The declining interest in college among kids and the reasons behind it.
The declining interest in college among kids and the reasons behind it.
Can College Be Saved? Exploring the Future of Higher Education
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On this week’s episode of Have a Nice Future, Gideon Lichfield and Lauren Goode explore the future of higher education with special guest Paul Tough, an education journalist, and author of The Inequality Machine. In light of rising costs and a lower return on investment, there are uncomfortable questions surrounding the purpose and value of a college education. Can college be saved?
Lauren Goode is [@LaurenGoode](https://twitter.com/LaurenGoode), and Gideon Lichfield is [@glichfield](https://twitter.com/glichfield). Bling, the main hotline, is [@ENBLE](https://twitter.com/ENBLE).
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Transcript
Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.
Gideon: Today, we’re just going to be super efficient. Uh, hold on a second. Have I got the doc? Where’s the doc?
[Music]
Gideon: Hi, I’m Gideon Lichfield.
Lauren: And I’m Lauren Goode.
Gideon: And this is ENBLE’s Have a Nice Future, a podcast about how terrifyingly fast everything is changing.
Lauren: Each week, we talk to someone with big, audacious, and sometimes unnerving ideas about the future, and we ask them how we can all prepare to live in it.
Gideon: This week, our guest is Paul Tough, a journalist who’s written several books on education. He’s also a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine.
Paul (audio clip): So the kind of public higher education system that we had 50 years ago, we could have again. It’s really just a question of priorities.
Lauren: So Gideon, I don’t know how comfortable you are with me aging you, but I’m just going to note—
Gideon: Oh I can be aged.
Lauren: OK, so it’s been a while since we’ve both been to college, or as your people say, university. So what made you think, OK, now is the time we have to have Paul Tough on the show?
Gideon: A few years ago, Paul wrote this book, The Inequality Machine, and it kind of busts open the myth of college as the great leveler in the US. We think of college as opening up opportunities to a better career, a more lucrative career. You know, that whatever background you came from, it can make the American dream come true for you, and his book says that that’s not actually true—that if anything, it exacerbates the existing social inequities in America. And then, early in September, Paul published a piece in The New York Times Magazine called “Americans Are Losing Faith in the Value of College.” And it paints a rather scary picture. It shows that college enrollment is going down, and more and more people just don’t think that college is a good investment anymore. And that seemed particularly relevant at the moment when hundreds of thousands of Americans are heading back to college.
Lauren: I read that article in preparation for this podcast, and, of course, I did the thing you’re not supposed to do, which is I went to the comments. It has more than 3,500 comments. So clearly that article touched a nerve, and I think the sense I got from reading the article, which is very different from when you and I went to college, is that for kids today, there is a real risk that it just becomes a raw deal, and it’s especially a raw deal if you are already in some way disadvantaged.
Gideon: Right. I mean, we’re pretty privileged. We had our educations when it cost a lot less—or nothing, in my case—and we’ve managed to forge careers pretty much in our chosen fields, although I think I’m still trying to figure out what I want to be when I grow up.
Lauren: Yes, fair enough. I have some second act planned at some point. I just don’t know what that is yet. But, you know, the thing that really struck me in the Times article as well, and you mentioned earlier, is this idea that at one point we were very high on higher ed here in America. Now something like 41 percent of young people are saying that college is important to them. Down from 74 percent a decade ago.
Gideon: That’s a big drop.
Lauren: It’s a huge drop. What is actually driving this change in sentiment?
Gideon: I mean, one of the big things, as you might expect, is the rising cost of college. But there’s a whole bunch of other social dynamics, and even the politics of college, that are changing. And all of this is stuff that I get into with Paul in the interview.
Lauren: Oh, I can’t wait to listen. Before we get to that conversation, though, I do have a small ask. So we’ve been getting some really great notes from our listeners, and we would love to hear more. So we have an email address. You can email us at [email protected]. Like our previous guest, Cory Doctorow, we do still read emails. Or you can just leave us some notes on your favorite podcast app. Tell us what you want to hear more of. Tell us what you don’t like. We can take it. We’re grown-ups here, but drop us a line, because we love hearing from you.
Gideon: And with that, my conversation with Paul Tough is coming up right after the break.
[Music]
Gideon: Paul Tough, welcome to Have a Nice Future.
