American higher education is the envy of the world, and it’s also failing our students on a massive scale. How can both be true simultaneously? Our decentralized, competitive system of research institutions is a national treasure, unparalleled in human history. We have the best universities, best professors, and best systems of discovery, and we attract the best talent. But the American educational system leaves many high-school graduates woefully unprepared for work or for life, whether or not they go to college. We leave behind more souls than we uplift.
Most young Americans never earn a college degree, and far too many of those who do are poorly served by sclerotic institutions that offer regularly overpriced degrees producing too little life transformation, too little knowledge transmission, and too little pragmatic, real-world value. Well-meaning and incredibly gifted members of faculties, administrations, and boards of trustees genuinely want to help students move up the ladder, but the current incentives don’t encourage the kind of programmatic innovation and pluralism that can help poor and middle-class Americans build a sufficiently durable foundation.
Decades into a digital revolution that will make lifelong work in any single sector rare, we need dynamism—not status quo–ism—in higher education. In our knowledge-intensive economy, we will need an ever-expanding, highly educated workforce. As important, we will need a broader base of wise, gritty learners. We cannot build what we need if we assume that the developmental experience of every 20-year-old will be the same.
We must build a university network that enhances social mobility, instead of reinforcing privilege. We need higher education to transform more lives by offering more accountability, more experimentation, more institutional diversity, more intellectual curiosity, more adaptive learning, and more degrees and certifications. We need a rethink, renewal, and expansion—tinkering around the edges won’t cut it.
Sadly, Washington is getting ready to subsidize failure. A mega-bailout in the form of student-debt forgiveness would prop up and excuse the broken parts of this system—missing the opportunity to go bigger and help college-age Americans from every class and community learn skills, enhance persistence, find work, and embrace the dynamic opportunities of the coming quarter century. Massive forgiveness of student debt would most help upper-class Americans who are going to be just fine without a bailout. It’s a regressive mistake.
Only about one in eight Americans carries student-loan debt; of the $1.6 trillion or so of debt that students have racked up, 56 percent is held by white-collar workers with advanced degrees. About one-third is owed by the wealthiest 20 percent of households, and nearly two-fifths was acquired in pursuit of graduate credentials. The fact is, the typical student-debt holder is more likely to be white, is more educated, and has more earning potential than the median American.
Washington’s debt conversation blurs the rather obvious distinction between doctors and dropouts. There are at least three kinds of debt: debt for specialized degrees that generally lead to high-paying careers, in fields such as law and medicine; debt for post-college education, such as a master’s degree in public policy; and debt for undergraduate courses, some of which lead to degrees and some of which lead to dropping out. Most doctors and lawyers are going to be able to pay off their loans just fine, and graduate students made the adult decision to assume debt. We need to think about the third group—and the system that encourages students to take on so much debt at such a young age with such an uncertain payoff. Rather than wiping the slate clean and repeating the same mistakes, Washington should take a hard look at reforming a broken system. The current debate is a missed opportunity.
A student-debt bailout rewards wealthy kids at the expense of middle-class families, but even more destructively, it perpetuates the lie that our current pedagogical arrangements are sufficient. We should instead admit our underperformance and find ways to introduce alternative approaches—overhauling everything from the credit-hour system to the accrediting cartels; developing new financial models that reconsider the standardization of prices and four-year degrees; experimenting with payment as a portion of future earnings rather than forcing students to take on debt on the first day of registration. To help those Americans who most need a hand, we need to tie public expenditures more tightly to student outcomes. Now is the time to build.
Far too often, higher education equates value with exclusivity, and not with outcomes. The paradigmatic schools that dominate higher-ed discussions in the pages of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post measure themselves by how many high-school seniors they reject, rather than by how many they successfully launch, by how much they bolster the moral and intellectual development of the underprivileged, or even by a crude utilitarian calculus such as the average earnings of their recent graduates. Elite schools compete largely to attract greater numbers of applications and then to reject larger shares of those prospective students. Rejection rates north of 90 percent are seen as hallmarks of “excellence.” The “value” of an education in this decadent system is measured before a student registers for her first class, whether the course is meaningful or not.
Exclusion-based ranking treats education like a luxury good and sells four-year degrees like Louis Vuitton handbags. They’re valuable because they’re expensive and exclusive. Our most desirable universities build ivory towers on top of pedestals surrounded by fences marked keep out. The famed Harvard Business School professor Clay Christensen argued before his death in 2020 that much of what is wrong with higher education lies in our political class’s fetishizing of the Ivy League, and the consequent status-chasing of so many “almost Ivies” in pursuing activities that help in rankings but do little for students or social mobility. Too many policy makers, thought leaders, and donors assume that most college experiences are like an Ivy League experience. The data tell a different story.
Thirty-one million people in this country are between the ages of 18 and 24. Thirteen million of them are current undergraduates; almost three-quarters of those are enrolled in four-year-degree programs. By contrast, 63,000 kids are enrolled in Ivy League undergraduate programs—that’s 0.2 percent of the 18-to-24-year-old population. Even if we add in all the undergraduates at the two dozen other Ivy-like institutions, we are still below 1 percent of the age cohort—yet this tiny subset of the population dominates the imagination of administrators, journalists, and lawmakers. Here’s the thing: Like the doctors and lawyers who pay off their debts, these kids are going to be just fine after graduation, tapping the networks of contacts they’ve acquired. Reform should be aimed at improving the experience of non-Ivy students, whether they’re enrolled in traditional four-year programs or not.
The biggest problem facing most young Americans isn’t student debt; it’s that our society has lost sight of the shared goal of offering them a meaningful, opportunity-filled future with or without college. We’ve lost the confidence that a nation this big and broad can offer different kinds of institutional arrangements, suited to different needs. What we say we want for Americans entering adulthood and what we actually offer them are disastrously mismatched. Debt forgiveness would not just be regressive; it would be recalcitrant. A massive bailout would increase the cost of education and stifle the kind of renaissance higher ed desperately needs.
Debt forgiveness would pour gasoline on the bonfire of education costs. According to the Education Data Initiative, “the average cost of college tuition and fees at public 4-year institutions has climbed 179.2% over the last 20 years for an average annual increase of 9.0%.” (For comparison, personal health-care costs—another disproportionately inflationary sector—have increased 58 percent over the same period.) The universities that take in federal dollars without useful tools to measure student outcomes have had too little motivation to resist price hikes. Meanwhile, students are taking out huge loans at artificially suppressed interest rates without considering whether their degree will justify the debt. Right now, there aren’t many guardrails against inflation on the supply or demand sides.
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