Why college is worth it

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Someone releases a study questioning if college is worth the costs, given subpar post-college employment and — oh, you’ve heard it?

I’ll let Kevin Carey of the think tank Education Sector explain: “For going on four decades, the press has been raising alarms that college degrees may no longer be a sound investment. Two things about these stories have remained constant: They always feature an over-educated bartender, and they are always wrong.”

This newest study, by the Associated Press, is truly 21st-century and instead features an overeducated barista. But it’s still wrong.

The study claims that recent college graduates are more likely to be employed as service employees such as waitresses or bartenders than as physicists or mathematicians.

These people are “underemployed” and consist of about half of the 1.5 million people who have been really screwed by their choice to educate themselves, apparently.

The problem with analyses like these is that they take advantage of normal phenomenon in the economy to tell a story that isn’t there.

As Carey writes, “College skeptics also fail to account for predictable career patterns. ... There are a lot more law firm partners out there who used to be bartenders than bartenders who used to be law firm partners.”

They also look at college degrees in a vacuum, comparing them to the past in an economy that isn’t the same as it was even 10 years ago.

The AP study points out that the best college employment rate was in 2000, during the midst of the dot-com bubble.

In those golden years, college unemployment and underemployment was at the insanely, ridiculously, absolutely, fantastically low level of 41 percent, which probably isn’t too far of a shot from today’s 53.6 percent.

The study notes that only three of the 30 jobs with the largest projected job openings require college degrees (teachers, professors and accountants, by the way).

But these are silly technicalities. The average college graduate earns about 75 percent more throughout a lifetime than a high-school graduate.

The unemployment rate for high school diploma-holders is at 8 percent, whereas bachelor’s degree-holders are unemployed at about 4 percent.

So yeah, that 53.6 percent figure is alarming, but that’s mostly because it’s alarmist.
Yes, it’s hard to get your dream job coming right out of college. So what? That doesn’t mean college doesn’t pay off in surprising and awesome ways.

David Brooks of the New York Times explains that “income differentials understate the chasm between college and high school graduates.” This is because college graduates are more likely to get married and less likely to get divorced.

College graduates are less likely to smoke, less likely to be obese, more likely to vote, less likely to be incarcerated and more likely to have successful children.

But let’s not forget — what we’re doing here isn’t just about the outcomes.

College is an experience that is rewarding as a process. How many high-school graduates get to experience Lil 5?

Too many. Stop inviting your dumb friends from high school down here.

­— shlumorg@indiana.edu