| 摘要 | In a few weeks more than 17 million students will head begin or continue pursuing higher education in over 4,200 degree-granting American colleges and universities. For the school year they will pay on average more than $12,000 for tuition, room and board at four-year public schools and more than $30,000 for an education at a private college or university. Many of these students will graduate—eventually. But many others will not. Is their struggle to earn a college degree worth it?
Not everyone goes to college. The legendary author F. Scott Fitzgerald dropped out of Princeton. Bill Gates, Ted Turner, Steven Jobs and Tom Hanks don’t have college degrees. We could ask: Is society worse off for their decisions? Are they worse off themselves?
The short answer is no. The cost of attending college outweighed its benefits for these self-starters. There are many other individuals who decide that the investment in college is not worth their money. As artists and entrepreneurs, carpenters and small business owners, they have decided that they gain more by spending less time fulfilling a college administrator’s requirements. College isn’t for them.
Of course, most young people today don’t see it that way—they want the perceived benefits of college. But are they willing to shoulder its costs?
On July 11, the House of Representatives passed (273-149) the College Cost Reduction Act of 2007. It cuts in half the interest rate on government-subsidized student loans. President Bush has threatened to veto the bill because it makes government support more widely available and doesn’t target only the neediest students. A liberal coalition backs the measure, including the NAACP, the National Education Association (the country’s largest teachers union) and advocacy groups like Campus Progress (a youth affiliate of the Center for American Progress) and the Higher Education Project of Ralph Nader’s U.S. Public Interest Research Group (PIRG). Touting the bill as the largest increase in college student aid since the GI Bill in 1944, the groups favor it because student debt, they say, is becoming “burdensome.”
But the real picture is more complex. First, even with costs rising, most people can still afford to go to college. The Department of Education reports that enrollment at degree-granting institutions increased by 17 percent between 1984 and 1994. Enrollment increased even more, by over 20 percent, in the decade after 1994, with women and minorities showing the largest percentage increases.
Second, cost isn’t the only thing rising at college: the benefits are too. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the college degree holder now earns nearly twice as much as those with only a high school education; that amounts to an earnings gap of between $500,000 and $1 million over an earnings lifetime. $19,300, the average debt taken on by students leaving college, hardly seems “burdensome” by comparison.
Third, over forty percent of students entering college full time at four year universities, the cohort most likely to finish, have failed to graduate after six years. Government subsidies that lower college costs for all students—those who graduate and those who do not—translate into higher overall costs for taxpayers. The U.S. has probably over-invested in higher education, notes economist Richard Vedder of the Center for College Affordability (who is also an adjunct scholar at AEI, the publisher of this web site), “with the incremental students financed by increases in student aid largely ill-equipped for college-level study.” Vedder writes: “By taking intellectually challenged students, colleges play a cruel hoax on many of them.”
If we were honest with students, and with ourselves, we would admit that college isn’t for everyone. We all know the perennial student who’s still taking courses that are never finished toward a degree that never comes. So as Congress celebrates making college “affordable” for everyone, let’s remember that there is no free lunch. Everything has a cost.
The best way to see who really benefits from college is to put the responsibility for its costs on the students themselves. A student who knows the costs and benefits of his own education is more likely to make choices that serve his—and society’s—best interests.
Phil Brand is a recent graduate paying off his loans from the University of New Hampshire. He is an education policy analyst at the Capital Research Center. |
