George Leef probes for Forbes readers the higher education establishment’s latest response to the bursting of the college bubble.
The College Board’s recent report Education Pays: The Benefits of Higher Education for Individuals and Society is a shameless effort at making students and policymakers think that earning a college degree is the closest thing to a panacea for all personal and social problems.
The authors write with an almost giddy enthusiasm: “The evidence is overwhelming that higher education improves people’s lives, makes our economy more efficient, and contributes to a more equitable society.”
Someone who had just awakened from a 50 year sleep might conclude that in the meantime, America had discovered that putting kids through college was the ideal policy — they emerge much more productive and earn far higher incomes, will be much less likely to become unemployed or need public assistance, they’ll be better parents and citizens, while leading healthier lives!
If you took this seriously, you’d think that the country is committing a terrible error in not insisting that everyone who could possibly go to college do so, and graduate.
But we shouldn’t take it seriously. America has already oversold higher education.
Our colleges are already admit large numbers of academically weak, disengaged students; further expansion could only come from scooping up lots of really sub-marginal ones. As I suggested in my “Tale of Two Bubbles” piece last month, with regard to students who are prepared for college, we’re about where the housing market was in 2006 with respect to people who were capable of handling a mortgage. Almost all of the people who were being drawn into mortgages at that point were poor credit risks setting themselves up for dreadful losses.
It’s the same today for college attendance. We already have all the good students, almost all the mediocre students, and lots of bad students.