Should You Go to College?

Should you earn a college degree at all?

It’s a serious question worth considering, even if you eventually dismiss the option. This post isn’t of the influencer bro type telling you college is a scam, that only suckers work 9-5s, and that you should drop out and trade Forex or Gamestop meme stocks. The unfortunate reality is that a college degree and debt are a necessary evil for most students to survive in our late stage capitalism world.

Harvard Business School professor Arthur Brooks discusses his child who opted out of college in a July 2020 article in the Atlantic that “A College Degree Is No Guarantee of a Good Life.” He proposes a typical scenario where students may be academically excellent yet not feel compelled to pursue a traditional four-year degree. He shares about the personal conflicts of being a college professor and raising an older child who was valedictorian while having a younger child with different goals and interests. An unquestioned assumption of a college education is that it provides a good if not the best return on your investment relative to the alternatives.

Arthur Brooks forewent immediate college enrollment to his parents' outrage to tour in a classical band. His wife Ester dropped out of high school to sing in a rock band. Safety-conscious parents often forget what it’s like to be a teenager. A new generation of younger parents may have themselves been raised by the first wave of helicopter parents in the 1980s, so they don’t know any different. Their son resolved not to attend college and pursue his passion—organic farming—before enlisting in the Marines. They agreed with his decision so as not to be hypocrites and because they trust his judgment.

Unlike in Europe or Australia, where students regularly take time off between college and high school, Americans fixate on immediate college enrollment. Brooks writes, “Some kids think they know what they want to do after college, but others don’t, so for them college is like buying an expensive insurance policy.”

He references research that correlates college degrees only mildly with happiness. Other studies call into question whether a college education causes happiness or is the result of other variables such as religious affiliation or income. “Some [researchers] actually believe that education is negatively linked to happiness, and hypothesize that some college attendees trade ambition for life satisfaction…. The evidence on the economic and happiness benefits of college is mixed.”

Like Brooks, I also believe “in the power of higher education to change lives and create opportunity.” It transformed my life and the lives of countless others. But is it the right fit for everyone? I’m skeptical. However, there are few viable alternatives to earning a living wage without a college degree.

Graduates like me during the Great Recession, and college students who are finishing degrees during the COVID-19 pandemic, struggle mightily to find gainful employment in their fields that pay living wages. Brooks writes, “Past performance is no guarantee of future returns. Many analysts see wage growth stagnating for college graduates, with average starting salaries increasing just 1.4 percent from 2015 to 2018—a period when the economy was roaring.” Earnings among recent graduates have stagnated in the past decade while wealth among the Baby Boomer generation increases steadily.

However, times have changed since Arthur Brooks and his wife came of age. They grew up in an era with a robust middle class where people could access jobs that paid living wages without requiring a college degree. Healthcare, housing, childcare, and education were substantially less expensive in the 1970s and ’80s relative to today.

My dad could make a living driving bread trucks for 40 years. My mom has worked in elementary education retail, neither of which required any college study. Those days are mostly over. The economy has shifted in remarkable ways even since the Great Recession. Overwhelmingly today, a bachelor’s degree of any kind is required to get most types of jobs that pay living wages, let alone career advancement, or as prerequisites to continued graduate studies.

A bachelor’s degree has become the new high school degree despite only one in three American adults holding a bachelor’s. Increasingly, master’s or PhDs are becoming the new norm in corporate hiring practices, especially at prestigious firms.

You can find Pollyannish YouTube videos from “stock advisors” or “entrepreneurs” who rail against a traditional college education and the “9 to 5 scam.” They attempt to persuade high school students not to attend. I’m sympathetic and agree with much of what they have to say, but speaking from experience, opting out of conventional society is so much easier with a college degree. If my unconventional lifestyle failed, I could more easily get a job in the US than if I only had a high school degree.

For most high school graduates most of the time, a bachelor’s degree is a necessary and unavoidable evil. Daniel Markovits estimates that the bachelor’s degree premium on lifetime earnings was double that of the 1980s.

I used to subscribe to Frank Bruni’s insistence that which college you attend does not define who you will be. I even mailed his book to a few of my clients. But his data and anecdotes from pre-2010 seem outdated.

Our economy is increasingly bifurcating between the kinds of office job that allow for remote work during a pandemic and lower-paid yet essential jobs that must be done in person. Daniel Markovits calls this division “glossy” versus “gloomy” jobs. It’s less likely today than a decade ago that jobs requiring bachelor’s degrees work alongside those who do not. People with college degrees marry each other in record numbers, a departure from trends half a century ago when there wasn’t much correlation between the education level of partners.

