Is College a Relic? What’s the ROI?
A message pings on my phone from my friend Rob: “I wrote a manual for the newbie on understanding college costs and how to accelerate earning a college degree. Do you want to read it?” I help students get into college for a living and am the parent of four children in college or approaching college, so I not only live and breathe this professionally but, like my clients, must myself solve the puzzle of paying for college– four times over across a span of 14 years. Do I want to read my friend’s work? You betcha.
Many parents dive deep on the “How to get into college?” and “How to pay for college?” questions as their kids approach junior year of high school. Cheering together at track meets or sitting around the picnic table at friends’ barbecues, my family has grown used to sidebar conversations as friends approach: Should she take the SAT or ACT? How can we negotiate this merit aid offer? Is my kid ready for college, or should he take the gap year? None of these folks has written a how-to guide, but it doesn’t surprise me that Rob has.
Rob drops the spiral-bound volume off on a Friday morning, and after the door closes behind my last kid’s exit to school, I skim through it in under an hour, nodding my head and jotting notes for myself. Rob’s analysis is thorough and important, offering key understandings for any family trying to figure out the college admissions and college payment systems. His main critique of the college process is that it is unduly costly and without sufficient return on investment to justify the four-year cost (for most students).
Before I unpack that in full, here’s what is beyond the scope of his project, but that I also would argue is just as much a part of the conversation: done well, college can prepare a student for a lifetime of critical thinking and agile navigation through life and career. In other words, being able to earn a living relates to but is not necessarily the most important outcome of a college education. My own experience in college taught me to question everything– why, yes, I was a Philosophy and Religious Studies major– and introduced me to people who helped me build my mind, one linguistics class and midnight dorm room debate at a time. College financial writer Ron Lieber is credited these days with the idea that college should leave a student with her “mind grown and mind blown,” but he’s not the only one who points out that our time in college can change how we think in a way that lasts a lifetime.
Achieving this type of intellectual expansion can seem impossible, however, when there is such intense pressure on universities to be all things to all people and at a cost that doesn’t saddle students with a lifetime of debt. More than 60 years ago, Clark Kerr, then the president of the University of California system, gave a series of lectures that is now collected in “The Uses of the University.” Therein he named the multiversity: the American approach to higher education that attempts to meld both the pre-professional training and research growth of the German universities of the 1800s with the classical education and cultivation of mind of the English education at an Oxford or Cambridge.
We have inherited this schizophrenia of purpose today, and I see it with my own students and their families. Is college for joining a fraternity for lifelong bonds and future career connections? Is it to have a diploma from an impressive school that opens the door to the right graduate school? Is it to gain a skill that will land a student a job the day after graduation? With questions like these looming, rare is the student who plans to declare a major in English, philosophy, or history. Nathan Heller’s 2023 “The End of the English Major” in the New Yorker magazine pulls the data: the study of English and history has fallen by a third in US colleges over the last decade. Any student who tells me she wants to study a subject in the humanities usually amends herself quickly: “But I’ll study finance/engineering/computer science so I can have the lifestyle I grew up with.” If I had a nickel for every time I heard that … well, all those nickels would go into my kids’ college funds.
Can there be a financial case that studying majors in the humanities can prepare students to think creatively, readying them to nimbly adapt to changing ideas– and job requirements? BlackRock COO Robert Goldstein noted in 2024– with artificial intelligence taking over the white collar workforce– that his company was increasingly hiring humanities majors: “We have more and more conviction that we need people who majored in history, in English, and things that have nothing to do with finance or technology.”
Notwithstanding the argument for the intrinsic value and potential economic value of a humanities education, we must also consider that the effective cost of college has doubled in one generation, while the public’s trust in higher education has dropped precipitously in recent years. This month, Yale University released a committee report of a group of Yale professors who sought to identify the sources of and solutions to the public erosion of trust (down to 36% in 2024 from 57% a decade before) in institutions of higher education. The committee identified three problem areas: 1) the soaring price of education and the perception that education is no longer worth the price tag, 2) a perception that the admissions process is itself unfair, and 3) an array of concerns about academic mission, speech on campus, and political bias.
In sum, colleges face erosion of trust; the cost of college to the consumer has doubled in a generation, in no small part because of the drop in federal and state funding after the 2007 financial crisis; and the economic case for an education, including in STEM, is in question with artificial intelligence displacing white collar work across law, computer science, and finance.
