The College Degree Is in Shambles
In The News Piece in The Chronicle of Higher Education
Nov. 5, 2021
Kevin Carey wrote an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education regarding the lack of value and high risk of scams associated with college degrees.
College degrees are assets. Or at least they are sufficiently asset-like that many people are willing to borrow large amounts of money to obtain them. Degrees unlock valuable parts of the labor market and yield returns in the form of additional compensation that can be used to make loan payments.
Degrees are, like homes, critical milestones on the standard path to prosperity. Because people tend to get their first degrees and homes earlier in adult life, when they have fewer financial assets and less established credit, it makes sense for the government to subsidize the loans used to acquire them.
But degrees are also not assets, in the traditional sense of the word. By too fully embracing the degree-as-an-asset idea, we have created a higher-education policy architecture that doesn’t work in important ways.
Read the full article here.