Failure to earn a college degree is an almost guaranteed consignment to a tenuous existence. Traditionally middle-skill white-collar jobs such as secretarial and paralegal are becoming automated or obsolete. Plumbers, electricians, and others who work in trades aren’t compensated at rates that keep pace with living costs, especially when starting their careers. They also have much less professional freedom than generations past due to a few large firms crowding out many smaller ones or freelancers, a tendency toward monopoly experienced in almost every industry.

Receiving a degree from a regional or lesser-known university lowers one’s ceiling for future career prospects. Some prominent investment banks and consulting firms told a transfer client of mine attending a public flagship university in the Southeastern Conference (SEC) point blank that they will never get a job based on the name on their future diploma. Credential discrimination is the antithesis of a meritocracy that is supposed to reward people who “pull themselves up by their bootstraps.” Human resources that filter not just by whether one has a degree or not but also the institution attended exacerbates the admissions madness.

Whereas corporate executives in the middle of the twentieth century were more likely to have only a high school degree compared with a college education, more than half of our current financial, political, and corporate leaders hold degrees from just 12 of the country’s most elite universities.

Survivorship bias entails that we only hear about the handful of successful people without college degrees and not the thousands of others who failed. For example, even famous technology executives such as Michael Dell, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg, attended college for a time rather than forgoing it entirely. Mark Zuckerberg met some of his early business partners in his Harvard classes and residence halls.

College degrees often fail to reflect the skills they supposedly transfer. Competency-based certificates could be an alternative. One impressive institution and a first mover in the online education space is the nonprofit, private, and regionally accredited Western Governors University (WGU). Their self-paced curricula allow students to earn credit for skills they already have while developing new ones at an affordable cost. That limits repeating classes that a traditional degree often requires. WGU accommodates transfers of credit from most traditional brick-and-mortar schools. It may not provide the “college experience,” but what does that even mean anymore in our pandemic era?

Transitioning away from degree credentials and toward a system that favors demonstrated skills and competencies, e.g., programming or web design, would provide stronger signals to prospective employers. A distributed certificate system would help nontraditional students, military veterans, or midcareer professionals who need additional training but aren’t well served by traditional four-year degrees.

Unlike their elite counterparts, which almost entirely exclude nontraditional transfer applicants, WGU enrolls nearly 140,000 undergraduate and graduate students, average age 36, two-thirds of whom are female. Around 12 percent of their student body is African American, compared with 13 percent of the overall population. WGU is quietly democratizing education and providing the skills that multinational corporations, schools, and government agencies seek. They promote genuine inclusion and access without a brick-and-mortar campus—all with an $800 million annual budget.

NYU Stern Business School professor and education critic Scott Galloway considers what role the COVID-19 pandemic will have on higher education in Post Corona: From Crisis to Opportunity. Education is an industry that’s changed little over the decades and is ripe for disruption. He observes that early promises of MOOCs, open courseware offered by universities such as MIT and Harvard, or celebrity teachers on Master Class are unlikely to displace elite brick-and-mortar institutions. He agrees that elite universities are here to stay. Middling private institutions and underfunded state universities are at a high risk of failure. Time will tell how many go bankrupt in the next few years for failing to enroll a sufficient number of students.

One alternative he proposes is partnerships between universities and corporations. For example, MIT and Google could provide two-year degrees online, available to many more students, that offer the concrete skills employers need. Since employing practices that still overwhelmingly favor a bachelor’s degree or higher, they could play a role in crafting curricula and course content. That would secure the benefits of a competencies-based institution like WGU while also providing the gravitas conferred by elite institutions and leading technology brands. Another possibility is that corporations like Apple or Amazon create their own quasi-universities that confer degrees or have a cooperative vocational model that combines work and study.

As it stands, self-taught programmers often need the validation of a credentialed degree to gain employment. The traditional education system hasn’t caught up to the demands of the twenty-first-century knowledge economy. American universities have an almost total monopoly on one’s future prospects, just as prospective NFL football players have no other choice but to play collegiate football under the auspices of the NCAA. At least MLB prospects have the option to play college baseball or join, and receive a salary from, the minor league farm system in the US, Mexico, or Japan following high school graduation.

Just because a bachelor’s degree is unavoidable doesn’t mean one needs to pursue it immediately after high school. In the next post, I discuss Gap Years.