Make the colleges pay

Must every young boy and girl aspire to have a university education? This delusion has become so strong in America that many on the left demand that not only should more and more young people get into universities, but that this four-year party should be free as well.  

But efforts to get Congress to appropriate the money to pay the college bar tab have failed thus far. The chief obstacle, by no means unreasonable, is how to convince the supposedly uneducated working class to pay for this sotted campus idyll of which they have had no part.  

Nevertheless, even if Congress has blocked that avenue — the democratic process being a threat to democracy — the Biden administration instead has cleverly tried to use a loophole in a 2003 law in order to write off $430 billion of student debt from the books. By way of an executive order, much as all despots have since time immemorial, the administration has argued that in a national emergency, the pen is mightier than a vote.  

In oral arguments last week, the Supreme Court heard the administration’s dubious justification for its debt cancellation scheme. The Biden team’s legal eagles claim it is within the president’s emergency powers to forgive student debt due to the exigencies of the Covid pandemic. Never mind that the president declared on television last year that the pandemic was over. Unsuccessful on the merits, the solicitor general was left to argue before the justices that since no one is harmed by the debt write-off, then no one has standing to sue the government.  

Lost in all this discussion, however, is identifying who is responsible for churning out unemployable graduates and low-wage eggheads. While lawyers and venerable judges may split hairs over who has standing to bring a case against the government, it is without question that universities have jacked up prices to astronomical levels without delivering much learning in return.  

Yale recently announced tuition will run $83,000 per year; a degree may soon cost half a million dollars. Will the government continue to forgive student debt in the future as universities continue to raise their prices? If you are a citizen of the United States, and there are over 300 million of those, you have standing against this imbecility.  

University degrees are the most overrated pieces of paper in our era. It pays to have one, not for the skills that colleges impart, but because the labor market is too lazy to judge candidates on their own. To avoid the trouble of bad hires, American employers have outsourced ranking, screening and selecting people to the universities, who in turn have asked the public to foot the bill.  

If I had my way, I would abolish all public spending on higher education

Michael Gibson

Economists have long known about this sorting function thanks to an intriguing detail in their research on wages. It turns out a big chunk of the economic benefits from college falls off if a student drops out one day before graduating. That would not be true if college were about obtaining skills. On that theory, a student one credit shy of graduating would make almost as much as one who departs on graduation day. But in fact, he makes nearly 30 percent less. On top of that, college admission committees screen for people who already possess remarkable abilities before they ever arrive on campus. It is sad and worth lamenting — and indeed shocking to many — that colleges currently offer no evidence that students improve their abilities due to their coursework after four years. If the degree were a drug, the FDA would ban it until schools demonstrated efficacy.  

Were we to bulldoze the higher education system to rubble, and start from scratch, the best way to provide advanced training would be through apprenticeship. Doctors should be trained in hospitals; lawyers in courts; police on the beat; teachers in the classroom; craftsmen on construction sites. We should not remove people from the very conditions of their work and hold them hostage at great cost in a lecture hall for years on end. 

The Swiss have done quite well in this respect. Almost 70 percent of their teens participate in an apprenticeship program. Instead of going into debt, Swiss teens learn by doing, make $1,200 a month, and launch their careers with admirable momentum. America would do well to follow. The idea that everyone must follow some general plan for learning is fatal for a nation, especially when things go haywire.  

If universities have done less positive good than commonly thought, they have certainly done great harm. Fewer professors than ever pursue the truth or make discoveries. Pseudo-specialization, particularly in the humanities, abounds. Activists have chased out the scholars, and as a result enrollment in the liberal arts is in free fall. It is not uncommon to see a 50 percent decline in the number of humanities majors at top colleges during the last decade. Instead of bastions for free thought, universities have become madrassas for “woke” fundamentalism. Young graduates emerge from these extremist temples equipped with destructive philosophies of intolerance and the feverish urge to censor, both of which they have subsequently brought into the human resource departments of many Fortune 500 companies. The water cooler has never been so chilly and humorless.  

Equity, Critical Race Theory and post-modernism are the kiss of death to scholarship and creativity. We should not expose young people to crackpot theories at public expense.  

If I had my way, I would abolish all public spending on higher education. Make the universities pay the cost of worthless degrees. Tax the endowments. Few will join me on this crusade, so I’ll have to settle for less. The Supreme Court’s judgment will come down in June. Let us hope the conservative majority sides with none other than Nancy Pelosi, who said as recently as the summer of 2021 that “it would take an act of Congress, not an executive order, to cancel student loan debt.” And then, if we’re lucky, perhaps some ambitious politician will try to hold the universities accountable for this madness. But I won’t hold my breath. The college delusion is too strong.