Parents, Don't Send Your Kids to College | From the Bell Tower
If we ever needed a stimulus for exploring change and putting the learners first, these new "no need for college" movements make a pretty good one Steven Bell, Associate University Librarian, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA Feb 17, 2011Most parents, from the time their children are old enough to understand, make clear their expectation that college is a destination on this road we call life. James Altucher is not like most parents. He tells his children that college is a waste of time. Not only does he not expect his children, smart as they may be according to him, to attend college, but he actively advocates that they, along with everyone else's children, should completely ignore higher education. According to Altucher, college is a bad investment and waste of time. Actually, says Altucher, it's just simple math:
Over the course of a lifetime, according to CollegeBoard, a college graduate can be expected to earn $800,000 more than his counterpart that didn't go to college. $800,000 is a big spread and it could potentially separate the haves from the have-nots. If I took that $104,000 [in tuition and fees] and I chose to invest it in a savings account that had interest income of 5% per year I'd end up with an extra $1.4 million dollars over a 50 year period. A full $600,000 more.
His critics immediately ripped into what they saw as a fool's proposition. Who's getting five percent interest these days? What about the benefits of a liberal education? College is about more than spending and earning money!
It's hard to take someone like Altucher seriously, but he may just be at the forefront of a new wave of vastly different thinking about the value of higher education.
Is this for real?
A part of me believed that Altucher is taking his radical position only to make a point about where college is failing American society. That is, he really does plan to send his children to college and expects that you will too, but wants to send out a strong wakeup call for vast improvements before they get there. As I dug deeper into his articles on this topic I started to think he is dead serious about this. He really believes that no one should go to college.
Before we write off Altucher as a crank with an axe to grind against higher education, however, perhaps we should examine his arguments more closely. With the publication of the book Academically Adrift and its revelations about the lack of learning happening in higher education, folks like Altucher may start gaining more followers.
The economic argument
Altucher is not the first to argue that foregoing college makes better economic sense than investing $100,000 in a potentially useless diploma. Richard Vedder, who blogs at the Chronicle of Higher Education, is a leading proponent of the "not everyone has to go to college" movement. In one notable post, Vedder used BLS data to point out that approximately 17 million Americans with college diplomas were employed in jobs that required no college degree, such as parking lot attendant or taxi driver.
Those previously suggesting that some individuals would be better off skipping college usually referred to those who did poorly in high school. That's what makes Altucher so different. He's not just pointing his finger at a segment everyone knows is likely to fail at higher education. Altucher wants everyone, even his own kids, to bypass college. It leads me to question Altucher's math and economics just as others have, considering the ample evidence that earning a college diploma, over the long run, has higher financial and job opportunity rewards.
More students are un-interested
When parents do force their sons and daughters to attend college the results are not always good. For one thing, some students are totally underprepared for higher education, and enrolling them before they are ready may be a formula for failure.
A recently released study in New York State revealed that less than half the students graduate high school prepared for college. We also just learned of a student who was so disappointed with his college experience that he decided to turn it into an entrepreneurial venture for all the other disgruntled college dropouts called UnCollege. Though not yet officially available for un-enrollment, Dale Stephens plans to offer UnCollege as the option for those who believe they can learn more on their own than they can by sitting in college classrooms—with lots of un-debt. This sounds like the perfect un-institution of higher education for Altucher's children.
While it strikes me as surreal and somewhat ridiculous, especially the notion of paying $100 a month for whatever sort of support and guidance you'll get at UnCollege, I think it speaks volumes about the current generation's lack of trust in traditional higher education.
I'll pay you not to go to college
Then I read a BusinessWeek article about Peter Thiel, a billionaire venture capitalist, entrepreneur, and philanthropist, and his next great idea for stimulating innovation in America:
Thiel's latest philanthropic brainchild: a program that will award fellowships of $100,000 to 20 entrepreneurs under the age of 20, on the condition that they drop out of college for two years to pursue their ventures full-time.
Is that where things are headed in this country? Paying traditional college-age students not to go to college so they can be truly creative, inventive, and visionary? What kind of statement does that make about what's happening in our college classrooms? I suppose it means that we're turning out lots of well-educated taxi drivers and GAP salespeople. None of the triumvirate of great American visionaries—Gates, Jobs, and Zuckerberg—completed college. You can expect to hear these three names mentioned again and again as the poster children for why college is a bad return on the investment.
Should we worry?
It a nutshell, no. I think our livelihood is safe for now. Then again, when you add up the ravings of one crank waging a campaign to get parents to stop sending their kids to college with a young entrepreneur's great idea for not going to college with filthy rich people using their money to increase the number of college dropouts, maybe there is just a teeny tiny little bit to worry about.
The lesson in the developments reported here, however, is that those of us working in higher education can no longer take anything for granted, not even our future. If we ever needed a stimulus for exploring change and putting the learners first, these new "no need for college" movements, to my way of thinking, make a pretty good one. The big question for academic librarians, as always, is how are we making a difference in the lives of our students and preparing them for academic and workplace success? We've got to demonstrate how we're superior to all the un-library options out there.
Steven Bell is Associate University Librarian, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA. For more from Steven visit his blogs, Kept-Up Academic Librarian, ACRLog and Designing Better Libraries or visit his website.
