Stop Scaring Students

It is high school graduation time, and some columnists here in California and nationally, in platforms such as Forbes and U.S. News & World Report, seem to be heralding in the season by carrying articles questioning the value of a college education. They report record unemployment levels among recent college graduates as the rationale for pursuing a trade right out of high school rather than pursuing a college degree.

What such articles fail to report is that the best insurance against unemployment is a college degree. A review of Bureau of Labor Statistics data tracing educational attainment and unemployment for all recessions since 1981 suggests that adults with a college education were twice as likely to be employed as those who had earned only a high school diploma. The logical claim is that education is an investment that pays off.

One recent article in  our local newspaper, "College enrollment down, experts cite low funding, high cost” quoted Richard Vedder, director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, who, on a recent trip encountered a parking lot attendant and bellman, both of whom had earned college degrees, certainly not required for their jobs. His take was that their "financial return on a college investment was negative."

Vedder drew the wrong conclusion.  During recessions some college-educated adults are forced to take jobs beneath the levels for which they are professionally qualified. But one cannot make the assumption that this is true for the majority of college graduates.  Recessions have the tendency to exert top-down pressure on the workforce, squeezing the less-educated and less-experienced out the bottom and into unemployment.

Within the last two weeks National Public Radio broadcast a Planet Money segment which contained sound bites from a trio of national figures – Ellen DeGeneres, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and Oprah Winfrey - delivering commencement addresses. All ardently urged the new graduates seated before them to "follow their passions."

I would encourage them to do just that, follow their passions … but tempered with pragmatism. Also I would recommend that academic advisers, coupled with an institution’s career advisrs, coach students to select majors and possibly minors that offer the student the opportunity to pursue both passions and careers. That way students can have their cake and eat it, too.

"What if you don’t have a passion?" asked the exasperated student interviewed in NPR’s story. College is a wonderful place to develop or focus passion.  Yet in this era of global economic stress, it is tempting for students to home in on a career early during their matriculation. Academic and career advisors should be vigilant in helping students and their parents, who are likely to be pressuring them into an early decision about an occupation, to avoid that trap.

All students need a healthy dose of learning opportunities that build the skills and capacities that will support them as their professional and personal lives unfold.  That is one of the purposes of the liberal arts, that broad curriculum that pundits love to hate.  We must be more effective in communicating the value of the liberal arts, not just in capabilities and perceptions, but in jobs and in dollars and sense.

Journalists and "experts" who say nay to the value of a college education are doing millions of high school and college students a gross disservice. They are robbing students of the best hope of developing and pursuing their passions with careers, each in a civically responsible way. Shortsighted reporting on this undermines the national security of the country by limiting its ability to develop the human capital on which the future of the United States depends.