CounterCurrent: Week of 6/26/23
“Why does anyone go to college?” asks National Association of Scholars President Peter Wood in a recent article for Quillette. For many years, the final step on the pathway to adulthood has been marked by earning a college degree. But why? Answers are mixed, but skepticism regarding the necessity of a college education is on the rise, along with other troubles on the horizon.
According to the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA, which conducted an annual survey of full-time students at some 200 four-year colleges and universities from 1991–2019, the most popular answer to “Why does anyone go to college?” was, by far, “To be able to get a better job.” Other popular answers included “To make more money,” “To learn more about things that interest me,” and “To gain a general education and appreciation of ideas.”
Today, the answers to this question are much more complex. Over 60 percent of high school graduates still enter college instead of seeking other options. Even so, high school graduates are rethinking their pursuit of a college degree. Reports of high school graduates forgoing college to join the workforce are on the rise, which raises the question: is getting a high-paying job right out of high school reason enough to skip a college education altogether? Or is American higher education facing a deeper transformation?
Wood suggests the latter. Not only did the COVID-19 pandemic take a chunk out of total college enrollment, but demographic changes during the 2008 recession caused a sharp decline in birth rates, and they’ve only continued their descent. There’s a myriad of other reasons people point to for the decline in college enrollment. The rise of online education, AI’s replacement of workers in various fields, and the political zealotry consuming colleges and universities that has led to disillusionment with academia are just a few. Wood argues,
We are witnessing the transition from “college is for everybody” to “college is unnecessary and often useless.” Going to college “to be able to get a better job” is likely to fade away as the primary reason students attend. And the institutions themselves—universities and colleges of various types—will have to accept a much less prominent role in our social and economic systems. They are in danger of becoming cultural relics.
Though many American parents believe attaining a college degree will set their children up for success and happiness, it’s not the on-ramp to a prosperous adulthood that it once was. Potential college students are being bombarded with disincentives left and right. It’s worth reading Wood’s full article, but here are a few more common problems in higher ed: the already high and rising price of tuition, open hostility toward traditional sexuality, admissions discrimination against Asian and white applicants, and institutional instability due to an overextension of resources.
Wood’s perspective is nuanced, and I’m inclined to agree with his analysis. Though I decided to pursue a college degree upon graduating high school in 2018, I witnessed many classmates seek out alternatives to the traditional college education. Their reasons for doing so were just as varied as Wood suggests in his article. And I’d wager that the reasons for not attending college will continue to pile up.
When will these problems plaguing higher ed come to a head? That remains to be seen, but if nothing is done, it will surely come sooner than later.
The members of the public on the other side of this chasm are still willing to consider college as the surest path to a career, but they are growing skeptical. That skepticism, however, turns into outright disaffection when they ponder how our colleges and universities often foster what is worst in young people: ingratitude to their families and their nation, self-centeredness, and aimless alienation. Colleges ignite group resentment, unwarranted pride, or equally unwarranted shame. And the education that colleges provide has been hollowed to near pointlessness. Students graduate with a veneer of knowledge rather than a core. An increasingly obsolescent institution has wedded itself to an increasingly noisome cultural stance.
We must encourage American higher education to untangle itself from this self-destructive ideological web. Educational standards must be raised, institutional neutrality reinstated, financial accountability restored, and academic freedom lauded instead of eschewed. Perhaps then, even with the problems raging outside of academia, the pursuit of truth and the benefit of a college degree will be saved.
Until next week.
CounterCurrent is the National Association of Scholars’ weekly newsletter, written by the NAS Staff. To subscribe, update your email preferences here.
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