Paul: Thank you. Great to be here.
Gideon: Are you having a nice future?
Paul: [Laughter] Yes, for the most part. It’s always hard to see the future, but, um, the present seems to be going well.
Gideon: It’s good to hear because one of the reasons we’re having you on the show is that you wrote a piece for The New York Times Magazine that paints a pretty terrifying future for higher education in the US. You’ve been writing about American education for years. You’ve written several books covering what contributes to children’s success in school. But more recently, you turned your focus to higher education. Why was that?
Paul: The two things that have always interested me were education and social mobility. The way that kids go to school, where they go to school, what they learn in school, how that affects their ability to change their lives. I was writing about early childhood. I was writing about K-12 education for a long time and then came to understand that in some ways, the real action in education and social mobility is in higher education. That this was the moment after high school where the lives of children from different backgrounds were really diverging more than anywhere else.
Gideon: So this story that you published this month in The New York Times depicts this rather alarming situation. Enrollment has been declining. The number of people going to college has been going down in the US, while it’s increasing for other OECD countries. And also people’s feelings about the value of college have turned a lot more negative in the last few years. And the key reason, broadly speaking, seems to be that there’s no longer a reliable promise that college will be worth it financially in terms of your later career, but you point to several trends that are behind that. So maybe you could talk a bit about each of those.
Paul: Sure. Yes. So, the sort of straightforward story where a college pays off, where you make a lot more money, you’re more likely to have a job. What I think both high-level economists, but also regular American families, have come to understand over the last decade is that in fact the equation is much more complicated than that, and what used to be a really sure thing, a very sort of stable investment, going to college is now a much more risky undertaking. There’s much more variability in outcomes. And so there are some people who are continuing to do great as the result of going to college. It’s really boosting their income. It’s boosting their wealth, but there are others for whom it is not paying off in the same way. And so there are a couple of relatively new studies that I wrote about that are parsing this question of how much college benefits people financially in new ways that I hadn’t seen before. And that sort of expanded my understanding of what’s really going on in terms of the finances of college. One of these studies looks at, instead of what economists usually look at, which they call the college wage premium— the very simple number of how much more on average a college graduate earns than a typical high school graduate—instead, they look at the college wealth premium. So over a lifetime, how much more assets versus debts do you have at the end of your working life if you went to college instead of not going to college, instead of just stopping with a high school diploma? And what these economists at the St. Louis Federal Reserve found was that, in fact, for younger graduates, for people born in the 1980s and afterward, that college wealth premium, the idea that you’d have a lot more money at the end of your working life if you had gone to college, was starting to disappear. And for African American graduates born in the ’80s and afterward, it had more or less disappeared altogether. For people who went on to get a postgraduate degree, the situation was worse, and what it looks like that the reason for that is, is that it’s all about tuition costs, rising tuition costs and student debt.
Gideon: It’s not only that it’s more of a gamble whether college is going to pay off, but that gamble also really depends on where you’re coming from.
Paul: Yes, exactly. And so this gets to the research of another economist at the Federal Reserve, a guy named Douglas Webber, who looked at the payoff of college through the lens of odds of how likely you are over the course of your life to come out ahead of someone who only has a high school degree. And what he found is, yes, that if you somehow manage to go to college and it’s completely free and you’re 100 percent certain that you’re going to graduate in six years, then actually college still does pay off. You have a 96 percent chance of earning more than a typical high school graduate. The problem is there aren’t many people who have that experience, right? And what he’s found is that about 40 percent of young people who start a college degree in this country do not finish it—drop out before finishing it. For them, the odds are really ruinous. They are almost always coming out behind people who only went to high school, because of the debt that they have and the lack of a credential to increase their earnings. He also found that it matters a lot what you study. So people who study—take, take a STEM degree, they’re still doing pretty well, their odds are, are still pretty good, even if they’re spending a good chunk of money on college. It’s the rest of us, those who are studying the arts, the humanities, the social sciences. If they are spending $25,000 a year on college, their odds are a coin flip whether they will do better than a high school graduate over their lifetime. And if they’re spending $50,000 a year, their odds are worse than even. There’s a better chance that the high school graduate is going to do better than them.
