The cost of a college degree has increased by 1,125% since 1978—four times the rate of inflation. Total student debt has surpassed $1.3 trillion. Nearly two thirds of all college students must borrow to study, and the average student graduates with more than $30,000 in debt. Many college graduates under twenty-five years old are unemployed or underemployed. And professors—remember them?—rarely teach undergraduates at many major universities, instead handing off their lecture halls to cheaper teaching assistants.
So, is it worth it? That’s the question Charles J. Sykes attempts to answer in Fail U., exploring the staggering costs of a college education, the sharp decline in tenured faculty and teaching loads, the explosion of administrative jobs, the grandiose building plans, and the utter lack of preparedness for the real world that many now graduates face. Fail U. offers a different vision of higher education; one that is affordable, more productive, and better-suited to meet the needs of a diverse range of students—and one that will actually be useful in their future careers and lives.
The cost of a college degree has increased by 1,125% since 1978—four times the rate of inflation. Total student debt has surpassed $1.3 trillion. Nearly two thirds of all college students must borrow to study, and the average student graduates with more than $30,000 in debt. Many college graduates under twenty-five years old are unemployed or underemployed. And professors—remember them?—rarely teach undergraduates at many major universities, instead handing off their lecture halls to cheaper teaching assistants.
So, is it worth it? That’s the question Charles J. Sykes attempts to answer in Fail U., exploring the staggering costs of a college education, the sharp decline in tenured faculty and teaching loads, the explosion of administrative jobs, the grandiose building plans, and the utter lack of preparedness for the real world that many now graduates face. Fail U. offers a different vision of higher education; one that is affordable, more productive, and better-suited to meet the needs of a diverse range of students—and one that will actually be useful in their future careers and lives.
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Overview
The cost of a college degree has increased by 1,125% since 1978—four times the rate of inflation. Total student debt has surpassed $1.3 trillion. Nearly two thirds of all college students must borrow to study, and the average student graduates with more than $30,000 in debt. Many college graduates under twenty-five years old are unemployed or underemployed. And professors—remember them?—rarely teach undergraduates at many major universities, instead handing off their lecture halls to cheaper teaching assistants.
So, is it worth it? That’s the question Charles J. Sykes attempts to answer in Fail U., exploring the staggering costs of a college education, the sharp decline in tenured faculty and teaching loads, the explosion of administrative jobs, the grandiose building plans, and the utter lack of preparedness for the real world that many now graduates face. Fail U. offers a different vision of higher education; one that is affordable, more productive, and better-suited to meet the needs of a diverse range of students—and one that will actually be useful in their future careers and lives.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781250091765 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 07/02/2024 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 289 |
| File size: | 803 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Fail U.
The False Promise of Higher Education
By Charles J. Sykes
St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2016 Charles J. SykeAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-250-09176-5
CHAPTER 1
BURSTING THE COLLEGE BUBBLE
HAVE WE SEEN THIS before? Rapidly escalating costs, irrational exuberance, and massive debt confronted by collapsing values? Political posturing, easy money, extravagant spending, and exaggerated claims of future benefits?
With striking parallels to the housing bubble of the last decade, the cost of a college degree has soared by 1,125 percent since 1978 — four times the rate of inflation — even as the value of that degree is increasingly questionable. A generation of graduates is emerging from higher education carrying a crushing debt burden, but without the skills or job prospects that once had been taken for granted.
Despite a lagging economy, colleges have bloated their budgets, raised tuition, ignored students, and indulged in a culture of bread and circuses — because they can. One former president explains that higher tuition often worked like higher-priced vodka or watches — nothing was different, since they tasted the same and told the same time, but consumers were willing to pay more for the brand. Where did the money go? Spending on instruction remains flat, even as spending on administration, buildings, promotions, athletics, and noninstructional student services has exploded. Campuses vied with one another to add amenities, including Taj Mahal–like facilities, while multiplying the number of administrators. Recent decades have seen the proliferation of vice-presidents of student success, directors of active and collaborative engagement, dietetic internship directors, and sustainability directors, along with vast arrays of administrators devoted to "diversity" and "inclusion." Even as professors became increasingly scarce in the classroom, the number of administrators metastasized. Between 1975 and 2005, the number of full-time faculty in higher education rose by 51 percent — but the ranks of bureaucrats rose by 85 percent, and the number of "other professionals" by 240 percent.
