halfway there, at least, with its residency requirements. And blowing up the professional schools would do wonders to fight the cartelization of those fields.

4. This is unrealistic! Probably true. But if we must continue to pour tax dollars into this field, we need to think more about what it is we're actually doing with the money. The current model is defective.