SOURCE:
USA TODAYURL:
http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2016/08/04/college-tuition-enrollment-debt-graduate-unemployment-bubble-sykes-column/87995576/by: Glenn Harlan Reynolds
Colleges, and graduate programs, are in trouble. Enrollments are falling — and not just at the PC-tainted University of Missouri — student debt is rising, and, worst of all in any bursting-bubble industry, the rubes seem to be catching on. This weekend, walking out of the drugstore, I saw Consumer Reports’ cover story, “I kind of ruined my life by going to college.” It was all about student loan debt and what it does to people’s lives. Hint: Nothing good.
I noted some years ago that trends in higher education couldn’t continue. The cost of college goes up every year; salaries, on the other hand, have grown much more slowly, if at all. This means that where today’s parents might have been able to comfortably fund their educations with loans and part-time work, today’s students can’t. Tuition is too high to cover with a waitressing job, and salaries are too low to comfortably pay back the debt after graduation. Or, sometimes, to pay it back at all.
When I wrote that book, student loan debt was approaching a trillion dollars. Now, Charles Sykes’ new book, Fail U.: The False Promise of Higher Education says that it’s $1.3 trillion, unsurprising given that tuitions of $60-70,000 a year are common now, and most students borrow to cover expenses.
The problem is that neither students nor society are getting their money’s worth.
Politicians sell education as a solution to economic inequality because it has two features that politicians love: It sounds good, and people won’t discover that it isn’t true until much later. Plus, when you push spending on education, you can always count on support from educators, who have a lot of influence in the media.
But as Sykes notes, “college for all” isn’t actually a good idea. Not everyone — probably not even most people — will really benefit from college. Fifty three percent of college grads under 25, he reports, are unemployed, or underemployed, working part-time or in low-paying jobs that don’t require a college degree.
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