Is College No Longer Worth Investing In?

In the last two decades alone, the amount of both people and money going into higher education has skyrocketed. According to a recent article in The Economist, the percentage of college age students actually enrolled in college increased from 14% to 32% over these years, while the OECD countries increased their spending on higher education from 1.3% to 1.6% of total GDP. That means millions of students and billions and billions of dollars. This is undoubtedly great news for global education as a whole, however, the subsequent increase in demand for degrees may be turning America's higher education into a money driven system, not a system focused on learning.

While the article admits that a bachelor's degree does still promise a 15% return on investment, it also states that, in a recent study on "academic achievement", "45 percent of students made no gains in their first two years of university". Though such a lack of learning may be hard to believe, it might not matter so much. Another study on "recruitment by professional-services firms" found that firms selected candidates from the "most-prestigious universities because of those universities' tough selection procedures", not because of "what candidates might have learned" in their time at that university. This is because America's higher education system lacks a "clear measure of educational output". The article therefore suggests that, when considering post-college employment, college really is all about getting in.

However, this goes directly against every single one of the reassuring, don't-obssess-over-college talks I have gotten in high school. This information seems to reaffirm everything that I foolishly thought about college going into high school: that I must always work my ass of because I have to get into the most selective university I can or the world will end.

What about the piece by Frank Bruni that was the most-emailed New York Times article for two weeks straight, "How to Survive the College Admissions Madness"? That article seems to directly disagree with the economist in a number of ways. It quotes Sam Altman, "one of the best known providers of first-step seed money for tech start-ups" as saying that the school where the graduates most stand out is "'the University of Waterloo'", not one of the country's most selective private schools. It also describes the obsession over "getting into the Stanfords of the world" as "getting crazier and more corrosive", not important for employment as The Economist would lead you to believe.

So which assessment of America's college system is closer to the truth? Which one do you think should the college system strive for?