The Edge

I’m Scott Carlson, a senior writer at The Chronicle covering higher ed and where it’s going. This week, I tell you about a recent debate I had about the purpose and value of college.

‘Is College Worth It or Not?’

A few weeks ago I took part in a spicy but civil debate about an immensely important topic. It had an alluring title: “Is College Worth It or Not?”

My opponent was Kathleen deLaski, whose book, Who Needs College Anymore? happened to come out on the same day as my book, Hacking College. DeLaski has a formidable background: She was a White House correspondent for ABC; the first female spokesperson for the Pentagon, in the Clinton administration; an executive at AOL and Sallie Mae; and the president of her family foundation. In higher-education circles, she is especially known as the founder of the Education Design Lab, an organization that researches and reports on the intersection of careers, skills, and educational alternatives — work that is very much in line with the topics of her book.

I’ll start here — as I did during our debate, which was held at LinkedIn’s San Francisco headquarters and organized by Nitzan Pelman, a social entrepreneur working in education — with where deLaski and I agree. Who Needs College Anymore? is a valuable examination of the “other” routes to adulthood and a career. I appreciate that deLaski is arguing for offering more societal legitimacy and support for the 60 percent of Americans who do not have a four-year college degree. Her book is aimed at “anyone for whom college was not designed” — first-generation and low-income students, part-timers, veterans, single moms, and “just about everyone but white 18- to 24-year-olds who were driven to freshman orientation on a leafy campus in the family SUV.” And at some level, I believe that there will be a convergence of different kinds of short- and longer-term educational offerings to serve more people, all offered through nonprofit organizations, community colleges, and four-year colleges, as deLaski lays out in her conclusion.

At the same time, I have a number of issues with deLaski’s arguments.

Let’s get spicy

For starters, I can’t abide deLaski’s characterization of “college” as an antiquated, static offering, “like the buggy whip as we entered the early automobile age.” She suggests multiple times in her book that college has pretty much offered the same thing since one of her ancestors went to Harvard in the late 1600s.

“The four-year degree has been the market signal we’ve led with for almost 400 years in this country,” deLaski writes. “But why does the degree have to be the only product that colleges sell? And why can’t the American Dream be achieved by other college products, other constructs of career preparation or adultification?”

This flattening of the history of higher education ignores the variety of institutions and experiences students can encounter, even if we are only thinking about “traditional” colleges. Since the founding of colleges in early America, we’ve had the Morrill Act to create Land Grant institutions, the establishment of “normal schools” and regional state institutions, the creation of community colleges, which have evolved into a common route to four-year institutions, and so much more. When she says that colleges have been “so smug as to lock the university door to keep out most learning programs that might smack of worker training,” I’m not sure what she means. Most nonelite institutions have adopted robust professional and pre-professional programs; in fact her book includes examples of colleges that have incorporated internal and external innovations to serve “new-majority learners,” those other than late-adolescents at traditional colleges.

More than that, it ignores the many new approaches, large and small, that are happening in higher education but go unnoticed, in particular, by the “innovation” crowd, who often seem more interested in flashy tech startups. In reality, offices, departments, colleges, and professors are trying new things and exploring new ways of delivering knowledge all the time. Some of them might become a permanent practice at an institution and even spread beyond it. Hacking College, which I wrote with Ned Laff, capitalizes on a student-success program that evolved out of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the late 1970s and operated under the radar at a handful of institutions in the decades that followed. If Ned and I hadn’t gotten together to write a book about the Field of Study method, it would have faded into history after Ned retired. (Even what happens in the classroom has evolved: As Carlo Rotella pointed out to me recently, the notion of openly discussing a novel in a literature class has only been common in college classrooms since the 1960s — before that, many students demonstrated their knowledge of a book by responding to questions when the lecturing professor called on them.)

But I also see this oversimplification as dangerous — a peril that deLaski herself has acknowledged. To paint higher-ed institutions as outdated and irrelevant to the job market or the nation’s educational needs plays into a narrative about defunding college, pushed by those who have motivations other than making education work for the underserved. What’s more, the narratives about college reinvention and “who needs college?” are not evenly distributed, often focusing on what’s available to lower-income students. Sometimes there is an element of discussing what’s good for other people. The guy at the nonprofit foundation or edtech startup who is talking up skills and short-term certificates sent his own kids to Vanderbilt or Stanford.

Many of the alternatives that deLaski explores lead to lower-level jobs or are very linearly about technology occupations, and the return on investment is unclear. A 12-week “faster + cheaper” boot camp in data analytics could cost $15,000, but you might be able to get many of the same skills from a community college, which could eventually stack into a four-year degree. Increasingly, artificial intelligence can handle many technical tasks anyway.