All of this was floated on an ocean of expanding student debt — $1.3 trillion and rising.
Ironically, at the very moment that the value of high education is being questioned, campuses across the country found themselves besieged by the Snowflake Rebellion — the emotional and often melodramatic uprising of hypersensitive activists (the "snowflakes") who demanded that colleges create "safe spaces" by silencing viewpoints that made them uncomfortable. Rapidly spreading from campus to campus, the protests saw the rise of what Roger Kimball called the "crybully, who has weaponized his coveted status as a victim." Even benign emails suggesting respect for intellectual diversity could trigger new rounds of confrontations and protests that, ironically, made college campuses decidedly unsafe places for students, faculty, or administrations with differing viewpoints. Even liberal faculty members complained about the climate of fear on campuses and the use of Kafkaesque tribunals that can jeopardize academic careers. [see chapter 11: Grievance U.]
The irony was not lost on many observers: "tolerance," has taken on a new meaning on many campuses. As the Snowflake Rebellion spread — from Yale and the University of Missouri to dozens of colleges across the country — it was followed by the now-familiar pattern of appeasement and capitulation by administrators, who often agreed to demands to increase funding and staffing for their already bloated diversity programs. While the complaints and behavior of the activists were often met with skepticism and derision outside of the academy, American higher education has largely responded by redoubling its efforts to multiply programs that institutionalize and reinforce the demands for ideological conformity and to search out microaggressions. A growing number of schools have published lists of words and phrases to avoid, including the seemingly benign phrase, "America is the land of opportunity." At one school, even the term "political correctness" has been deemed to be a microaggression."
On the surface, this wave of disruption seemed baffling, because as one Yale student wrote, "there are few institutions in American life that are so utterly beholden to the left and its principal tenets." But the campus disruptions exposed how utterly the intellectual climate on American universities campuses has been transformed in recent decades. The upheaval has also reinforced doubts about the wisdom and value of what passes for the higher learning at perhaps the worst possible moment for the higher education complex.
STICKER SHOCK
For some families, sending a child to a private university now is like buying a BMW every year — and driving it off a cliff. If the education is financed through student loans, paying for college is like buying a Lamborghini on credit. By 2012, the total cost of a four-year education at a private college had exploded to $267,308; the cost of public college had risen to $122,638. The price tag for attending Duke University is now more than $60,000 a year, but that is less than the price tags of at least forty-eight other schools including Bard College ($63,626), Dartmouth College ($62,337), Wesleyan University ($61,498), Boston College ($61,096), and Southern Methodist University ($60,586).
Since 2004, student debt has more than quintupled; 66 percent of students now borrow to pay for their education — up from just 45 percent as recently as 1993. Between 2004 and 2014, the number of student borrowers grew by 92 percent and the average student loan grew 74 percent. The average student now graduates with around $30,000 in student loans, while the portion of students with $100,000 or more has doubled. Millions of students carry debt burdens without getting any degree at all. Student loan debt now exceeds both the nation's total credit card and auto loan debt. The delinquency rate on student loans is higher than the delinquency rate on credit cards, auto loans, and home mortgages.
The problem will haunt not only Generation Debt, but the overall economy for decades to come.
Until very recently, higher education's model of "ever bigger, ever more" worked because consumers were willing to pay inflated prices for the coveted credentials it conferred. For most students, parents, and trustees, higher education was still living up to its end of the bargain. Universities required little of students, and in turn, students asked little of universities. The fact that the degree could be acquired with minimal effort or stress was not seen as a particularly vexing problem for students who were able to glide through four or five years with few demands being placed on either their abilities or their work ethic. As long as they acquired the desirable credential, as long as it got them into good-paying jobs and ensured entry into the middle class, they were more than satisfied. Despite all of the problems associated with higher education, that credential still worked as it was designed. Whether it actually signified any skill or body of knowledge, it conferred legitimacy and prestige, and was still accepted by society and employers as a sign of accomplishment. Its absence still carried a stigma and considerable economic penalty.
But what happens when the ticket punch no longer works?
