Author's Note: This blog post was originally published in my previous (and less successful, and now defunct) blog in 2010 while I was still living in the United States. Though the data, where applicable, might be a little dated and the references are US-based, the main points are still relevant today not just in the United States, but in Korea, too.
A
college education seems to be one of those things that most everyone
wants. Parents want it for their kids, employers want to hire those
who have had it, a lot of college students think that it ought to be
a right, and politicians extol its virtues.
Getting
a college education is indeed a good thing. In my own experience, I
can tell you that it has helped me to understand complex ideas and
philosophies and especially because I studied the social sciences,
going to college has helped me to reaffirm some of my own beliefs,
changed some of my opinions and has also helped me to understand
ideas that I do not agree with. My college life, with everything else
that came along with it, was a wonderful journey and it’s a memory
that I will forever cherish, even if I do not remember some of those
nights.
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Now
there are several government aid programs that allow students to
pursue higher education.
As
for the GI Bill, it allows enlisted men and women in the armed forces
to pursue an undergraduate or graduate degree at a college or
university, a cooperative training program, or an accredited
independent study program leading to a degree. It is the least that
the men and women of uniform who have fought for their country
deserve. On the other hand, the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) ensures that all eligible
individuals can benefit from federally funded financial assistance
for education beyond high school. The stated intentions of those two
services are difficult, if not impossible, to argue against.
Now
that I have gotten all the niceties out of the way, it’s time to
rip them a new one.
The
GI Bill was established in 1944 and it was the first of the federal
government’s many forays into higher education. It wasn’t until
1958 that the National Defense Education Act, which was the precursor
to the Federal Perkins Loan program, the very first federal student aid
program for low-income students, was passed by Congress. Before 1944,
politicians in the federal government did nothing to subsidize or
regulate education.
Conventional
wisdom dictates that the GI Bill and FAFSA (and all of its
successors) allowed countless students to afford a college education;
and had those services not been enacted by Congress, the United
States would be lagging far behind other industrialized nations and
could not have achieved the rate of economic growth that it has
experienced since the end of the Second World War. What we have to
ask ourselves is whether or not that conventional wisdom is actually
correct.
The
philosophical argument that is given in support of getting a college
education is education itself. Education is indeed a journey that
begins at birth and ends with death and the more educated people are,
the better off everyone’s lives is.
But what is the practical
argument that is given in support of getting a college education? I
can think of only one – to be eligible for a better paying job. For
that reason, many people who support the subsidization of
education claim that the GI Bill and FAFSA have allowed for many
people to escape from the drudgery of manual labor to become doctors,
engineers, accountants, lawyers, etc.
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Don’t
get me wrong; I’m certainly not against higher education. However, the
problem is that many people seem to make the mistake of judging the
GI Bill and FAFSA to be good because of their stated intentions
rather than their results.
If
the only argument in support of the GI Bill or FAFSA is the
philosophical one, then my argument would be merely philosophical as
well – as much as I agree that having an educated populace is a
desirable thing, I do not think that the government subsidizing
education is the best way to approach that goal. The thing about philosophy, however, is that it is something that people are free to, and do, disagree with ad infinitum.
However, once people try to make the practical argument in support of
the GI Bill or FAFSA, then my argument becomes more fundamental –
has it worked?
Case
in point, how many new college graduates do you know who deliver
pizzas or bag groceries or sell insurance over the phone or bartend
or work entry-level jobs of one kind or another? In other words, how
many new college graduates do you know who work jobs that really do
not need 4-year degrees to accomplish? How many college graduates do
you know who absolutely needed the on-the-job training that they received from their employers because the four years that they took to major
in English or Music Education or Communication or Political Science
did not teach them anything about escrow? Or how many times have you personally not been able to apply for a job because one of the job requirements is work experience and that seems to be the same requirement that all other businesses require? I know many such people and
considering my readership, chances are that you are one of them.