Gideon: And then there is nonetheless this paradox, which you pointed out, or at least, to me, it feels like a paradox, that you pointed out in your piece, that economists expect demand for American college graduates to keep rising faster than colleges keep up, and there are some projections you cite about a shortfall of somewhere between 6.5 and 8.5 million graduates in the labor force by 2030. Are there not enough spaces in college? Are they not recruiting the right people? Is it that the costs of putting people off?
Paul: Yeah. So that’s a mismatch between the supply and demand. Supply is going down. The number of American undergraduates is going down. It was at about 18 million undergraduates a decade or so ago. Now it’s at about 15.5 million. Some of that is changing demographics, but a lot of it is just students, young people making different decisions than they would have before. But the question of demand hasn’t changed. And in fact, what these economists are saying is that, uh, the way that the economy, the technology, that the global marketplace is changing, we need more highly educated people in the workforce. And so those demands don’t, don’t change based on the decisions teenagers are making. Those are just sort of basic facts in the economy. The problem is, whereas in the past, the sort of higher education economy would respond to that by saying, look, there’s this demand for people with degrees. It’s reflected in the college wage premium that college graduates are getting, and so we need to get more graduates out there. I think the institutions still want to do that. They’re desperate for more students, but it’s the students who are saying, nope, it’s not worth it. We, we believe you. The demand is there, but the costs are just too high.
Lauren: I just found the title for your new book.
Gideon: What’s that?
Lauren: You Can’t Eat Democracy.
Gideon: You Can’t Eat Democracy. There you go.
Lauren: Although it sounds like actually that you’d be making a very capitalistic argument with the book titled that, but yes, when actually you are fighting to better democracy.
Gideon: Exactly.
Lauren: OK. So like, how do we fix this? What did Paul—what was your takeaway from talking to Paul about what we actually need to do to fix our broken higher education system here in the United States? Aside from, OK, I’m just gonna marry a Brit and move to London. Gideon?
Gideon: Hint taken.
Gideon: Paul talks a bit about this in the interview. He points out in the article that 40 percent of people don’t graduate, and so you need to do a lot more to figure out who is not graduating, often people from poorer backgrounds, and how to help them navigate college and have a higher chance of success. He also talked about states improving their community college systems, so that it’s not just the flagship institutions but also the ones that serve the more general population that have a better standard of education and are better at helping students succeed so that fewer flunk out.
Lauren: I do wonder, though, even if we create a really great two-year college system or alternative college system and offer people different pathways to higher education, as long as the Ivy League exists as the Ivy League, as long as private donors are inclined to give money to these private institutions and balloon their endowments, as long as state governments and federal governments look at, you know, their budgets and say, you know what, we’re going to cut back again on giving money to public schools. It seems like that’s just going to continue to create a multi-tier system. Where the elite ultimately go to the elite institutions, and then someone else went to, like, the alternative school.
Gideon: So Paul did point out that back when the GI Bill was passed, which created a lot more college opportunities, it was also still possible to get a good, well-paid job that didn’t require a college degree and in fact the wage gap between white collar and blue collar jobs was not nearly as big as it is now. So today if you have a multi-tier system with vocational degrees and two-year degrees and so on that’s great. As long as the job opportunities are there and that they pay enough to cover the cost of whatever education that was, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having a multi-tier system and with having some schools that are elite schools that attract the best and the brightest and produce the cutting edge research and bring in students and professors from all over the world, but you need to make those accessible to talented people from all around the world strata of society. And crucially, and that people from underprivileged backgrounds who come to those schools have as much chance of succeeding at those schools as the people from wealthier backgrounds. And that is one of the things that seems not to be happening right now.
Lauren: Right. Ensuring that they have enough support so that they can finish, which puts them in a better position financially afterwards. Well, unfortunately, I don’t think we’re going to solve our broken education system in a half-hour podcast, but I think we, we took a good stab at it.
Gideon: I mean, yeah, I think for me, what this conversation highlighted was I hadn’t realized just how broken the education system is in terms of how much it denies people opportunity. And it seems like it should really be a wake up call.
Lauren: Right. And how down on higher-ed Americans are, which it seems like they should be because it seems like a raw deal. And I’m still mad about it.
Gideon: I just found the title for my new book.
Lauren: What’s that?
Gideon: You Can’t Eat Democracy.
