OPINION:
America’s universities — and employers offering the best opportunities to graduates — need a reality check.
Even before demonstrations disrupted campuses and forced embarrassing confrontations between university presidents and congressional leaders, public confidence in universities was waning.
According to a recent Gallup Poll, only 36% of Americans expressed a lot of confidence in higher education — down from 48% just six years earlier.
Although college graduates earn more, live longer and healthier lives and enjoy more employment stability, only 22% of adults believe college is worth the cost if the student must take out loans — just 47% are OK with college if borrowing is not necessary.
The hard data says otherwise — if the student chooses wisely.
In 2023, the barebones cost of going to college — tuition, fees, room and board — averaged about $153,000 over four years. Add to that lost income — at $15 an hour or $30,000 a year — and the price balloons to $273,000.
For in-state institutions, the average cost was $229,000 and for the typical private college, $355,000.
If you add travel, spending money, books and so forth, these figures could balloon. But if the student earns money on school breaks, those could cancel out with attentive planning.
The earning premiums for a college degree over a high school diploma are currently about $30,500 a year.
The interest rate on federally guaranteed student loans is now 6.53%. That puts the discounted present value of the wage premium over a working lifetime at about $370,000.
Students can make most private colleges work, but they must be careful.
You can quibble with my assumptions.
The wage rate for a new high school graduate might be lower, but even at $12 an hour, the average cost of college is still about $250,000. Conversely, college-graduate wage data includes those who spent even larger sums on advanced training.
Many college graduates earn much more than the average $71,000, and the secret is in choosing a major and location well.
Baruch College is a great investment. It sends many business and finance majors to the ready Manhattan market.
Majoring in the humanities or many social sciences will likely land you below the average.
All this math ignores that 38% of college freshmen don’t graduate.
Half of college graduates end up in positions that don’t require their degrees, and about one-quarter earn less than the typical high school graduate.
From an employment perspective, supply exceeds demand for college graduates, and many Generation Zers opt to learn a trade or enter an apprenticeship — routes that often pay while the young person earns.
Employers like experience, and employment opportunities are consistently better for students with just about any major who do a reasonably relevant internship.
Universities are simply not accountable these days.
Faculty either make or severely constrain administrators’ hiring and firing decisions. Hence, professors’ left-wing prejudices are self-perpetuating. It’s maddeningly difficult to scale back undersubscribed departments to create spaces in programs that offer good postgraduation job prospects.
Employers often complain that graduates lack the critical thinking ability and soft skills to work smoothly with others and deal with frustration.
That is unsurprising given that universities are compelling rigidity of thought and allegiance to progressive purity when recruiting faculty.
Employers use diplomas as signaling devices — even if they say otherwise.
Employers are eliminating degree requirements and emphasizing skills more. A LinkedIn study found a 36% rise in job postings that did not require a degree, but the share of positions filled by candidates without a sheepskin rose much less.
Colleges won’t really change until we have an exit exam that tests graduates’ ability to organize complex information to solve problems, deal with ambiguity and tolerate disagreement. Then, employers could use the results to screen applicants.
College should be worthwhile for noneconomic reasons, too.
In the words of Sydney J. Harris, a 20th-century journalist at the Chicago Daily News and Chicago Sun-Times, “The primary purpose of a liberal education is to make one’s mind a pleasant place in which to spend one’s leisure” and to turn “mirrors into windows.”
But these days, looking at the intolerance on college campuses — the unyielding compliance with “woke” ideology demanded of faculty and students — it’s hard to expect universities to impart or even seek to cultivate such reflective qualities.
After the recent turmoil at prominent institutions such as Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, a few presidents lost their jobs, and prominent donors advocated withholding contributions until progress has been made on antisemitism and other forms of intolerance.
But things won’t change until powerful men and women on Wall Street and elsewhere refuse to hire new graduates from Ivy League and other elite institutions that won’t clean up their faculties and establish an atmosphere where open discourse based on verifiable facts and reason is welcome again.
• Peter Morici is an economist and emeritus business professor at the University of Maryland, and a national columnist.
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