George Leef opens his The Overselling of Higher Education with some harsh words:
Higher education in the United States has been greatly oversold. Many students who are neither academically strong nor inclined toward serious intellectual work have been lured into colleges and universities. At considerable cost to their families and usually the taxpayer as well, those students sometimes obtain a degree, but often with little if any gain in human capital that will prove beneficial in the labor market or in dealing with the challenges of life.
Leef shares this quote from David Labaree’s How to Succeed in School Without Really Learning:
When students at all levels see education through the lens of social mobility, they quickly conclude that what matters most is not the knowledge they attain in school but the credential they acquire there. Grades, credits, degrees — these become the objects to be pursued. The end result is to reify the formal markers of education and displace the substantive content… The payoff for a particular credential is the same no matter how it was acquired, so it is rational behavior to try to strike a good bargain, to work at gaining a diploma, like a car, at a substantial discount.
I suspect most young Americans would find this statistic shocking:
Prior to World War II, only about one high school graduate in ten subsequently enrolled in a college or university.
Read the whole article.