Are Too Many Students Going to College?

The editors of The Chronicle of Higher Education have posed that potentially incendiary question and asked a collection of experts to engage in a rolling conversation in response. You can read the dialogue, which was posted Monday, by clicking here.

Among those answering yes is Charles Murray, a political scientist and scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, who is quoted as saying, “The four-year residential program leading to a B.A. is the wrong model for a large majority of young people.” Mr. Murray argues that “only 10 to 15 percent of the nation’s youth possess” the linguistic and mathematical ability to do well in a traditional college program.

Richard K. Vedder, director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity and professor of economics at Ohio University, puts it more bluntly, “A large subset of our population should not go to college, or at least not at public expense.” Mr. Vedder’s argument centers on the diminishing number of jobs that require a college degree.

Alison Wolf, a professor of public-sector management at King’s College London, takes a contrary view, saying, “Anyone who meets the entry criteria and is willing to pay the fees should be able to go.” Joining her is Sandy Baum, professor emerita of economics at Skidmore College and a senior policy analyst for the College Board, who says, “Everyone should have the opportunity to continue his or her education after high school without finances creating an insurmountable barrier.”

Surely, readers of The Choice — especially those of you hurtling toward college application deadlines — have answers of your own to this question. Please use the comment box below to let us know.

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This is rediculous! Of course anyone should be allowed to go to college if they have the grades and the financial ability to do so. I think Gen Y will be much better off. Not only do we easily understand new technology but hopefully we will have a higher percent of college graduates.

Vedder is correct, as any university professor knows. However, universities are businesses, and have done a marvelous job of convincing other businesses that a degree is a meaningful way of screening resumes. That reality forces kids who’d otherwise leave college alone to waste years and many dollars on the insane application dance & the consequent homework (forgotten immediately) and tuition.

The alternative for universities is to be much smaller and much less important, and to have less protection in the public sphere. What are you going to do?

As an instructor of science at a major university, I can tell you it is a FACT that many of these students should not be there. Non-existent background, no discipline, don’t know what they want to do in their lives, only there “finding themselves”.

It is not a coincidence that a common joke in Europe is to ask visiting Americans “Is it true everyone over 25 in the US has a PhD?”

Murray’s on the mark – but we need more and better vocational training for myriad jobs including the hotel industry, horticulture/gardening, carpentry, electricians, plumbers, etc. etc, How about diverting some money away from the elite establishment for these alternative paths and professions?

Please do not send anybody to colleges at all so that we can have all jobs done in BANGALORE.

Most definitely there are too many unqualified or ill-prepared students at the University or college level.

It is not an indictment on their intelligence level but on their maturity level.

I would agree whole-heartedly, having taught at an Ivy League university for many years. About half the students would be much better off with vocational education. Mind you, the business enterprise called `higher education’ would collapse but …

I’m a faculty member at a large state university. For the most part, the students are excellent. The question for their generation has always been “what are they buying and how does it compare to what is waiting for them after college/graduate school?” I know a lot of really smart kids who have ended up making $10 an hour after their four year degree, doing retail. I think a lot of those kids could make $30 or more an hour doing electrical work, plumbing, construction, programming, driving for Teamsters, working in manufacturing, nursing, you name it. What’s been sold to them is that their higher degree will get them a real job, but in the end, they need to retrain in a skilled manual labor job in order to feed themselves. I could never understand why liberal arts colleges will graduate hundreds of English majors a year while never requiring them to take at least 3 or 4 computer science classes. There are so many benefits to a liberal arts experience, but so few are tangible. Maybe it’s not whether so many should attend college and get a BA or BS, but what we should teach them while we have their attention.

Instead of considering such an open-ended and loaded question, attention should be placed on how colleges perform.

How much does it cost to educate a student, for example?

Are some colleges more efficient than others?

What do we need to know this for? EG, how relevant is the curriculum to the careers that student’s pursue?

How much value should we place on applied learning vs. pure learning?

The current college model is a hollowed-out ancient one that purports to classically educate students even while it maximizes income and employment for a host of special interest groups like transportation, medical services, IT services, etc. These are good jobs, of course, but largely an unnecessary enterprise that students don’t need to fund in order to receive an education.

How about we abolish affirmative action policies that are inherently racist and restore some measure of real and true merit to the academic process?

Matt from Queens November 10, 2009 · 2:21 pm

I agree with Prof. Vedder.

My cynical take is that the opposing viewpoint is from people who have benefitted from the educational-industrial complex. Colleges, their employees and contractors (e.g., builders, architects, consultants) benefit from getting the largest number of students and the largest possible budget for their institution. A great proportion of the money that funds their budgets comes from the govt in the form of govt-backed student loans and research grants.
[can someone provide the statistics? I think this figure is the majority of college budgets]

There are worse things than having a bloated college bureaucracy or more students going to college than there are jobs requiring a college education.

