What do people do after graduating from high school?
Once upon a time there were many common answers to this
question, but in recent decades one has increasingly and remarkably steadily become
the norm for above average students and many below. It has hardly been that way throughout the
nation’s history; according to the U.S. Department of Education, in the
1869-1870 school year only 1.3% of 18 to 24-year-old Americans were enrolled in
college. That share edged up to 2.3% in
1899-1900, reached 4.7% by 1919-20, and even in the Depression-time 1933-34 was
at 6.7%. By 1945-46, the beginning of
the G.I. Bill, it reached 10.0%, achieving 17.7% only ten years later and 27.7%
in fall 1963, on the eve of U.S. Vietnam War involvement. With the end of conscription twelve years
later, 40.3% of Americans attended, not exceeding that rate until 1981 but
reaching 53.7% by the fall of 1991.
Sources conflict after those dates, but per the Bureau of Labor
Statistics 70% of high school students went directly to college in 2005, though
dropping to 65.9% by the fall of 2013. Most
other first-world countries have not reached these levels; in a 44-country list
from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, only Australia,
Canada, Ireland, Japan, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Norway, Russia, South Korea, and
the United Kingdom had a higher share of 2014 25 to 34-year-olds with at least
two-year degrees than America’s 46%.
Since the Civil War, this massive and inexorable-seeming
social trend has built with a remarkable lack of opposers. One classic exception was author Caroline
Bird, whose 1975 The Case Against College
argued that fewer people should attend.
The book includes sections on how universities and even two-year schools
benefit from a “mystique,” the cost of college to parents and students, its
real, statistical, and erroneously purported advantages, a look at the true
sources of success, and a 44-page chapter on alternative courses of action. The work got attention, but as above did not stop
the enrollment rise.
Now, 43 years later, we have picked up another dissident,
this time professor Bryan Caplan, author of last month’s The Case Against Education. In
some ways, the roles and situation of college have transformed; in some ways they
have not. Here are nine changes, from
Caplan and elsewhere, since Bird’s book.
First, the cost of college has massively increased even in
relation to inflation. The prices quoted
by Bird, including $22,256 for all expenses for four years at Princeton, $2,400
per year including books and support for resident state-school students, and a
medical school graduate expecting to owe “close to $15,000” now seem
quaint. According to former U.S.
Secretary of Education Lamar Alexander, college tuition rose 260% from 1980 to
2014, compared with 120% for the Consumer Price Index. Anecdotally, and by adding a few years to
each end, we can get much higher jumps.
Tuition at Lawrence University, which I attended for the 1975-76 school
year, has more than decupled from $4,400 to 2016-2017’s $44,544. That at the University of Wisconsin
Milwaukee, for state residents, soared 14-fold from 1977’s $680 for two
full-credit semesters to $9,534 per year.
As a student I covered that with 320 hours of minimum-wage work, at
$2.30 per hour less payroll tax deductions – today, at Wisconsin’s $7.25, it
would take 1,424.
Second, vocationalism, which was starting to vie with pure
learning for main college directions in 1975, largely won that battle in the
early 1980s, with school-wide emphasis changes and accounting becoming the most
popular undergraduate major.
Third, the percentage of graduates has also increased
substantially. In 1975, 17.6% of
American males, and 10.6% of females had four-year degrees; by 2016 those
numbers were up to 33.2% and 33.7%, or a combined share 137% higher.
Fourth, the average statistical advantage for graduates has
also gone up, with the expected “earnings premium,” cited by Caplan as rising
from 50% more over a lifetime than those only finishing high school in the late
1970s to 73% last year.
Fifth, there are more college dropouts than ever, and they are
not counted in the statistical gain above.
They accrue sometimes considerable debt, impede themselves from earning
more during their enrollment times, cost their parents money as well, and, per
Caplan, may after failing “be too embittered to go back and learn a
trade.”
Sixth, employers’ main response to degrees becoming more
common has been to raise their educational requirements. In the 1950s, people wanting careers in
business rarely went to college. Later, I
saw that personally in AT&T management – when arriving in 1988, my
bachelor’s degree was a solid credential, with many peers and even my first
on-the-job boss without one, but in only nine years so many such managers had
retired, been downsized, or were otherwise replaced by those two steps more
educated, that I felt naked without a master’s degree. The tasks themselves did not change nearly
that much, with intelligence and technical aptitude still most required.
Seventh, academic work and studying hours in college have
dropped. Per Caplan, average 1967 students
took 40 hours per week for class and study time – in 2017, that was 27.
Eighth, and strangely given the last difference,
above-average universities have become significantly more selective. Even correcting for high school grade
inflation, many successful 1970s and 1980s professionals could not now get into
the colleges they attended with the credentials they had. To name only one example, the University of
Wisconsin at Madison then accepted almost all applicants with gradepoint
averages in the top half of their classes – now the average is 3.85, and over
half of those seeking to attend are rejected.
Ninth, the general incompetence of graduates, in conjunction
with their learning only narrow pieces of subjects, has worsened. For me, the most depressing parts of learning
about Caplan’s work were his examples of what people who successfully completed
college, the most recent of whom have overcome these high admission
requirements, paid modern-day tuition, and avoided falling to the no-degree
wayside, often or even generally cannot do.
Per Caplan, 20% had only “basic” or even “below basic” literacy, and
many could not “make sense of a table explaining how an employee’s annual
health-insurance costs varied with income and family size, or summarize the
work-experience requirements in a job ad, or even use a newspaper schedule to
find when a television program ended.”
He also discovered Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner’s finding that
“students who receive honor grades in college-level physics courses are
frequently unable to solve basic problems and questions encountered in a form
slightly different from that on which they have been formally instructed and
tested.” Caplan glumly noted that while
“those who believe that college is about learning how to learn should expect
students who study science to absorb the scientific method, then habitually use
it to analyze the world,” it “scarcely occurs.”
While 1970s universities with their arena-sized classrooms and predominant
“multiple-guess” exams had, though to a lesser extent, these problems as well,
few good academic departments would have let people graduate without having
more flexible capability within their fields.
Next week, we look at what has stayed the same since Bird’s
work, and what is now happening, overall, with American higher education.
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