What is a college degree actually worth these days?
And why the world doesn't need any more opinions, especially mine
“Dad, Wesleyan costs $89,000 a year.”
My daughter said these words to me a few nights ago. I knew annual tuition at private universities was hovering around $70,000, but when you put together the fees, the housing, the books… good lord.
And so I spent about 10 minutes with the cost calculator on the Wesleyan website, and well, she wasn’t wrong. The total estimated cost was $89,920. Per year. For four years. With a younger brother exactly four years behind her. Lest you think this price is exceptional, most private universities in the USA cost in the same ballpark. (Suspiciously so.)
My family doesn’t buy nice things. We have one car, a 2017 Subaru. My kids go to public schools. We sent our kids to budget daycare, we fly basic economy, we cook most of our meals. Come break into our house if you want; we barely own anything that you’d want to steal.
But if both our children were to attend private universities, assuming just 5% annual price increases, it would cost us (gulp) around $859,000 between now and 2032. That is… a lot more than we’ve saved.
Now, just to be clear, we probably won’t be spending that. Most families spend less than the sticker price. And California, this woke and broke hellhole of a state, has a splendid public university system. Total costs per year are about 60% less than private universities.
But still, sending both our kids to state universities, using the same inflation formula, puts us at around $391,000 in total costs. Yeesh.
Is a private school worth that much more than a public one? Is any four-year university education even worth what it costs? To be clear, these are uniquely American (and British) questions to consider. In most of the developed world, college tuition is free or at least a lot cheaper than here. Even with discounts based on financial need, a university education in the US or UK costs significantly more than in other countries. And it just so happens that our two countries have much greater income inequality than other places (represented below as the Gini coefficient).
As a policy, making college expensive is costly to society in other ways. A nation needs a highly educated citizenry to start companies, make scientific discoveries, pass laws, create jobs, and even win wars.
Economically, it’s also not great for your young adults to have high indebtedness when starting out in life. As a percentage of America’s economy, student loans grew from 4% in 2008 to around 7.5% in 2016. It plateaued until the pandemic, and it’s since sunk to 6.5% as the economy has surged (with inflation). That’s a lot of money, especially if you consider that most of that 6.5% of the entire economy is hanging over people who are early in their careers, a deprivation that prevents buying a home, planning a family, or starting a business.
And yet, in aggregate, life is significantly better for the college educated than for everyone else. Life is longer, too.
As you can see above, life expectancy for people without a four-year degree stalled around 2010, declined through the start of the pandemic, and then collapsed. COVID had a lot to do with it.
But it’s not just COVID; “deaths of despair” are also surging among the non-college-educated, especially white men, coinciding with a surge in gun ownership and availability of opioids.
Marriages, too, last starkly longer among the college-educated. A woman with a degree who gets married is 78% likely to still be married to the same person 20 years later, versus 40% for women with only a high school education.
So obviously, spending your nest egg on an advanced education isn’t like blowing it on Beyonce floor tickets. You get something tangible for your money, right? You meet lots of people your age and form lifelong relationships. You get access to different careers and future life paths. And you get an education.
OK, that last part, education, is where the conversation gets especially weird.
But first, let’s watch a video. Warning: it will probably annoy you.
FitnessWithAlison (133k TikTok followers) is a young woman in Alabama who last month published a series of rants about how she can’t land a marketing job that pays more than her hated service job, in spite of $80,000 in student debt. Her TikTok followers are generally supportive in the comments, many of them commiserating with similar debt/income situations.
Another video of hers also went viral on other platforms like Xitter, and when that happens it’s because someone wants to humiliate them. Outside of the empathetic bubble of her TikTok followers, older people mocked her entitlement (“she thinks she deserves $150,000 right out of school. Oh honey.”), her tone deafness (“what is that luxury SUV she’s driving?”), or even her decision to go to college at all.
But this reveals a much larger point about what’s happened to higher education in America. It used to be that higher education, in addition to preparing for your career, was an introduction to a lifelong learning process that helped one better understand the world and participate productively in the citizenry of a nation. It’s the same patriotic reason we made K-12 compulsory. But college was also not meant for everyone — it was for “the best and brightest,” which ostensibly meant the smartest and most motivated high school students, but really meant kids who had the right parents and educational resources.
In 1980, fewer than half of high school students attended college. That grew to almost 70% by 2016, making college an expectation for most people (and their parents). But also, since 1980, controlling for inflation, the price of college has more than tripled to over $17,000 a year. For private universities, the costs are even 3-4x higher.
So you have more people attending university (most of them women), competing to take on more debt to do it. No wonder college is becoming a purely economic calculation.
