President Obama’s proposal to make the first two years of college tuition free for students who can maintain at least a “C” average may have arrived precisely when students most need encouragement.
For many students and college students, staring glumly at the cost/benefit analysis of higher education, this is, indeed, turning out to be yet another winter of discontent.
The class of 2013 graduated with an average debt load of $32,500, owed to everyone from federal lenders to family members. The jobless rate for those between ages 16 and 24 is 12.4%, more than double that of the general population.
Student loans are also a national plague: student-loan debt, at $1.1trn, far outpaces even the total credit-card debt held by all Americans, as Pew has pointed out.
By the time I collected by own diploma in 1983, many of us were scurrying off to the (temporary) safe haven of graduate school as fast as we could. (Not coincidentally, grad school enrollment tends to track fluctuations in the unemployment rate.)
These days, that’s less of an option, given the amount of debt students are likely to rack up by collecting more degrees. Consider the University of California at Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, which last fall proposed to boost fees by 65% for in-state students. The university eventually chose a more modest $7,500 supplemental fee for students.
There are no simple answers to the question of whether college – community college, a four-year degree or post-graduate studies – is “worth it”. But even for the lowest-paid occupations, some kind of post-secondary education ends up boosting earnings by at least 10%.
You can fare better than a liberal arts major from a four-year college if you pick the right two-year program at a community college, too, the research suggests. About 30% of those who earn an associate’s degree in a science or technology-related field fare better out of the gate, winning jobs as lab technicians, draftsmen and paralegals. They make less than other graduates over time, but neither are they paying crushing student loans.
So perhaps the president’s plan is a good, pragmatic compromise?
It has certainly provoked plenty of debate, with some critics sneering at community colleges as “dropout mills”, others arguing that what the plan suggests is a lousy use of government funds and that even the massive $60bn plan won’t cover the most significant expenses associated with college, such as room, board and books.
Another group contends that this simply will end up widening the gap between the privileged individuals who can afford to attend a four-year college and everyone else.
Most of these critics have some valid points. But so do the students who, at just this point in time, are grimly studying the economics of their academic decisions. Should they not have bothered with it all, as a reported 12% of students surveyed end up concluding?
“More education still gives you some advantages,” says Anthony Carnevale, director of Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce.
The turning point came in 1981, he says: that’s when companies started the wave of downsizing that continues to this day and that disproportionately penalizes blue-collar workers with less education.
“Wage premiums for those with college educations went from being less than 40% before that date to more than 90% by the late 1990s,” Carnevale says.
What tends to get less attention, Carnevale says, is that for jobs, the field of study matters a lot more than your degree or where you earned it.
Carnevale says that certificate programs are now among the most popular offerings at community colleges, and make up nearly a quarter of all college awards, even though they don’t end with the recipient earning a degree.
He notes that someone with a certificate in heating, ventilation and air conditioning can have a median salary of $70,000 on completing the course. That’s far more than many liberal arts graduates with four-year college degrees can expect.
“But only about half of certificates are valuable – by which I mean, only about half give you earnings that are 20% higher than you would have earned with just a high school diploma,” Carnevale adds. “There are a whole host of these, but they tend to be in computers and technical fields, and 80% of the students tend to be male.”
Sure, they may end up losing ground, salary-wise, as the decades pass, but they also haven’t had to forfeit a chunk of their annual earnings to pay down student debt.
And to the extent that the president’s plan – or some other scheme – can cut one big expense, and grants or loans are available to cover the living expenses that can be just as daunting a financial obstacle as tuition itself, well, that gets one group of students one rung further up the educational ladder.
The proposal isn’t flawless, of course. For starters, it would be helpful had Obama identified those programs or certificates that actually do seem to give their recipients an edge.
Equally, students who get a general associate’s degree and then don’t move on to a four-year college to receive their diploma are going to see less benefit from the program.
But while President Obama is a pragmatist, the shape of this proposal also reveals a tinge of idealism that somehow has managed to survive six years in the White House.
If Congress passes his initiative, and you really want to study philosophy or medieval history – knowing you’re unlikely ever to make a dime as a result of investing your time – and you can find a community college program that qualifies, well, why not?
This is America, land of free choice, if not (yet) of free tuition.
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