Is College Working?

Few propositions are questioned less frequently among the intelligentsia than that higher education is a productive investment—too expensive, perhaps, but still a good use of social resources, and one that we should be encouraging more and more students to participate in. But a new report from the the Wall Street Journal adds to the growing heap of evidence making that argument look less and less solid:

Freshmen and seniors at about 200 colleges across the U.S. take a little-known test every year to measure how much better they get at learning to think. The results are discouraging.

At more than half of schools, at least a third of seniors were unable to make a cohesive argument, assess the quality of evidence in a document or interpret data in a table, The Wall Street Journal found after reviewing the latest results from dozens of public colleges and universities that gave the exam between 2013 and 2016. […]

Some academic experts, education researchers and employers say the Journal’s findings are a sign of the failure of America’s higher-education system to arm graduates with analytical reasoning and problem-solving skills needed to thrive in a fast-changing, increasingly global job market. In addition, rising tuition, student debt and loan defaults are putting colleges and universities under pressure to prove their value.

The results vary by school attended (and almost certainly by field of study). Moreover, the WSJ only accessed data for public institutions, which have faced budget cuts; it could be that results are better at private schools. But overall, the data call into question the value that higher education is providing at a time when student loan debt is at record highs and politicians are mulling plans to make public college “free” by offering huge new subsidies.

A college degree is becoming in many ways what a high school degree was fifty years ago—a stamp of competency, or marker that a person has basic skills needed to be a reliable employee—rather than a signal of actual advanced knowledge-acquisition and capacity for creative thinking. On an individual level it still makes sense for most students to do what they can to get credentialed; no one wants to be left behind on the professional treadmill. But as a society, an education system defined by degree inflation and quality stagnation is a sign of a deeper malaise. Those college graduates who do have critical thinking skills should be putting them to work devising new ways to deliver students the skills that will do them the most good, rather than blindly shepherding more and more students through an expensive and unreformed higher education system that is struggling deliver on its most basic promises.