Last week Congress finally passed legislation that prevented the interest rates on federal student loans from doubling to 6.8%. While this move was welcome by college students and their parents, it does little to stem the skyrocketing debt that student loans are creating for Americans. Neither will increasing Pell Grants, increasing funding for state universities, or having a student loan debt strike. Our higher education system problems are structural, and the only way to fix this problem is change the entire structure of higher education. The first thing we need to do is abandon the standard bachelor’s degree.
Students in the United States currently hold over one trillion dollars in student loan debt with the average student burden at around $25,000. The cost of higher education has outpaced inflation every year for a couple of decades now. Yet the real value of wages for US workers has remained stagnant in the same time period. In short, students are paying much more money to get the same income. Higher education has become a riskier and riskier investment. It is time to bring the cost of obtaining job skills in line with wages.
Higher education has become an aggressive driver of income inequality, and that inequality becomes cemented across generations. As costs increase many students simply cannot go. This leaves them with a lifetime of lower wages, less access to decent health care, and fewer worker protections. For low-income students (and many middle-income ones), going to college now means decades of debt. This debt prevents students from buying homes, starting families, and saving for their own children’s’ education, which defeats the purpose of going in the first place. This is not only bad for individual, but also cuts consumer spending across society, which is a drag on the the economy as a whole.
To change this situation we need to get over the idea that students need a BA to perform most professional jobs. For many jobs and industries this is simply not true. Why does someone who works in advertising need a four year degree? Do those science and history classes really improve their job performance? That’s a dubious proposition at best. The idea that students need to be “well-rounded” to write ad copy or perform accounting tasks is not only patently ridiculous, but it is the acceptance of a classist trope that defines what it means to be educated in a much too narrow manner.
Instead of our current system, students should be able to receive industry-specific training without the added academic baggage in two or three years. Very few jobs really need an actual BA, and students should not be required to purchase one to enter the job market. Business students, artists, and computer science majors should not be forced to pay thousands of extra dollars for classes that have little benefit for them. People who want to study law or medicine should be able to access pre-professional programs without two extra years of unrelated course work. Colleges (especially public ones) should not be in the business of creating barriers for students to enter the job market. We must create much more flexibility for students to get the skills they need to have a secure economic future.
This brings me to my next point. Bachelor’s degrees not only are out of line with actual wages, but they actually act as a method for opportunity hoarding by upper class Americans. Requiring every student to have a bachelor’s degree in many industries is a way of keeping out students from families that can’t afford college. This protects the privilege of the wealthy, while trapping low-income people in poverty. Additionally, keeping poorer students out of many industries may discourage innovation and creativity because new perspectives are never considered.
Of course, getting colleges to offer these kinds of programs is going to be difficult. After all, higher education is billion dollar business and admissions offices aren’t easily going to give up that much money. Furthermore, colleges have a powerful emotional tool to continue to get students to fork over huge amounts of money for a traditional BA; the American dream. Colleges sell students a future and that is a product wrapped in emotion about our own worth and potential. Admissions offices know the power of those feelings and they know that many students will pay almost anything to feel like they can attain those dreams. However, we need to decouple this emotional appeal from the discussion and instead look at the matter more practically. Organizing our entire higher education system on emotion and tradition is not serving us well.
To make an idea like this work we need to create market forces that will make these kinds of programs attractive for colleges to offer. This means that businesses need to be willing to hire people with different kinds of educational backgrounds. Big companies and foundations that donate millions to universities need to start asking for programs like this. At the same time, students need to start demanding suitable programs and enrolling in schools that have more flexible and less expensive options. In the meantime, maybe students need to delay their entry into college for a couple of years. Hitting colleges where it hurts may be the best solution and is really the only way education consumers can strike back. The higher education system has become an obstacle to economic security for many Americans. It is time for our schools to find a solution or to get out of the way so that the market can.
Image via campusprogress.org.