The big concern is that students, and/or their parents, are on the hook for debt that becomes oppressive and was unnecessary for their future career path.

There’s no great harm in students spending 4-5 years of their young adulthood playing hacky sack, smoking dope, and exploring their sexuality in a college setting.

The harm lies in having these students take out tens of thousands of dollars of student loans to finance those few carefree years.

Perhaps instead of cutting down on the number of educated people, we should encourage them to obtain their higher education in something useful to society like the physical sciences and medicine. While I support the study of linguistic arts (anyone who has graded or edited a scientific paper would likely agree that being able to write clearly is of the utmost importance), it doesn’t seem that we need many more scholars on The Bard. However, in a world facing a seemingly endless string of physical science, engineering, and technological problems and hurdles, it would seem that an army of intelligent minds to overcome these obstacles would be most welcome. So rather than dumb down job requirements to require less than a college degree, we should create more high end (in an educational sense) jobs to meet the challenges facing the planet. This would turn our economy away from being primarily service based, to something more stable, productive, and less tied to the financial ebb and flow of Wall Street.

june house November 10, 2009 · 2:23 pm

Are Too Many Students Going to College? Are Too Many Students going to Prison? I read that about the same
amount of people go to University as Prison each year.

In early states developement, each city wrangled over
who would get the state prison and who would get the
state university.

Oftentimes it was the city with the most politcal clout that won the prison as they were seen as more lucrative, at the inception of these systems.

So, these two systems march on like truth and beauty, yet I can not see it as a problem, that more people are going to into the University as the Prison system.

I agree. We have automatically assumed that the 4-yr degree is the thing to which all students should aspire b/c that was the best way to material success and occupational advancement in the mid- to late-twentieth century. (Let us bracket, for the moment, that this paradigm is centered around education for jobs, and not education for the brain or even education of the person – they are not the same thing). However, the increasing technologization of the world is demanding fewer liberal arts minds and more technicians.

From a purely utilitarian point of view, it make sense to direct our human capital (formerly know as students/young adults) to the kind of training that will enable them to be more employable in the emerging technological economy. The increasingly globally capitalistic world we live in needs more technicians with some higher-functioning capabilities, not liberal arts majors who understand lare global and historical patterns of politics, anthropology, and human achievement. It is for THIS reason that too many students are going to college – the labor market does not demand, nor entirely value, these “products”.

However, thinking along these lines only increases the likelihood that democracy will become less of a vitally important part of human (and capitalist) life as more and more decisions become based on the inputs and outputs of economic activity, and less on the sacrifices and benefits of democracy. Corporations already base their “lives” on the bottom line; do we truly want people to, as well? We are not just talking about the state of unemployment or the material value of a degree, but at the core this is a fundamental question of what education is for.

If it is to get rich, then keep this discussion going, because that is all it will be good for. If not, then we need to be asking different questions about education in general, and college education in particular.

As a student at a public Big 10 university, I agree that too many students are attending college. There are many students here that cannot even write a coherent paper, and it causes me to wonder how they were even accepted. I also work at a college bookstore, and I am constantly surprised by the inattentiveness and idiocy that I witness every day. Why are these people using state funding to attend, instead of simply cutting them from the equation? The acceptance process should be a tad more discriminating. The flood of bachelor’s degrees from all these students is diluting the worth of the degrees of people who actually deserve it. Majoring in Leisure Studies? Don’t even bother attending.

As a university professor I can certainly say that, yes, there are a large body of students who are going to struggle in college because they are woefully unprepared. But that does not mean that they will not improve- in fact many do. Moreover, an education cannot and should not be boiled down to the cost/benefit analysis typical of economists. College exposes people to new ideas and ways of thinking. Whether a college graduate uses that to start what will become a Fortune 500 company is irrelevant. It is a sad, sad state of affairs when we think of education solely in economic terms. And if students are unprepared for college then why hasn’t this spurred a debate about improving primary education instead of cutting the rolls at universities? The only sound argument here is that college saddles students with debt and that this is cause for concern. But in my mind that only means we need a renewed commitment to education and funding for it, not a return to the days where only the wealthy could attend college.

reinadelaz November 10, 2009 · 2:28 pm

The US has long needed to admit that not all students are college material and that not all professions require a college education. Sadly, the refusal to do so has caused an under-funding of apprenticeship programs and other vocational training. In Florida, over half of community college applicants require remedial math classes. Almost as many need remedial reading and writing coursework before they can attempt college-level studies. This is a failing of the public K-12, for sure, but it is also a failure of higher education to meet the real needs of our society. Does a dental hygienist really need to study the humanities in order to properly scrape teeth clean? Of course not. The training necessary to adequately perform the responsiblities of this job can easily be done in an OJT setting.

