For the last several months, an increasingly hot topic of popular discourse has been the higher education bubble. With many of the same characteristics as the housing bubble that collapsed several years ago, the higher education bubble features rapidly rising college costs, unrealistic expectations for the future value of that education, and people going to college who should not be doing so. And, oh yes, just like the housing bubble, the government is part of the problem.
In 2008, CNN pointed out that from 1985 to 2005, college tuition had increased more than four times faster than the consumer price index. Late last year the Los Angeles Times reported that in spite of the overall collapse of the economy, college tuition was still rising rapidly — a 7.9% increase at public schools, and a 4.5% increase at private schools.
Some degrees are certainly going to pay for themselves. Students with degrees in electrical engineering, computer science, and some of the other demanding technical fields have a realistic hope of paying back their student loans. But even an optimistic evaluation, such as this one from the National Association of Colleges and Employers, admits that 2010’s graduates with bachelor’s degrees in psychology averaged just over $32,000. (Because that is the average, it means that just under half of those psychology graduates started at a lower salary.) For a student who accumulated $30,000 in student loan debt, servicing that debt is going to be painful, if at all even possible. And, of course, these are the graduates who were actually offered jobs. A bachelor’s degree is no longer the path to a certain job that it was, even in 2008.
Perhaps most troubling to me, as an adjunct history instructor at a community college, is the situation faced by college students who are like the housing speculators of 2005 and 2006. (These speculators bought houses to “flip” because everyone knew the housing market would always rise. If you had a few million dollars in savings, or you had a six-figure income, you could afford to make the payments on houses that you were not going to occupy or rent. Wealthy housing speculators could afford to get their fingers slammed in the door when the bubble collapsed, but most speculators could not. This frenzied speculation drove some buyers out of the market by making prices artificially high, which in turn encouraged a building boom far exceeding genuine demand. Today the whole economy is suffering the hangover.) What I am seeing — and what other faculty I talk to are seeing — shows that something similar is going on today with college. There are students attending college who are clearly there for all the right reasons and with the necessary skills. It does not bother me that the government is subsidizing them through taxes and grants; these students are likely to more than pay back the government’s investment in the form of increased income taxes once they graduate. (Of course, they will be better citizens as well, because they have me teaching them history!)
I also see students who know that they are deficient in some basic skills, but are prepared to work hard at correcting these weaknesses. I respect these students; they try and often succeed in overcoming past mistakes and failures because they want to make something of their lives.
There are, however, a disturbingly large number of students who are wasting resources. Not surprisingly, there are students who lack the emotional maturity to be in college. They are unable to focus their time and energy on studying for tests and completing assignments. Many of these students have the skills; a few years at minimum wage asking “Would you like fries with that?” will probably fix this. (If not, there really is no hope.)
Some students are suffering from family or employment problems that make you want to go slap someone around: emotional wreckage from divorces, kids under pressure to work so many hours in family businesses that they don’t have time for their studies, employers who refuse to work around class schedules, and insecure men who resent “the little woman” trying to make anything of herself. These students may be wasting resources this semester, but perhaps next semester, they will have straightened out their complicated personal lives.
Then there are students who lack some very basic skills. In a recent discussion of the Pell Grant program, one commenter who described herself as an instructor at a community college suggested that Pell Grants should only be available to “those students who can write a complete sentence.” I have not seen many students who are that deficient. I have seen quite a few who lack the skills that used to be learned in junior high school: correct use of “their” not “there”; the distinction between “it’s” and “its”; that a possessive (“parliament’s”) is not the same as a plural (“parliaments”). Trying to teach college level skills to students with such serious educational deficiencies is rather like trying to teach calculus to students who have not yet mastered algebra.
Ignorance can be fixed. This is one of our jobs at a community college: to help students who were not at the top of their high school graduating class reach a skill level that makes a four-year school at least possible.
What cannot be fixed is what upsets me: the students who have no intention of passing the class. We are required to take attendance for the first two weeks of each semester, “for financial aid reasons.” No surprise: a lot of financial aid depends on being a full-time student. Every semester, I have students who show up for two weeks — and never show up again. They do not respond to emails. They do not drop the class. They do get an F. I suspect that they are getting either a grant check, or a student loan — and this is the reason that they are there for two weeks.
I have other students who show up most of the time. They take quizzes — but their scores on multiple choice quizzes are so close to the random guess rate that they could not possibly be studying. They turn in no assignments — or they might turn in one or two out of fifteen. I warn students at the beginning of the semester that even a poor score on an assignment is better than a zero, and that they have no chance of passing the class with a bunch of zeroes. Still, they turn nothing in.
There is a lot of financial aid out there. The Pell Grant program has increased 150% since academic year 2005-6, with federal funding growing from $14.4 billion to $34.4 billion for 2010-11. I hear stories of Pell Grant money being used to buy big screen televisions. Someone I know runs a court-ordered domestic violence treatment program, and offenders sometimes delay paying for the program until their student financial aid checks come in. There is a tsunami of student loan debt being run up by students who either do not care, or do not understand that with a few, very rare exceptions, the only way to avoid repaying that debt is death or total, permanent disability.
This is a bubble. Students who are not serious about college, or who lack such basic skills as the ability to write a five paragraph essay, are not just wasting their own money (if they spend any of their own money at all): they are taking away seats from, and driving up costs for, those students who are ready, willing, and able.
(Also see: “Study: Higher ed bubble could be solved by getting faculty to teach more.”)
Join the conversation as a VIP Member