The other day I texted a girlfriend whose second child just committed to the college of her choice: “So, do we really NEED college? Can’t we just have our kids earn a plumbing license and make sure to use their library cards frequently?” I’m going to keep arguing for the value of education Ron Lieber style– mind grown and mind blown– but if we don’t pay attention to the economics of the college proposition, college itself may become a relic. Whatever part of the multiversity your kid and you want to partake of, it’s worth considering my friend Rob’s points (and my editorials):
The cost of college is outstripping families’ ability to afford the investment (and loan reform has limited students’ ability to finance college). Christina: The GI Bill opened up college opportunities for students post WWII and post Vietnam War. That, coupled with federal and state subsidies, made college accessible and increasingly important to large segments of adults in the US for two generations. Now, the effective cost of college has doubled in a generation (my generation) with in-state cost of attendance above $40,000 for families who don’t receive aid and private colleges nearing $100,000 per year. Reasons (primarily): federal and state funding is exceedingly low, while the administrative cost of running a college is higher than ever. Bottom line: even at the public, in-state level, gone are the days when a student could work her way through school by living at home and paying tuition with a part-time job. In addition, with federal student loan reform over the last generation, a student is limited in her ability to borrow (a good thing), so any debt for school beyond a small amount ($27,500 total for undergrad) is actually family debt.
A college education may no longer provide the credential a student needs to succeed professionally, thus undermining the value proposition for college. You must have a way to develop and demonstrate skills that goes beyond the paper of your diploma. Christina: we should also value the qualitative gains of college experience and exposure (if college is affordable for the family and leads the student toward knowing herself and developing a marketable skillset). Lifetime earnings map out in fascinating ways based on major of choice, and can be complicated by graduate education and career choices. In other words, a philosophy major who later graduates from an Ivy league law school or an English major who works in consulting at Bain will have different trajectories from the history major who works as a barista after college. Assuming that the only way to monetize a history degree is to become a history professor (or a barista) is a limiting way to view that degree.
There are ways to make college more affordable and to speed up the process of acquiring the college credential: online schooling, community college credits, CLEP exams, dual enrollment, and AP courses can all reduce the amount of time a student needs to spend in college and paying top dollar for college credits.
Christina: These programs can work when done well, and Rob’s guide is a comprehensive map for students and families wishing to take advantage of these alternate routes to gaining credits. Students and families must be careful in researching which colleges will accept these credits and for which majors. It can be challenging to anticipate this when we don’t usually know a student’s college pathway three and four years ahead of enrollment. Even if a student follows a traditional four-year path, she will need to educate herself on building a college list for financial fit.
Many students choose majors for their supposed employability and long-term viability but don’t appreciate what the real pipeline to a job looks like, both educationally and over the long term.Christina: Rob maps helpful points around these difficulties that every student should consider. It’s informative to see which speed bumps arise in school and professionally when a student chooses business, computer science, or education as a major. In an uncertain job market, students are right to take his advice about understanding what awaits them during education and afterward. The College Essay Guy has some targeted advice on how to choose a major.
But back to why and what we are doing beyond just paying for college. Jodi Kantor wrote graduating college seniors a love note in last week’s New York Times: “It’s Time to Build a Career. Grab a Notebook.” She tells her young readers about her stops and starts in her own career path, arguing the thesis that every one of us must develop a craft– the professional competence built around skills– and that this craft should be framed around solving the problems that drive our interest. Similarly, I often talk with my students about the Japanese concept of ikigai, which is a life’s purpose that drives you forward. It gets you up in the morning and gives your life meaning because it both fulfills your interest and betters the world.
If all I ever wanted to do was make money, I would have kept my first job as a corporate lawyer, but I lived the experience of what Kantor points out, “Perhaps you’ve met people who live happy, fulfilled lives despite being miserable at work. I have not.” She reminds us all to pay attention to what we think about, read about, and do when no one is making us. When I started searching for the path to my second career, I thought about all those things, and I became attuned to the skills that other people noticed in me too. I felt like I was drowning professionally the year I worked on an arbitration in Germany, trying to navigate three legal systems and a foreign country, all while managing being a parent to our first child. When one of my bosses pointed out my skill in prepping witnesses for deposition, though, it felt like a lifeline, and I brought that counseling angle into my current profession. That was just one glimmer of many that set me on my next path.
If we continue to look at college the way we did sixty or even thirty years ago, as an inevitable step in the journey to professional security and success, we will be dinosaurs, just like some of the colleges that are shuttering. Neither the cost structure of college nor the state of the professional world would make that a wise choice. But if we approach the college experience with a balanced view of cost, career outcomes, and growth, it can still be viable for many students. And for those who don’t want college? There are incredible pathways elsewhere, and I would be just as thrilled to support one of my own clients (or one of my own children) in pursuing the trades. I would just make sure they made use of that library card too.