College: It's Complicated

from Sara Mayeux about the problems inherent in trying to hold a generic discussion about the value of "a college degree":

It's worth disaggregating what we're actually talking about when we talk about "higher education." Four years at Harvard or Stanford is not the same thing as four years at Oberlin or Grinnell, which in turn is quite different from three to five years at a state flagship, all of which are basically incommensurate with cobbling together credits at a local community college while working full-time. And as for for-profit "universities," well, in my ideal world we'd just call a spade "consumer fraud." (On that topic, see Adam's in this space.)

Articles about whether "college is worthless" or "higher education is a bubble," which we've seen a lot of in 2011, are thus fairly useless. There's just no such thing as a generic "college degree" or "college experience" that can be meaningfully discussed — too many variables determine whether, and how, any particular undergraduate program is useful or valuable.

The biggest problem, as I see it, is that elite discussions suffer (naturally) from an elite bias that, in turn, gives a distorted view comparable to the famous New Yorker cover of the Manhattanite worldview. From inside elite circles the difference between going to Yale (Ivy!) and going to the University of Michigan (public!) looms fairly large. But the truth is that these are both highly selective schools. If you restrict your gaze to public colleges located in the state of Michigan, the undergraduate population of the flagship campus is a small slice of the overall pie. And most states' flagship campuses aren't nearly up to Michigan's standards of selectivity.

Not only are these less selective, less prestigious colleges more numerically significant than their more famous brethren, but precisely because they're less selective the quality of the instruction they offer is a bigger deal to the students who attend them.