College: A No-Brainer?

"I want my child to go deeply in debt to become lazy, anxious, boozy, unthinking, and ignorant."

No parent actually says these words precisely, but they in fact encapsulate some of the most ambitious goals of parents in the United States.  We scrimp, save, and take out loans (and have our kids take out loans) for precisely that very outcome. We look askance at children who aren’t following the same path, as if there's something inherently wrong with them.  For millions of parents, this is their Holy Grail.  

But they typically phrase their desire this way:

"I want my child to go to college."

Some emerging -- and dreadful -- facts about the modern, heavily subsidized (but still absurdly expensive) everyone-should-go-to-college push are causing many people to reconsider sending their kids to university.  Here is the reality:

-Your child will likely not spend much time actually studying.  In 1961, students spent approximately 24 hours per week studying.  What about now?  They top out around 14 hours.  If you think your teenager/young adult can learn more in 14 hours than 1961 young adults could learn in 24, you either believe evolution works faster than it does or you wear those legendary "parent-colored glasses" that view your child as the super-special snowflake capable of greater achievement than mere mortals.

-Your child has a 44% chance of filling their spare time with binge drinking and are more likely to drink, drink heavily, and binge drink than students who don't go to college.

-Your child may actually unlearn things they learned in high school.  In recent years, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute has released a Civic Literacy Report which tracks students' civic knowledge from their Freshman year through graduation.  The results are shocking.  At some schools -- even top schools like Cornell and Duke -- students graduate with less civic knowledge than when they started.  Among the more lurid statistics, one-third of college students can't name the three branches of government.

-Your child is going to be pushed in one political direction.  People of all political stripes read SixSeeds, and we should be able to agree that students should hear from more than one political/ideological perspective while in college.  Yet the reality is that our colleges and universities are among the least ideologically diverse institutions in the United States, with professors less likely to believe in God than the general population and far, far more likely to be on the left side of the political spectrum.  Unsurprisingly, students -- who are subject to frequent classroom indoctrination -- leave college more liberal than they arrived. 

-Your child is likely to become more depressed and anxious.  One would think that the combination of massive spare time, omnipresent parties, and low academic demands would mean that students looked at college as a form of debauched Disneyland, a four-year vacation before they enter the "real world."  Yet juniors feel more depressed, overwhelmed, and anxious than entering freshmen.  

Ahh well, at least all this spare time, ignorance, and alcohol is available at a low, low price, right?  As more people have gone to college, its price has become more accessible, right?  

Wrong.  College is phenomenally expensive and its prices have risen far, far above the rate of inflation.  And these price increases have largely been financed by borrowing on a massive scale.  In fact, Americans now owe more in student loans than they do in credit cards.  Even aside from the dubious merits of much of what passes for a college education, the university economy is facing its own purely economic bubble.

Let me back up a moment.  Am I saying kids shouldn't go to college?  No.  I'm saying that not all kids should go to college and that college can be actively destructive for some.  When you dig just a bit deeper into many statements of parental conventional wisdom, like "You should spend more time with your kids" or "Your kids should go to college," you find that they either cannot be or are not anywhere close to expressions of universal truth.  As I've argued before, many families have the ability to spend more time with their kids only because other families have chosen a different path.  As for college, perhaps the better long-term outcomes for college grads over those with high school diplomas has less to do with college and more to do with the kids themselves, and the answer isn't "more college."  The answer is "building more character in children."  

The University of Tennessee's Glenn Reynolds put it well:

The government decides to try to increase the middle class by subsidizing things that middle class people have: If middle-class people go to college and own homes, then surely if more people go to college and own homes, we’ll have more middle-class people. But homeownership and college aren’t causes of middle-class status, they’re markers for possessing the kinds of traits — self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, etc. — that let you enter, and stay, in the middle class. Subsidizing the markers doesn’t produce the traits; if anything, it undermines them.

It’s time to look at college with fresh eyes – and yes, to even do a cost-benefit analysis of the whole experience.  Instead of writing that tuition check (or, taking out that loan), at least pause to consider whether your child could possibly be better off getting a job, learning a skill, or even putting on a uniform.

College shouldn’t be a no-brainer.

Read more from this author:

Graduates, It's Not About You After All

We Want to Be Better Than We Are

Is Your Family a Group of Hobbits?

Is Jack Bauer Good for my Family?