are the benefits of higher education shrinking?

One of the key tenets of American and maybe even Western culture is that education always leads to greater and greater heights. You can see this truism repeated in almost every film and TV show as wealthy characters who aren’t part of a fish-out-of-water storyline almost inevitably got to their significant income brackets by their business savvy or attending graduate school to get a lucrative job requiring that extra level of education. Even in the world of politics the two parties which can’t seem to agree on anything anymore manage to come to a consensus on the idea that more education is a key weapon in fighting rising unemployment during massive economic crashes. This is why more and more students are being urged to get more education and attend a post-secondary educational institution to make themselves ever more valuable to tomorrow’s employers.

Unfortunately, the reality isn’t that simple and getting a degree, especially an advanced one, is a double edged sword. According to a panel of experts assembled by The Chronicle of Higher Education, not everyone could benefit from attending college or using it as a safe harbor in rough economic times. Instead, the advice is that students carefully evaluate their options before deciding what’s best for them because the traditional four year college model simply isn’t for everyone and it seems unfair to either burden students with debt or force a major revision in the criteria used by admissions offices solely to boost student populations.

Besides, there’s a serious cost to boosting student populations at traditional colleges. There are only so many professors and TAs, the dorms can only hold so many people, and the staff can only provide so many services to a very finite number of students. Considering that many states are actually cutting back on their education subsidies while they should’ve been doing just the opposite, makes the problem even worse. Considering these issues along with cold, hard facts about historical student performance leads to advice like this…

All high-school students should receive a cost-benefit analysis of the various options suitable to their situations: four-year college, two-year degree program, a short-term career-prep program, apprenticeship program, on-the-job training, self-employment, the military. Students with weak academic records should be informed that, of freshmen at “four year” colleges who graduated in the bottom 40 percent of their high-school class, two-thirds won’t graduate even when given eight and a half years [to complete their coursework]. And that even if such students defy the odds, they will likely graduate with a low GPA and a major in low demand by employers.

And that’s where we hit a major issue. How much are employers going to pay for skilled workers? We live in a society in which people want to earn as much as possible but pay as little as possible for the products they’re going to use on a daily basis. The problem is that companies can’t run themselves at a loss and this means that they’re only going to hire as many skilled workers as they can afford and sometimes, barely enough to be handling the basics, i.e. as few as they can get away with having without risking a complete collapse of a key process.

As someone who recently returned to college to seek more advanced skills, I’m basically betting that my field of study will still be important enough to accommodate more professionals and researchers holding graduate degrees when I graduate. At the same time, I’ll also be facing the question of whether I would need to study even more to put myself ahead of the competition or if at some point my education will make me over- qualified for the jobs employers are willing to offer. There are no set rules or guidelines. I’m just trying to make educated guesses based on BLS data and my experience in IT as well as that of others in the field.

So if even those who invested years in the job market before seeking to push their education to another level are playing a kind of employment blackjack, what of those who are fresh out of high school, headed to a four year college because that’s what they’ve been told to do? What if they decide to take on areas of study that are absolutely fascinating to them but for which employers have no regard? What company has a use for military historians or a creative writing major? Certainly teachers, designers and copywriters are always needed and there will always be a few places for them. However, there will be a lot more competition for those places and many of these degree holders may end up doing something very different with their majors.

That’s helping to turn a bachelor’s degree into an evaluation of one’s skills to pay attention in class rather than acquire relevant skills for the job and it’s starting to depress the wage premiums on having a degree in the first place. We can’t turn colleges into job factories taking orders from companies based on their employment projections and we need institutions which encourage people to explore and broaden their horizons. At the same time, pretending that every major will eventually yield a career which can ensure a stable living wage is also irresponsible.

But then again, it’s difficult to predict what skills will be in demand four years from now because the economy runs on corporate profits and annual salaries rather than a four year cycle of hiring brand new grads. In fact, the worse the economy, the less grads can expect to land a job and may very well end up spending more and more time in college, accruing debt and becoming highly educated but inexperienced. Some colleges combat this by requiring resumes demonstrating professional experience in a chosen area of expertise if you want to be a graduate student so you’re more likely to stick with your chosen curriculum and your degree will actually help you in future endeavors by showing that you’ve spent the time and effort taking your skills to a new highs. Still, what about newly enrolled college freshmen who are still not sure what they want to study, only told that a college degree is a necessity for success and will always help them land a job?

Will colleges try to make sure that only high achievers will be awarded degrees and try to make degrees more exclusive? Will they be willing to grant more degrees to more students because they feel this will get them the funds they need in the future because they can pressure politicians with high graduation numbers? And what will happen in a job market where a bachelor’s degree is the new high school diploma? Finding the answers to these questions will require a close cooperation between all the parties involved, and right now that kind of genuine communication between students, colleges, employees and politicians is sorely missing. College degrees seem to be becoming hit or miss experiments in landing a currently trendy job after college, quickly forgotten after landing the first professional, full time job after graduation as a simple formality…