It’s certainly true that everybody doesn’t need a four year college degree. You could probably make a pretty strong argument that my plumber is at least as valuable to society as I am. Governor Rick Snyder likes to say a welder can find a good job anywhere in Michigan within twenty minutes.
But in a recent essay, Michigan Future’s Lou Glazer looked at a massive report from the Federal Reserve, the “Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households in 2017.”
What it revealed is that 85 percent of people with only a bachelor’s degree said they were doing at least “okay” financially, compared to only 66 percent of those who only had a high school degree; those with associates’ degrees were somewhere in the middle.
Interestingly, the report also showed that nearly three-quarters of kids who had a parent with a bachelor’s degree went on to earn one themselves. But less than a fifth of those who came from families where neither parent had a degree finished college.
Glazer concluded that this was more evidence that “the elites that are telling us not to get a four-year-degree mean that for only other peoples’ kids, not their own.”
Kudos to Lou for exposing a bit of hypocrisy there. By and large, it isn’t just that people with advanced degrees make more money. They tend to be happier, to enjoy their jobs and to have more intellectual and emotional resources to cope with life.
There’s also something that worries me about our understandable obsession with earning money. Do we really want a nation of highly trained technocrats, people who can design engines who have no idea who Socrates was, or how things really work under our Constitution? Today, college has become so expensive that many students have little time for the luxury of honest intellectual inquiry, of reading an important book just on a whim.
That’s what higher education is supposed to be for. Glazer also shared with me a post by Eileen Lonergan, who attended Michigan State and now owns a website design and internet marketing business in Massachusetts. She wrote that “the most important part of my education at MSU was in how it prepared me for a career that didn’t yet exist while I was on campus.”
Lonergan, who majored in advertising, added that being exposed to ideas and technology “provided me with the curiosity to want to continuously learn new things, and instilled in me the confidence to put myself out there and try.” That’s why both Glazer and I believe a traditional liberal arts education is the best grounding of all.
But how do today’s students afford one? Well, government ought to heavily subsidize the cost of education. That would be about the best investment that this or any society could make, something we used to do, ironically, during the Cold War.
One thing we might try is establishing a National Service Corps for all Americans between the ages of 18 and 20, modeled on a combination of the Peace Corps and the armed services. I think young people who don’t do military service, which would be most of them, could elect to spend two years working for their country in various ways, from literacy tutoring to road building to some new version of the Civilian Conservation Corps.
They’d get a small stipend while there, and when they graduated, the government would pay all or most of the cost of their higher education. That would be the best thing we could do, not just for the next generation – but for ourselves.
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