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Considering
the fact that less than 30% of college graduates get into professions that are related to their college majors,
basically, by subsidizing college education as heavily as it has done
for the last several decades, the federal government has turned the
college degree from a mark of important personal accomplishment into
just another credential that doesn’t necessarily mean anything
except that the student managed to accumulate enough college credits.
It’s
true that many employers now require a college degree as a job
qualification. But how many of those jobs actually require particular
skills or knowledge that an applicant could have acquired only in
college? The vast majority of the time, the college degree
requirement is generally used by an employer as a screening device to
keep from having to interview applicants with only a high school
diploma or less even for the most mundane jobs because of the
perception that those with only high school diplomas are less
reliable than those with college degrees. Then the question that
arises is that if a college degree for the most part acts as merely a
screening device rather than a sign of acquired knowledge that is in
need, is that expensive college degree worth it?
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But
what does the cost matter to the recipient of government aid to go to school? He/She is
not paying for his/her education; not directly out-of-pocket anyway.
It matters for two reasons.
Firstly, nothing is for free. Just
because the recipient of the GI Bill is not paying for his/her
education doesn’t mean that taxpayers aren’t paying for it. And
is it right for taxpayers to be forced to pay for an education whose
value is not worth the price tag?
Secondly, it matters because after the government began meddling in
education, it has arguably cheapened education. The GI Bill was
signed into law in 1944 in order to reward the millions of soldiers
who were forcibly drafted into the Second World War. Originally, it
was not meant to go on after all of the military personnel who
participated in the Second World War who could take advantage of the
program had chosen to do so. It was supposed to be a temporary thing
but then came the Korean War, the Vietnam War and so on and so forth
and so not only did the GI Bill remain, it also got a post-9/11 makeover.
As Dr. Milton Friedman once said, it just goes to show you that there really is nothing as permanent as a temporary government program.
As Dr. Milton Friedman once said, it just goes to show you that there really is nothing as permanent as a temporary government program.
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However,
people do argue that government needs to subsidize education because
it is so incredibly expensive. “Think of the poor,” they say. But
they are not asking the important question – why is college
education so expensive?
Since
1985, overall inflation in the US has been about 107.05% whereas the
inflation rate for college during the same timeline has been around
466.8%.
When
something makes no mathematical sense, it’s usually because
government is involved. If you are a recipient of the GI Bill’s
benefits or that of FAFSA loans, think of how readily the bursar at
whatever university or college or accredited school you attended
accepted those checks without ever asking you a lot of questions. And
why wouldn’t they? Those checks are never going to bounce. After
all, it is guaranteed money by the government – it’s free money,
money that has either been taxed or practically freshly printed, or
in some cases, yet to be printed.
When
there is subsidization and guaranteed money involved, two things
happen.
Firstly, subsidization inevitably always leads to
overproduction. Just ask the Iowa corn farmers.
Secondly, guaranteed
money inevitably always leads to higher prices. If I can charge any
price I want for the product that I am selling and I am guaranteed to
be paid no matter what, what reason would I have to not increase my
price? The same logic applies to colleges. If the GI Bill allows you
to go college for up to $100,000 or if FAFSA allows you to borrow up
to $100,000 in student loans, then like magic, the cost of going to
college goes up to $100,000. Never mind the fact that the value of
your education might not be worth $100,000.
By
subsidizing education, the government has transformed
the college experience from being one of expanding the mind to
becoming a mere credential to get an entry-level job for which people are
mostly over-educated. It has raised the cost of going to college so
much so that very few people can now go to college without the GI Bill or
FAFSA thus creating a vicious never-ending cycle. And it has allowed
the marketplace to be so saturated with college degree holders that
despite the fact that so many young people are in serious debt, many young people can only find work in
entry-level jobs that pay peanuts, which in turn compels people to support higher minimum wage rates, which in turn exacerbates things even further. It's a vicious cycle.
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So
the next time you hear someone say that education ought to be a
right that the government ought to help pay partially for or fund outright, people ought to be reminded to think of one very important thing – that famous road to hell
that has been paved with the purest of good intentions.
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