While the average student debt load rose 24 percent in the last decade, average wages for graduates aged twenty-five to thirty-four fell by 15 percent. In 2011, 53 percent of college graduates under twenty-five were unemployed or underemployed. Many of those who found jobs discovered that their career choices were dictated by their mortgage-like monthly loan payments; others found that starting life with six-figure obligations made them unmarriageable.
Those doubts are spreading. A survey of 30,000 alumni by the Gallup-Purdue Index found that only 38 percent of recent college graduates "strongly agree" that their degree was worth the cost. Only a third of graduates with student debt, thought their education was worth the price tag. Their skepticism is understandable.
A study by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York found that in 2012 roughly 44 percent of recent college graduates were working in jobs that did not require degrees — the majority of them in low-wage jobs. One study by Richard Vedder and Christopher Denhart found that there are more college graduates who are working in retail jobs than there are soldiers in the US Army "and more janitors with bachelor's degrees than chemists. In 1970, less than 1% of taxi drivers had college degrees. Four decades later, more than 15% do."
WOULD YOU LIKE MOCHA?
Students are of course welcome to pursue their bliss or work toward degrees in esoteric fields from pricey colleges, but they should not be under the misapprehension that they are necessarily making a sound investment. Some of them — or their parents — will pay $270,000 for a degree only to find themselves in a job that requires them to ask "Would you like to try our pumpkin spice latte today?" Specifically, the New York Fed study found that a majority of recent college graduates with degrees in liberal arts (52 percent), communications (54 percent), technologies (55 percent), agriculture and natural resources (57 percent), and leisure and hospitality (63 percent) were working in jobs that did not require a bachelor's degree.
Degrees with highly unlikely paybacks include screenwriting and production from a school that charges $61,731 a year (Drexel); feminist, gender, and sexuality studies from a school that costs $61,498 a year (Wesleyan); theater from a school costing $61,940 a year (Scripps College); or fine arts from a school charging $62,031 a year (the University of Southern California).
And these are the students who actually graduate, sheepskin in hand. The picture for those who do not finish is even grimmer. Even as government aid and loan programs have encouraged the largest possible number of students to attend institutions of higher education, it has simultaneously guaranteed that many of those students will receive at best a mediocre education. For higher education and many would-be students, federal largess has proven to be a classic Faustian bargain. Only 34 percent of students entering four-year institutions earn a bachelor's degree in four years, and barely two-thirds — 64 percent — finish within six years. Rather than benefiting from a wage premium, many of the dropouts, especially those who end up with a load of debt and no degree, find themselves actually worse off than if they had not enrolled at all.
CHEAP MONEY
Like other bubbles inflated by cheap credit, the college bubble was floated on the belief that the value of the degree would continue to appreciate in value. But now, default and delinquency rates have reached the level where alarm bells are being sounded by the ratings agencies. By late 2014, 7.1 million borrowers with $103 billion in debt were in default on their student loans — a default rate of 19.8 percent, a staggeringly high number.
"This all makes sense," Jason Delisle, the director of the Federal Education Budget Project at the New America Foundation, wrote in the Wall Street Journal, "when you realize that the student-loan program has been designed to achieve two political goals: Loans should be available to any student, at any school, pursuing any credential; and student debt is bad and burdensome, so it should be easy for borrowers not to repay."
Even at the height of the housing bubble, mortgages were models of fiscal prudence in comparison with student loans. Student borrowers do not have to provide any evidence that they have the ability to pay back the loan. There is no collateral. And loans are as available for the study of flower arranging as for engineering.
Moody's Investors Service warns that worsening performance of student loans "reflects the fact that student loan origination standards were not tightened as they were for other types of consumer loans." One reason for this is that the federal government pumped money into the loans and provided lenders with guarantees. "With no supply constraints and a federal guarantee taking losses in the event of a default," Moody's noted, "lenders had little need to curtail their lending and every incentive to expand it." With echoes of the government's push for the issuance of more subprime loans, the government policy "permitted borrowing to remain robust at the cost of poorer performance." In some ways the explosion of student debt was even more reckless than other forms of lending, including the so-called NINJA mortgages ("no income, no job, and no assets"), which played a notorious role in the housing bubble. The Moody's report noted:
While other forms of consumer lending depend highly on the borrower's current income streams and prior credit history in determining creditworthiness, student lending is a more speculative. Borrowers and lenders alike hope that the higher income resulting from the human capital investment justifies the cost of the loan. This has not been the case for recent graduates thus far.
