Opinion: The College Conundrum

I’ve long contended that the overwhelming factor that accounts for the consistent increase in college tuition at about three times the rate of inflation over at least the past 30 years is, paradoxically, the availability of financial aid: By increasing the supply of financial aid money, the government created a perverse incentive for colleges to suck up as much as possible in a never-ending vicious cycle. There’s no end to this because there’s no point at which natural equilibrium can ever be achieved, and no matter how much financial aid is made available there can never be any limit to how much colleges will want.

Even more perversely, the higher costs shift the value proposition so that colleges become focused on competing for students as customers, doing all of the things businesses traditionally do when given such incentives: Colleges will invest in luxury dormitories and elaborate recreational facilities while migrating their teaching faculties toward adjuncts instead of tenure. The economics dictate, bizarrely, that as more and more money is poured into the educational system, the quality of education itself is gravely harmed.

Market distortions of this kind are usually seen only in very unusual anti-commodities, such as wine: Few customers can taste the difference between $10 wine and $100 wine, and blind testing shows that almost no experts can, either. So why do people often pay exorbitant prices for wine? The simple answer is that they do so because everyone else does so. It turns out that the price of wine is almost totally disconnected from its quality, and what people are actually paying for is the reputation of a label, not even because they think the label is better but because other people think the label is better. In a rational market, the price of wine should have some plausible connection to what is actually in the bottle, but it doesn’t.

Ultimately, this raises the question of what value is perceived in going to college. Certainly some part of that is the actual education, just as some part of the price of wine reflects the liquid inside the bottle as well as the hard costs of the bottle itself and transportation to the retail shelf, but such intrinsic costs are minimal to the point of being almost negligible. Unlike wine where eventually someone is really likely to drink the stuff, the perceived value in attending college is largely in getting past a barrier to entry, an essentially negative rather than positive motive.

This is why proposals to make colleges free of tuition and totally government-funded are quite dangerous, at least within an American cultural context. On the one hand, it doesn’t make much sense to decide who can go to college based upon solely their ability to pay for it, which was how things mostly worked before the World War II-era G.I. Bill. On the other hand, colleges were a resource inherently limited in the number of students who could be accepted, leading to rational selective gatekeeping measures such as entrance examinations and evaluating past academic performance. Free colleges in some cases were quite prestigious, and City College of New York (which used to be free but no longer is) was called “the Harvard of the proletariat” and was the founding base of the New York Intellectuals movement, among others, but getting in was very competitive.

Strongly against the grain of American egalitarianism, college only works if there is substantial selectivity in the admissions process: If everyone is expected to go to college, it becomes an extension of high school and has the practical effect of magnifying the drop-out problem, except that instead of dropping out at 16, people will still be dropping out at 20. This effect has already manifested emphatically in graduate programs, where it is impossible to understand why the country needs between 3,000 and 4,000 M.F.A. creative writing graduates every year, something that mystifies a lot of people and clearly has not revolutionized American literature in a good way.

Creative writing is not like brain surgery, where the risks of getting it wrong make necessary extensive formal training under close supervision. Nor is the ability to do brain surgery evidence of the ability to think about anything other than brain surgery, as neurosurgeon and Yale alumnus Ben Carson proves every time he explains publicly how the earth is only a few thousand years old and the Egyptian pyramids were really grain silos used by Joseph as described in the Bible rather than as tombs for pharaohs. Then again, Carson currently has a book on The New York Times bestseller list, which is more than can be said for the creative writing M.F.A. hordes.

The college experience of Millennials has been a consequence of two conflicting factors: The belief that everyone should have a chance to go to college and that cost should not prevent access. Taken separately, either factor has good arguments that can be made for it, but taken together there have been highly negative unintended results with enormous student debt and lousy prospects for jobs that would allow repaying that debt. The pernicious view that everyone should go to college as a minimum level of education has even fostered for-profit colleges that are designed specifically to victimize students who can pay with student loans but end up no more employable than they were before but with crushing debt, and such for-profit colleges are the end stage of the race to the bottom on consumerism disconnected from real education.

To be clear, I am not arguing that college selectivity should seek a polarization of society that would lead to a permanent underclass of those who did not go to college, but rather for some sort of reasonable middle ground such as advanced vocational training. Acceptance of the absurd situation has led to a lot of dark humor, such as the Avenue Q song “What Do You Do with a B.A. in English?” Liberal arts education is grounded on the white lie that students are going to college because they want to, when the reality is that they feel they have to in order to get a job — in which case, for the vast majority, college already is vocational school, so we might as well just admit it and save a lot of time and money.