Some of my favorite time of my adult life was college and I consider the experience to be a grand one full of noble intention. So it's hard for me to admit that college as we know it is probably on its way out. It was originally only for the elite, but it made no small amount of sense that, as the world became more complicated, a more complicated education was going to be required by more of the people than ever before. There was a time when that was enough and parents across the country figured that a college education was necessary to good career prospects. What we're seeing now in universities and colleges across the country is simply a riding of the inertia of that mindset. None of this should come as any surprise. How hard does your average B.A. recipient work and how much money do they, or their benefactors, spend in order for them to arrive at the end of the four-year journey, only to be told that their degree does not matter in the slightest? About the best you can see, and that graduates these days hear, is something along the lines of, "Well, it's a baseline everybody has to have," or, "You'll be ever MORE screwed without it." Being a baseline everybody is required to have won't save college forever because, eventually, enough generations will have realized how worthless their own degrees were to stop being biased towards people with them. If you've got a young person with a degree, a few summer internships, and lots of participation in extracurricular activities versus a high school graduate of the same age who's been waiting tables and working temp jobs since high school, the college graduate is going to win most of the time right now. Sooner than most think, the only difference most employers will see between these two is the high school graduate has less debt, has a more proven work ethic, and has gained a greater variety of applicable skills.
Part of the reason college has hung on for so long is that it's a clear path of what you're supposed to do when you grow up. Going to college was presented to me in the same spirit that, "Learn to use to potty," or, "Learn to drive a car," were at earlier ages. This wasn't a polite suggestion, but an inevitability to which I was to get used. It was comforting for me, in a strange way, because I knew that, as long as I went to and graduated college right after high school, I was doing what I was supposed to be doing when I was supposed to be doing it. The reality is considerably less comforting. Perhaps, in my own case, I really was where I was supposed to be doing what I was supposed to be doing because my talent is writing, for which I needed training, and I am autistic, for which I badly needed time to mature and adjust to adult life. However, the general idea of college right out of high school constituting doing the right thing at the right time is nothing like a sure thing. Maybe it is, but maybe a tremendous amount of money is being wasted while years of potential job history are being cast as either spotty or nonexistent. College is always going to get the kids who are born academics or actually need some sort of special training, but that isn't what the university system we see today is built on. It's built on just about everyone who can manage it somehow or another going to college because that's just what you're supposed to do. If only the academics and the knowledge-specific professionals go to college, it'll be a very different university system than the one we all know.
I suppose I'm both biased and unbiased, in a certain sense, writing this article. For me, college was very socially useful, absolutely essential actually, but utterly useless to me in terms of career. However, that is mitigated by the fact that I have autism and ultimately have proven to be unemployable in general. So a lot of what I'm basing this on comes from friends and classmates and what I've been watching them go through. It is impossible to be a recent (okay 11 years ago) graduate and not be aware of the maddening nature of the world into which we seem to find ourselves. Other than friends who required some very specific training for their career, nobody is considered valuable in the workforce based upon things they learned in college. Their student debt crushes them with greater force than the surprising casualness with which people inform them that their degrees are useless. In the course of eight failed careers, I have filled out many job applications, I have sat in many job interviews, and I have been informed quite extensively about what my weaknesses are. What 100% of the employers from whom I have ever sought work want is experience. College is almost looked at as time wasted that could've been spent on gaining experience. The disparity between what college is thought to, and claims, to offer and what graduates experience when they leave makes it hard for them not to think of themselves as people who have just been conned. What needs to change here? I don't know, but this isn't sustainable. This is not even in the same neighborhood as sustainable. Whatever the solution is, it had better arrive soon because charging a lot of money for degrees most employers think of as worthless isn't morally sound.
-Frank
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