This is how bubbles work: We all think tulips are valuable until we don't. Buying stock in the South Sea Company or the dot-coms is a sure thing — until it isn't anymore. We think housing prices will continue rising forever until we realize that they won't. Bubbles burst when buyers realize that the value of the asset is not worth the inflated price.
The education bubble bursts when puffery is confronted by reality. Increasingly, the economic model of higher education no longer works for many students, who realize belatedly that they have placed themselves in a financial stranglehold for unmarketable degrees. Charles Murray notes that the bachelor's degree still confers a wage premium on its average recipient. But, he says, "there is no good reason that it should." In other words, we have decided that the degrees are valuable when there is no objective reason to do so, and there will come a moment when the market catches up. That moment appears to be now.
"This is just the beginning of the college implosion," tweeted businessman Mark Cuban after Sweet Briar was threatening to close its doors. "At some point," said Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks, "it's going to pop."
Entrepreneur Peter Thiel is convinced we are seeing a "classic bubble."
It's basically extremely overpriced. People are not getting their money's worth, objectively, when you do the math. And at the same time it is something that is incredibly intensively believed; there's this sort of psycho-social component to people taking on these enormous debts when they go to college simply because that's what everybody's doing.
In some ways, Thiel says, the current education bubble may actually be worse than the housing bubble. Student loans are harder to get out of than mortgages, because they cannot be discharged in bankruptcy. "If you borrowed money and went to a college where the education didn't create any value," he says, "that is potentially a really big mistake."
The education bubble is not an "asset bubble," notes economic analyst and Forbes contributor Jesse Colombo on the website TheBubblebubble.com, but it is definitely "a bubble-like phenomenon with very similar risks and implications as asset bubbles." All of the major elements of bubbles are there: "a highly convincing and partially legitimate boom story, soaring prices and profits, decreasing affordability, a highly overpriced/overvalued product, blatant profiteering, a 'gold rush' mentality, extrapolation of the boom's growth far into the future and debt-fueled overinvestment/overexpansion."
In the end, when this bubble bursts, he says, "the higher education industry will have no other choice but to drastically downsize until it is much smaller than its current size. Expect to see mass higher education job layoffs, slashed salaries and benefits, colleges merging or consolidating, while many colleges will simply be forced to close their doors."
A QUESTION OF VALUE
But is this just a phenomenon of the weak economy, or does it suggest a deeper problem in higher education? There is in fact mounting evidence that the intrinsic value of that degree does not always measure up to the ever-increasing price tag. Author Kevin Carey went to the website of one of the nation's most expensive colleges (with a sticker price of $60,000 a year) "to look for some kind of data or study indicating how much students at George Washington were actually learning. There was none." This should not, however, have been surprising. "Colleges and universities rarely, if ever, gather and publish information about how much undergraduates learn during their academic careers."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Fail U. by Charles J. Sykes. Copyright © 2016 Charles J. Syke. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
Acknowledgments,
PART I I TOLD YOU SO,
Introduction: Scenes from a Graduation,
1. Bursting the College Bubble,
2. Déjà Vu: ProfScam Twenty-eight Years Later,
PART II THE COLLEGE BUBBLE,
3. The (Escalating) Flight from Teaching,
4. The Reality of Academic Research,
5. What Do Students Learn (and Does Anybody Care)?,
6. The College for All Delusion,
PART III BLOAT,
7. Our Bloated Colleges,
8. Academia's Edifice Bloat,
PART IV JUNK SCHOLARSHIP, HOAXES, AND SCANDALS,
9. Does the Emperor Have Any Clothes?,
10. A Scandal Reconsidered,
PART V VICTIM U. (TRIGGER WARNING),
11. Grievance U.,
12. Rape U.,
PART VI IS THIS TIME DIFFERENT?,
13. Time for a Bailout?,
14. Netflix U.,
15. Smaller, Fewer, Less,
Notes,
Index,
Also by Charles J. Sykes,
About the Author,
Copyright,