Higher education in the United States has been greatly oversold. Many students who are neither academically strong nor inclined toward serious intellectual work have been lured into colleges and universities. At considerable cost to their families and usually the taxpayer as well, those students sometimes obtain a degree, but often with little if any gain in human capital that will prove beneficial in the labor market or in dealing with the challenges of life.
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So says George Leef of the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy in this new essay. Roughly seven out of ten high school graduates in the United States today go on to college, many of whom will not complete a four year degree. To be perfectly frank, most of these people neither deserve nor even need higher education, and it will likely be to the benefit of everyone if vocational and technical training were emphasized rather than university education. The job market will benefit from more people having real-world experience and skills, the professors will not have to deal with students unprepared for intellectual rigor, and the students themselves will save a great deal of time and money.
For many students, college is not seen as a place to grow intellectually or increase the breadth of their knowledge, but rather as a four-year excuse to drink, party, and otherwise delay the responsibilities of adulthood while doing as little as possible to graduate. The results of this overselling of higher education are manifold: grade inflation, ever-rising tuition costs, the dumbing-down of curricula, and the ultimate devaluation of the Bachelor’s Degree itself.
