On Tuesday, my home town newspaper, The Marietta Times, asked the poll question: Would a tuition guarantee convince you to attend college? The question was really about the continued rise in college tuition costs and, as I noted in a comment:
The factors driving college tuition increases are multitudinous, and no one change will fix the problem, but I think the best place to begin is to somehow encourage students to do what I did: find ways to not borrow money (for me the solution was 11-years in the military) but for others the way to graduate debt free might involve part-time work/part-time school or other models.
Chris Arnade thinks, and I agree, that my goal of graduating debt-free is a fantasy. In Writing in College costs expose the false meritocracy of the American dream for The Guardian, Arnade writes:
I paid for my own college by working during summers. In 1987, I graduated from a Florida public college, with no debt. My yearly cost was $2,500, an amount I paid for by working picking watermelons, painting houses and tarring roofs. ?
I can only pay for my daughter’s college because I worked on Wall Street for 20 years. She could never pick enough of a cornucopia of watermelons, or quinoa, or kale to pay her costs.
My oldest daughter is going to college next year. The price, if she chooses a state university in New York, is roughly $25,000 per year. That is the cheapest option, and about 10 times what I paid. Adjusted for inflation, that’s about five times more expensive than my tuition fees.
My case is relatively normal. Over the last 30 years, the cost of education, adjusted for inflation, has increased 300 percent.
No summer jobs can pay for that, which is an important barrier to have crossed. Thirty years ago, college was below that barrier. You could work summer jobs, night jobs, and pay for college without taking out a loan. Now you can’t. Not even close.
Further, Arnade thinks that the game is intentionally rigged and pricing is the mechanism.
Most of the best paying jobs now require a college degree, or post-college degree, and still rarely hire from state schools. They want Ivy schools, or similar. That feels safe.
This is a problem. Businesses have abdicated their primary role in hiring, handing it over to colleges, which have gladly accepted that role, and now charge a shit-load for it. Want a job kid? Pay $60,000 a year for four years. Then maybe pay for another two to get a MBA.
Yet, those best schools do not teach kids anything radically different from what the average colleges do. They do not prepare them better for the day-to-day work of Wall Street. Those finance skills are learned with experience and instinct after two years of training – on the job.
Rather, a prestigious education is a badge given to students who can follow the established rules, run through the maze, jump through hoops, color between the lines, and sit quietly. It shows that they really, really want to be a grown-up. For that, they pay $60,000 per year.
It has become a test. Are you part of the meritocracy?
I see Arnade’s point, but I don’t think this is anything new. I had excellent professors at Ohio University in the early ’80s and I think that anyone who really looks closely at what happens in undergraduate programs will quickly realize that there’s no educational beef in the Ivy Leagues. What there is, however, is credentialization.
A degree from Harvard, or any of a select number of very expensive schools, gives a visa stamp on your social passport. The degree says: I’m one of you and I understand how the game is properly played. I’m a member of the One Percent.” Of course there are a number of diversity students allowed to attend, but like the pejorative used in English public schools, these scholarship boys (and girls) “aren’t really one of us.”
Private clubs such as these will continue to be private clubs as long as power, position and money, and not merit, continue to be the factors deciding who gets to play and who doesn’t.
While Molly Brown was an exception that proves the rule, I wouldn’t take that bet.