And there is not a lot of data pointing to what those outcomes from alternative programs are. During the debate, Kemi Jona, the vice provost for online education and digital innovation at the University of Virginia and one of our moderators, cited recent reports that show a gap between college and non-college outcomes. This month, the Strada Foundation issued a report finding that 70 percent of students, on average across the nation, get a positive return on their college investment within 10 years (The Chronicle has received support from the Strada Educational Foundation for our coverage of college-to-career issues). Meanwhile, in June, the American Enterprise Institute and the Burning Glass Institute published data showing that only about 12 percent of the more than one million nondegree credentials available yield a positive return. Last year, the Georgetown Center for Education and the Workforce’s report on “The Future of Good Jobs” indicated that two-thirds of well-paid occupations will be open to bachelor’s-degree holders, with far fewer such openings available to people with two-year and high-school degrees.

One argument against such evidence is that this is backward-looking data, but I can’t see how our needs will change, even with (or maybe, because of) the advent of generative AI. Future generations will have to grapple with some of the most complex problems humans have ever faced. To be sure, some of them will require technical and practical skills that can (and perhaps should) be learned outside of college. But my bet is that society and the business world will need many people with the skills and habits of mind that we typically associate with college.

And by “college” in this instance, I mean the undergraduate degree. In her book, deLaski proposes that we should recast the term with “more-inclusive language” to mean any additional learning following high school. “College should be defined as any post-high school path that sets a learner up for a family-sustaining wage and opens their eyes to their own possibilities.”

I have mixed feelings about that. Recasting everything as college might bring some legitimacy to pathways outside of the traditional undergraduate degree, but it could also further confuse the public about what routes actually have value.

Who should go, and what’s the real issue?

The key question of our conversation — one teased in deLaski’s book title — focuses on who should go to college and who should think about another path. Who Needs College Anymore? suggests that four types of students might benefit: students who want to move up the class ladder; “legitimacy label seekers” who need the degree signal for career or life advancement; people who need a license for a particular occupation; and students who want a “ready-made community” and a feeling of belonging. While I can agree with many of these, I might argue that some of these motivations are superficial.

I also see some pitfalls. I think it’s a mistake to identify large swaths of people as not needing college. For example, deLaski suggests young men might be better off as DIY autodidacts, gathering job-relevant skills and information on YouTube and Reddit. Having worked with a lot of young men through job mentorship and the martial arts, I think it’s a bad idea to steer more of them away from college and toward narrower technical skills, which could hurt their long-term job prospects. (And it surely won’t help them on the dating scene, where young women already complain about the imbalance in education levels and social skills.)

Another example of someone whom deLaski thinks can skip college is what she calls the “connected career switcher” — someone who already has a job and an established network. She presents her daughter, a professional ballet dancer for 12 years, who earned a spot on a dance company after an apprenticeship, as an example. Still working in ballet, her daughter is now doing side gigs in marketing, after having completed a $3,700 part-time online boot camp in digital marketing, and may seek a marketing job after she retires from dance.

To me, this category reveals a gap in common arguments about who needs college, and who doesn’t: I would argue that the CEOs of Ford or LinkedIn say that college degrees don’t matter (when, in fact, their future corporate work force will likely be filled with people with degrees) because they don’t really know what it’s like to live in an environment where degrees are not common or where the cultural products of an educated society are not readily accessible to them — or to their kids. College delivers cultural and social capital in the form of academic knowledge, experiences, and exposure to new cultures and people, which opens up possibilities for those who don’t grow up around all that stuff. People who already come from wealth might forget how transformative college can be, simply because they’re already swimming in much of what a college education can deliver.

In the end, the question of who goes to college boils down to four things, deLaski says: “a learner’s bankroll, desired profession, network, and self-motivation.”

“The bankroll is, sadly, the most important piece,” deLaski writes near her conclusion. “If a learner is just starting out, and they have the money, of course, they should go to college.” If they can’t, she suggests, they might consider some of the alternatives she highlights. However, she acknowledges later that “My model will break down in bad economic times,” and that many nondegree options in tech fields have been some of the hardest hit in recent hiring downturns.

This concession relates to a comment from an audience member at our debate: Maybe the problem is that we need to reduce housing costs, he said, because the cost of living makes experimentation and exploration in one’s college and career risky.

Exactly. These conversations play out against the backdrop of an economy that is hostile to young talent, with a supercharged housing market, a widening wealth gap, and eroding social safety nets and public investment. These economic pressures skew the answers to questions about whether college is worth it, who needs it, and what it does or does not deliver.

Listen up!

This weekend’s theatrical release of Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere has Bruce fans in a frenzy. Can’t get enough of The Boss? Check out our recent College Matters podcast episode with Louis P. Masur, a distinguished professor of American studies and history at Rutgers University, who teaches a popular course on Springsteen.

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