...No Desire For Education

The always brilliant Thomas Sowell offered this insight into a major flaw in progressive thinking, back in 1995, as a rebuttal to the assertion that young people thirst for an education and that the government is right to slake that thirst via tax-dollar largesse:

You have millions of people who have absolutely no desire for an education using up billions of dollars of the taxpayers' money, and not only not getting an education themselves, but making it more difficult to give an education to those people who came to college with an idea of getting one.

Sowell drives home his point:

They wanted to be in ivy-covered buildings for four years in order to get more money when they graduate, and have a good time while they're there.

He then schools (pun obviously intended) his counterpart in the "fallacy of composition" that underlies the Left's belief that college-educating everyone will elevate society. If everyone is credentialed, the benefit of being so diminishes or disappears. If one person stands up in a stadium, he sees better, but if everyone does, then there's no benefit gained. Is a college education beneficial to everyone, to every career, and to every life-path, given that it requires substantial time and resources? Does the mere fact of having a college degree really mean that much?

This jibes with an observation I recently encountered about why the spawn of society's "elites" are so eager to go to Ivy League schools. It's not about the education itself, it's about building associations and networks that will serve them in the workplace and preserve the "elite" status of the 1%. It's about maintaining the "us vs them" life of privilege and power, a reality we witness every day (hint: it's not the evil rich corporate types who build walls and compounds to keep the riffraff at bay, it's the progressive power players and their Beltway remoras). Again, the fallacy of composition - those elaborate networks are only useful if few have them, rather than everyone.

All this was true before higher education went down the rabbit hole of woke and useless "studies" degrees, and it's even more true now. While certain professions obviously require a rigorous tertiary education, and some kids go to school to get one, much of what goes on in college is not about kids craving knowledge or the honing of their intellects.

The Internet offers many lists of "top party schools."

Q.E.D.

Many kids go to college because it's expected of them, or because lacking a degree is deemed a blemish and reduces one's social/dating marketability, or because they can postpone adulthood for several years, or because they have convinced themselves that chasing a "studies" degree serves some greater good.

Many kids assume massive debt, facilitated by a government that has socialized away the concept of lender's risk. They choose study programs that don't warrant taking that debt, find themselves with educations that offer little utility in repaying that debt, and then whine about being buried by that debt.

With the risk throttle removed, there's little left to check the growth of college tuitions. As Mike Roe notes, college tuition has increased faster than food, than energy, than real estate, and than healthcare. It's obvious that colleges are simply vacuuming up all the cheap and free-flowing money the government offers to college students, with little to show for the effort.

Add to that the various forms of affirmative action and identity-based favoritism, and the availability and quality of education sought by those who genuinely want to learn diminishes even as it is made more expensive.

As usual, when government gets involved in something, price goes up, quality goes down, and moral hazard is created. Good intentions rule the day, results mean little - or produce a counterintuitive response that failure can be remedied by doing more of the same, and risk is off-loaded. People are never as careful with Other People's Money as they are with their own, and government is the ultimate example of that.

College enrollment has been declining for the past dozen years. We should applaud and encourage, rather than lament, that trend. There are obviously many kids who don't gain anything of value by going to college, and would be far better off entering the workforce after high school. Obviously, those pursuing STEM and "professional" careers get there through tertiary schooling, but they are a minority (18%) of all undergraduate degrees.

What of the old and oft-cited "fact" that getting a college degree increases your lifetime earnings? That statistic is so heavily skewed by STEM and professional high-earners that removing them from the equation actually flips the result, something that's validated by another statistic: that only 27% of undergrads actually use their degree for a job or career. Figure that most STEM majors do and we end up with a shockingly low rate of non-STEM degree utility.

Useless degrees that drop high-five- or low-six-figure debt on the backs of kids just entering the workforce. Are we shocked that some of them feel overwhelmed by their debt burdens?

That Sowell's interviewer brings up credentials instead of knowledge is also telling. People, especially on the Left, have grown used to admiring documentation over depth, and prefer that their "experts" wave around a piece of paper rather than demonstrate insight, understanding, and fact-supported logic. Someone's statement is often validated by "he has a degree in X" rather than of its own merits. This "credentialism" is reinforced by a long and growing list of government requirements and certifications, by professional societies such as the AMA and the ABA that demand someone get paper from an institution in order to enter their hallowed ranks (and in doing so create artificial scarcities that enhance their members' prospects, power, and income), and by the social media hordes who shout down perfectly valid statements because the utterers don't have proper pedigrees.

The cultural stigma associated with skipping college is fading.

It should fade faster, and we as individuals should do our part by recognizing that someone who opted to become a carpenter's apprentice out of college is very likely making a better choice than someone going to Party_School_01 to pursue a [insert-woke-here] Studies degree whose sole utility is teaching others the same useless garbage. We should also recognize that a great many young adults elevate other priorities above tertiary learning, and that none but universities' coffers are served by shipping or pushing them off to college.

I expect (and, again, welcome) a great shake-out in college education. People are waking up to the realities I covered here, and more are opting to skip the traditional college path. I expect that employers in tech, finance, and elsewhere - employers that already train up their new hires - will start looking at the straight-out-of-high-school crowd, teach them what they need to know in order to be productive, and rely less on the hollow inculcation factories for their entry-level needs. If a number of universities end up shuttering their doors, so much the better. If tuitions decrease, then all who matter win. They've been too-long insulated from market forces by the buckets of money the government channels through students and into their vaults. And, if kids end up becoming productive adults sooner as a result, they, we, and society as a whole benefit.

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