WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Before diving into the causes of rising higher education spending, it’s worth asking if we ought to care. It’s obvious that we should care about, say, our rising spending on health care. It is very important for cancer patients to be able to afford chemotherapy; any argument that it’s not fails the laugh test. But it’s become somewhat fashionable of late to claim that higher education isn’t really that essential. Perhaps the answer to the cost problem is for kids to simply stop going.
“For an increasing number of kids, the extra time and money spent pursuing a college diploma will leave them worse off than they were before they set foot on campus,” Megan McArdle concluded in a Newsweek cover story last fall. Peter Thiel, the billionaire PayPal co-founder, has been paying smart undergraduates to drop out and start working on something, anything, other than college.
So does college raise incomes? Is it an investment good enough to make widely accessible?
Yes, it is. Period. Usually, this would be the part of the article where I note that there’s disagreement and perhaps a slight weighting of evidence to one side or the other. I won’t. Even McArdle and other college skeptics acknowledge that the average college graduate today will make far more over the course of his or her life than the average high-school graduate who doesn’t attend college. And the bulk of the information indicates that college really is the cause.
Going to college means you make more money than you otherwise would, and that benefit far, far outstrips its upfront price.
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