Matt Yglesias and David Adesnik like the idea of making a college degree a universal entitlement. I dissent.

The only way to guarantee a college degree for everyone who wants one would be to, as Yglesias phrases it, “do something good and liberal” and expand the availability and generosity of federal student loan, grant, and subsidized loan programs. There are lots of reasons why this is a bad idea, and most of them can be discenred by simply observing the effects Messrs. Stafford and Perkins have already had on the cost and quality of a college education.

Grade inflation is up, and while I don’t have any data (and suspect there isn’t any that could satisfacyorily quantify such a thing), I would guess most smart people would agree that your typical liberal arts grad isn’t nearly as educated as he was 25 years ago. We’ve all seen those Jay Leno-ish polls showing the alarming number of college grads who can’t find China on a map, or can’t name a single Supreme Court Justice. Meanwhile, the cost of bachelors, masters, and doctorate degrees have all risen well above the rate of inflation (not coincidentally, at roughly the same rate federal loan ceilings have risen), while the real value of all three has declined.

By “decline” and “real value,” I mean that because more and more people are going to college, the comparative advantage a student gains over those his age by going to college is more slight than ever. Employers today use a bachelor’s degree to weed out applicants the same way they used a high school degree a generation ago. So in one sense, I suppose, a college education is more important than ever, in that without one, your prospects in the white-collar world are pretty dim. But if everyone else has a degree, the value of your degree drops pretty dramatically.

At the same time, most of those grads are leaving college with massive debt, debt that’s growing at a far greater rate than first-year salaries are. That’s because by making it easier for anyone who wants to to go to college, the government has made buyers of colleges and sellers of prospective students, and rigged the system in favor of the buyers. When colleges get 10 applicants for every spot in a freshman class, they can pretty much charge whatever they please for tuition. There’s very little consumer pressure to keep costs down (I’d submit this is also one reason why textbooks cost so much more than ordinary books — college kids aren’t spending their own money. They’re spending their parents’ money, the government’s money, or their own future income in the form of loans). That same lack of consumer pressure also means colleges don’t have to work as hard to provide as good a product, in this case a high-quality education.

I suppose it would be nice if, as Yglesias and Adesnik theorize might happen, a universal guarantee to a college education produced a well-read, well-schooled, worldly, and sophisticated population and workforce. I just don’t think it will.

If we look what increased access to college has effected so far (the diminishing real value of an ever more expensive degree, grade inflation that makes it increasingly difficult for employers to evaluate graduates, the dimished quality the college education itself, and a generation of graduates burdened with debt) it’s probably safe to predict that “universal” access would provide more of the same, only worse.

Instead of Adesnik and Yglesias’ ideal, my guess is that univeral access would give us a generation of young adults with college degrees who are about as smart as the population of young adults with high school diplomas a generation or two before them, only they’ll be getting started on their careers (and building wealth and savings) several years later in life, and with the added handicap of looming student debt and interest.

Maybe we should think about going the other way. Phase out federally-guaranteed student loan programs. My guess is that it would mean fewer kids opting for college right away, which would mean more pressure among colleges for those who do apply. That probably means lower tuition costs, and, after a while, a better education product, too.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 21st, 2004 at 11:01 am by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.