“Plastics”
My introduction to college as career training arrived in the early ‘90s, when I myself was in school. Every person I met from earlier generations had these things to say:
“What are you majoring in?” (Government.)
“What are you going to do with that?” (Nothing, probably.)
“One word, plastics.” (Politely chuckle like every other white dude born before 1965 hadn’t already made that joke to everyone else my age.)
While Wesleyan was teaching me that a liberal arts education was its own reward, and would also benefit my livelihood through an adaptive mindset of lifelong learning, the world was asking me “what are you going to do with that degree?” Not “what are you going to do after your degree?” But “what are you going to do with that degree?”
You hear a lot from college skeptics — particularly cultural conservatives — that college is often “wasted” on “useless subjects,” which are typically defined as anything not related to making money, and especially anything they find annoying or threatening. This effectively reframes college as career training, a place to learn a set of skills which will not significantly change over the decades.
But the reality is that the college-level jobs of 2023 (sometimes called “knowledge work”) tend to change drastically over time, and sometimes quite suddenly. In marketing, for example, the skills change dramatically every 18-24 months. The strategies and tactics I used in 2015 would be desperately ineffective in 2023. You evolve or die.
To be truly successful in the private sector often requires an understanding of history, economics, sociology, philosophy, psychology, biological sciences, physics — the type of broad education that’s not obviously applicable to a specific career track.
Which gets us back to our TikTok friend FitnesswithAlison, who is incensed that nobody will hire her in spite of her expensive marketing degree. What Alison is learning the hard way is that the job market doesn’t really value what you learned from your marketing degree. She might have been better off studying economics or Mandarin or American history, and then using her intellectual plasticity to build a portfolio of free marketing work for local businesses. She clearly knows how to build a TikTok following, after all. Her resume could have been thick with web building, SEO, and social media strategy. She wouldn’t even need a degree for that!
The Paper Ceiling
Here’s another area where Alison and others are almost right. For those out in the world already, a degree should not always be an entry requirement for many careers.
The tech industry, where I work, has only recently come around to this. Google notoriously used to only hire from a handful of universities favored by their founders. When I interviewed there in 2009, the recruiter asked me about my college GPA and SAT score. My SAT score!
In the mid-’10s, when I was working at another Big Tech, the recruiters assigned to me gave me a template for an open mid-level marketing job. One of the requirements was “four-year degree in business, marketing, or related field.”
I had to ask, “Why do we require a college degree? This is an experienced role. If someone has a track record, should we care what they majored in, or if they went to school at all?”
The recruiters were actually pretty delighted to have this discussion, and to remove the degree requirement. On its own, a college degree is primarily a measure of your parents’ social class than anything else. Making it a job requirement effectively shuts out qualified people based on their childhood circumstances. And since getting into school is harder than finishing, a degree requirement — especially like Google did it until recent years — is only slightly less absurd than asking a grown-ass adult what how they did on the SAT when they were 17.
Removing the degree requirement raised the quality and diversity of my applicant pool beyond expectations, enough so that I actually wrote a blog post about it.
So I haven’t required a degree for any job opening in years. Not for marketing. (Sorry, Alison. Maybe work on your resume?)
A billboard recently went up near my home that calls degree requirements “the paper ceiling.” But that we even need an ad campaign for this speaks volumes about how society still values a degree for the wrong reasons, even decades after someone earned it. I’m 21 years removed from my Berkeley MBA, but that credential still opens doors for me.
This is where Alison has a point. Based on what she’s shared, her approach to college seems to have rendered it a waste of money and time, all for “a piece of paper that doesn’t even work.” If her exclusive objective was to qualify herself for a marketing career, then yes, a four-year degree was an inadvisable way to pursue that. As she says, she was indeed “lied to,” or at least misinformed by people who didn’t really understand the value of education. Given what she really desires is a 2023 Ford Bronco, it’s possible that she wasn’t listening very attentively.
And yes, people with college degrees are pulling away from people without them, both economically and also literally. College graduates are increasingly less likely to marry non-graduates (although this is evolving as women outnumber men in American universities by a double-digit margin), and they tend to live in urban clusters, while the less-educated remain in economically fragile communities that vote Republican by a 30%+ margin.
We have to remember that college isn’t an independent variable in all the charts we’ve showed above. College is very much an end result of having family support and/or financial means, more than it is a causal factor for a longer, happier life. College is also a social indicator of other privileges that themselves lead to higher incomes, longer and healthier lives, and solid families. '
In other words, college is a milestone in an existing American caste system. Treating it like a ticket to the good life is one reason why so many poorly guided young people owe so much money for educations that don’t serve them (or that they might not have even completed).