I felt during my attendance of a public university that most of my peers probably should not be bothering with a 4 year university not due to utilitarian reasons, but that they just seemed to be learning so little.

There’s more to college than learning though. Most people have quite a bit of fun in college to. I know people who go not to learn, but for the social atmosphere. I don’t know if this is something society wants to see as reasonable or not.

I agree with Charles Murray’s assessment. There are a lot of jobs that provide important and valuable service to the nation, but are not academic in nature. In these cases, an academic curriculum simply does not seem to be the best way to prepare them for the job — Some practical hands-on training might be of more value.

The mission of colleges and universities is to advance science, and train the next generation of lawyers / doctors / scientists / managers. Training nurses / counselors / administrators is just as important, but I am not sure colleges and universities are well-suited for that.

FromwhereIsit November 10, 2009 · 2:31 pm

While I do not think that four-year residential college between age 18 and 22/23/24 is the best thing for everyone, I do think that Americans need more training (vocational, entrepreneurial, university) to equip them for a 21st-century economy that requires constant reinvention, creativity, and nimble transitions across fields and pursuits. This is true not just in industry (see Apple’s metamorphosis from dowdy provider of school computing equipment in the 1990s to music seller/digital player trend setter in the 2000s) but also in entertainment (see Madonna, Jamie Foxx) and sports (see Shaquille O’Neal, Deion Sanders).

I know far too many people who spent their college years hop-scotching through majors, skipping classes, and doing little to get a degree in something generic and fall into some corporate job. Yet these are the lucky ones: millions of students do not even complete high school, ensuring that they remain uninformed and consigned to low-paying jobs in consumer retail or food services. The United States will see a rapid decline in its standard of living if it continues to push its young people into McJobs or mind-numbing corporate roles spent dawdling around water coolers. I think that greater emphasis should be placed on strengthening the foundational years of education (elementary, middle, high school) so that students can make informed choices about what to do with their lives as they become adults. This means solid public school curriculums with greater emphasis on science, math, computer programming, economics and verbal communication. It also means identifying children’s talents in arts, music, and sports and providing them with the funding and instruction to turn these into marketable skills.

A citizenry that is educated across all levels will compete better against other nations. More importantly, it will (hopefully) select progressive leaders best able to guide the United States ( and the world) though the challenges ahead.

Education is never a waste.

Having said that, a large majority of colleges dont educate provide a “Club Ed” experience akin to these “students” being on an extended 2 yr vacation with Sports, Greek life, and spring breaks raised to cult status with room & board at hotel prices.

Less than 50% of colleges can graduate a class in 4 yrs. that means 50% of these “students” waste 2 yrs and end up in a vocational program or an even more watered down community college.

Thats why your contractor charges you an arm and a leg for your McMansion repairs/renovation.

They know their supply is getting less….with students viewing being a plumber, electrician, mason, carpenter as below them (even though many make $100K+)….and being a cubicle drone waiting for conference room cake as superior.

There is an education bubble coming. Its happened in other nations who grant PhDs in traffic management and flower arangement….and its a joke.

Unfortunately, concomitant with a higher proportion of non-college prepared students matriculating at four year colleges, there is a decline in the number of vocational programs available to both high school and community college students.

This is short-sighted in the extreme.

it’s not that students going to college are unprepared but colleges aren’t challenging students and they don’t teach the skills for afterwards. that’s why college isn’t for everyone.

Richard Vedder’s pespective is strictly financial. That is cleraly not the only criterion on which the benefits of a college education should be measured.

The first mistake that many individuals make is to assume that college is a vocational choice only.

Anyone who receives a bachelor’s degree in any discipline, whether or not it is directly related to a specific vocation will experience a life far more rich than he or she would have without that education.

College is an opportunity and a process for passage between adolescence and adult life. It is an opportunity to establish a set of values and perspectives on the world. It should not fill ones mind with anything. It should open one’s mind to everything.

Put twenty randomly chosen people in a room and spend a couple of hours with them in casual, social conversation. It is no challenge to separate those who attended college from those who did not with a high degree of accuracy.

A college education brings a fullness and a richness of life that benefits the individual and the familial and social circles in which he or she spends the rest of their life. If you must put it into monetary terms the money spent on a higher education for one individual benefits all of us.

A simple ROI analysis misses the point all together.

Jim Taggart November 10, 2009 · 2:36 pm

We need more social programs, and less emphasis on state funded education. Everyone knows how far education has gotten us.