Here's a tale of two pronouncements. One day, Malcolm Harris writes in N+1 magazine that "no one dares call higher education a bad investment." Just a few days later, Daniel B. Smith writes in New York magazine that "it is hard to think of a time when skepticism of the value of higher education has been more prominent than it is right now."
Can these pronouncements be reconciled? Ladies and gentlemen, I submit that they cannot. And that points to a broader problem with Our National Convo on higher education: It's comically muddled. Consider again, for instance, that N+1 piece I just mentioned. I couldn't quite tell you what it's about. Half of it's about for-profit two-year colleges; half of it's about nonprofit four-year colleges. These are very different institutions! Do they belong in the same article? Not that Harris doesn't do an OK job of seaming the two topics together. Nevertheless, when he writes, "higher education, for-profit or not, has increasingly become a scam," all I can think is, "that's a pretty big 'or not'!" (Well, and also: "How can something be 'increasingly' a scam? Is it a scam, or isn't it?")
It's worth disaggregating what we're actually talking about when we talk about "higher education." Four years at Harvard or Stanford is not the same thing as four years at Oberlin or Grinnell, which in turn is quite different from three to five years at a state flagship, all of which are basically incommensurate with cobbling together credits at a local community college while working full-time. And as for for-profit "universities," well, in my ideal world we'd just call a spade "consumer fraud." (On that topic, see Adam's earlier thoughts in this space.)
Articles about whether college is worthless or higher education is a bubble, which we've seen a lot of in 2011, are thus fairly useless. There's just no such thing as a generic "college degree" or "college experience" that can be meaningfully discussed -- too many variables determine whether, and how, any particular undergraduate program is useful or valuable. On the particular issue of crippling student debt, arguably that's most a problem for students who attend private schools charging Harvard-level tuition yet without a Harvard-size endowment to fund generous financial aid -- think NYU -- which is a fairly defined sector of the higher-education landscape. On the particular comparison to subprime mortgages, arguably that's most true for places like Kaplan and the University of Phoenix. (On that point, and for a rare example of higher-ed commentary that does do an Ok job of disaggregating, check out Anya Kamenetz's response to the bubble meme.)
It's also worth injecting some precision into the cost estimates we bandy about. Anytime you hear higher education is a bubble, you can count on this shockingly large figure of $200,000 coming around the corner next. Indeed, both of the articles I've quoted so far mention that figure somewhere or other. And $200K is quite a high number! Yet as far as I know, it remotely approximates the cost of college if you meet two conditions: 1) you're attending an especially expensive residential private college, and 2) you're paying the full sticker price. How many students fall into that category? I don't know! The articles never specify. A 2009 iteration of the "higher-ed is a bubble" jeremiad warned that "tuitions, fees, and room and board at dozens of colleges" were "now reaching $50,000 a year." That sounds ominous! But wait a minute: "dozens of colleges"? What does that mean? 24? 144? See what I mean about the lack of precision? And doesn't America have way more than "dozens" of colleges?
Finally, it's worth keeping in mind that Harvard enrolls fewer than 7,000 undergraduates. For comparison's sake, let's take a brief tour of one of the nation's largest undergraduate campuses: the University of Central Florida. UCF enrolls about 56,000 undergraduates, majoring in subjects like nursing, elementary education, and hospitality management. In-state tuition is under $5,000 a year, with total costs estimated at about $18,000 a year. As you can see, whatever the problems of UCF, they are not the problems of Harvard, and they affect many, many more students and families. And yet, a lot of Our National Convo on higher education seems really to be about Harvard, and schools like Harvard. Or, at the other end of the spectrum, about Kaplan, Phoenix, and similar "universities," whose ongoing scheme of laundering federal loans should obviously be shut down, but which also only account for 10 percent of the post-secondary student population. So I am here to remind you, chattering classes: There is a world in between.
Peter Brooks wrote recently that the university is "one of the best things we’ve got," maybe "better than what we deserve." In turn, he argued, universities "deserve better critics than they have got at present." Now, you can certainly find incisive commentary on the university at places like Tenured Radical or even, occasionally, in the Chronicle of Higher Education. But on the whole, Brooks is right: If they're to survive, to be saved, to thrive, universities need critics who are more astute in their observations, more precise in their language, more magnanimous in their spirit, and more interested in finding out what it's actually like at the full range of colleges and universities that American students attend, rather than merely serving as mouthpieces for the Peter Thiels of the world.