Both of my kids are very likely to attend college, and possibly even more school after that, but that’s really their choice. They might also choose to major in some kind of liberal art that is not directly applicable to a career. This is itself a privilege that many people in the USA cannot access.
My kids also have role models: two parents with careers that diverge from their studies, using skills that you can’t learn meaningfully in a class but only by trying, failing, and learning. And it’s the trying and learning that college is supposed to be about.
Now is Wesleyan worth $180,000 more than a state university? We’ll see what kinds of choices the admissions and financial aid offices grant us.
Our opinions are almost worthless
OK, one last topic here, following up on last week’s newsletter.
Somebody once thought to say: “Opinions are like assholes: everybody has one, and they all stink.” This must have appeared somewhere in print decades ago, so let’s just blindly credit Mark Twain or Oscar Wilde.
Not all opinions really do stink, but they are cheaper than ever. It used to be that if you wanted to share an opinion, you had to write a letter to the editor or wait on hold for talk radio, and hope the gatekeepers judged yours worthy. In the early internet era, the technical barriers to starting a website or weblog were just high enough to keep most opinions to the comment section, and we all know how wonderful the comment section is.
When Twitter came along, it was still too confusing for most normies. They’d create an account and maybe tweet their name, and then see a feed full of code like “RT @dropitlikeitswet Boehner doesn’t a have chance of passing #anwropen h/t @jcourtis,” and then sign off forever.
But now everyone has figured out the basics of self-expression on the internet. As Kyle Fitzpatrick writes in his essential Trend Report:
This is the era of the community note, a faulty, populist “fact checking” where everyone does their own research despite being below-average students. This is an age of disinformation and disappointment, yet we have been primed to compete for attention in wartime scenarios.
This is worth mentioning because nobody actually thinks they have opinions anymore; there are only “facts” and “takes.”
Your Instagram stories and Facebook feed these days are loaded with “facts,” many of which are propaganda, many of which are counter-propaganda, and many of which are meta-propaganda (propaganda about propaganda).
Which brings us to Israel and Gaza.
The actual indisputable, context-free facts seem to be that Hamas soldiers brutally killed, maimed, or abducted anyone they saw near the Gaza border. And Israel since then has been firing rockets into Gaza — thousands of them by their own count — killing even more people than Hamas did. And Hamas has been firing rockets back, and so has Hezbollah on the other side of the country.
To be watching any form of media is to be pushed various perspectives on Israel, Hamas, Gaza, Iran, Hezbollah, anti-Semitism, and the Palestinian movement, a Rashomon-style narrative where either Israel or the Palestinian people are heroes or victims. These maps and graphs show how we’re right and good, they’re wrong and consumed with hatred.
It’s a shame that Kellyanne Conway coined the phrase “alternative facts” to mean “lies that Donald Trump made up to benefit himself,” because we are living in an age of actual alternative facts that are true, but just cherry picked from the sloppy mess of context.
The line between a “fact” and a “take” is also fuzzier than ever. When I write about the Israel/Gaza situation, someone may point out that even calling it “the Israel/Gaza situation” is unfair to a group, or reflects how my mind has been propagandized into belief.
And that person is absolutely correct! I can’t see everything that’s happening in Israel or Gaza, I don’t speak any of their languages, and the “history” I’ve learned is also highly subjective. I don’t actually know what’s propaganda. We’re all making judgments to determine how to feel about what we hear, and one’s confidence is unrelated to to the depth of their knowledge and context.
So I’m generally keeping quiet. As I mentioned last week, I’m disappointed that people appear to be keeping score about Whom You’re Standing With on Facebook. My opinion is that innocent people shouldn’t be massacred with weapons, that Israel has the Right to Defend Itself, that ordinary Gazans have the right not to get killed by missiles raining from the sky, and that sometimes those ideas are directly in opposition to each other. Barack Obama expressed it well.
And this is also why you won’t read a lot of opinions in this newsletter, about any topic. Instead you’ll see a version of a story that I want to tell, with the eternal caveat of how much I don’t know about the world. I always hope you enjoy it, and your comments and emails are always cherished.
The cost driver seems to be the lifestyle, not the eduction: Housing, sports, entertainment, subsidized food, private police forces, etc. The scammy for-profit colleges capitalized on the demand for a no-frills education that is accessible to full- and part-time workers and those juggling family responsibilities. Too bad they were scams and not run by educators actually interested in developing a school.
Eric-a long time since our paths have crossed but nice to have a chance to read your reflections on these topics. Thanks for your thoughts - will look forward to following along...