Case Against College

The message is familiar. Colleges are youth ghettos. They promise more than they deliver. They serve as great social sorting machines and not as institutions of higher learning. Their students are pressured to attend by parents or peers and do not know what else to do. Their diplomas cost more--and are worth less--than ever before.

This sort of thing has been said before by academics, federal task forces and foundation reports. But the message is likely to have more impact on the public when it is pronounced by a best-selling author. That is precisely what Caroline Bird (author of Born Female and The Invisible Scar) has done in her new book The Case Against College (McKay; $9.95).

Bird has no credentials in education other than her degrees from the universities of Toledo and Wisconsin, but she apparently has done her homework. She writes that "College is good for some people, but it is not good for everybody." The problem, she says, is that for the past decade or so, in a great wave of democratization, society has made college available--if not imperative--to most of the youthful population. Fully half of all U.S. high school graduates now go on to some form of higher education, and the percentage is climbing every year.

Fuzzy Function. The greatest growth has been in public two-year community colleges, but the function of these well-meaning institutions is fuzzy at best. "There are too many people in the world of the 1970s already," says Bird, "and we do not know where to put newcomers. The neatest way to get rid of a superfluous 18-year-old is to amuse him all day long at a community college while his family feeds and houses him. This is not only cheaper than a residential college but cheaper than supporting him on welfare, a make-work job, in prison or in the armed forces."

The dilemma that Bird underscores in dozens of interviews with students, parents and college administrators is that "the great majority of high school graduates aren't sure what they want to do." Indeed, there is no reason why they should be, or why a college freshman has to sign up for a major that from the day he sets foot on campus narrows his possible options and his choice of careers. Most young people simply have not experienced enough variety in jobs or life-styles to be able to make an intelligent choice about then-adult career when they graduate from high school.

Bird is at her weakest in overstating the financial advantage of not going to college. She plays games with statistics, arguing that if a high school graduate invested the equivalent of four years' college costs in a lump sum in a savings bank and went to work, his lifetime income (including compound interest) would exceed the earnings of a college graduate. The greatest fallacy in that line of reasoning is the fact that high school seniors do not have the $25,000 or $30,000 representing their college costs in a lump sum to invest. Nonetheless, Bird is correct in saying that a college education does not necessarily have much effect on income; she points to the analysis of Harvard Professor Christopher Jencks, who concludes that financial success in the U.S. depends to a large degree on luck and social class, not years in school. As college graduates are increasingly finding to their dismay, college today often does not even prepare them for their first jobs, much less for future financial security.

Bird suggests relaxing the lockstep that forces millions of young people to march automatically to school year after year, from kindergarten to graduate school. She notes that top educators have already called for alternatives to the traditional college education. Yale President Kingman Brewster, for example, has warned against the "assumption that formal education is best received in continuous doses," while proposing that students leave the campus after their sophomore year to live abroad. Chicago Sociologist James Coleman's White House report on youth suggests giving vouchers worth four years of college tuition to young people; the vouchers could be used to join an apprentice program or enroll in a specialty school or traditional college any time after age 16. Clark Kerr's Carnegie Commission has proposed that every high school graduate be given "two years in the bank" to spend for further education at any time in his life, perhaps alternating periods of work and school.

More Options. Whatever the ultimate choice, young people must have more guidance and options than are now available. They should be free of the pressure that demands a diploma from a traditional college and be encouraged to take advantage of the vocational schools, special institutes, apprentice programs and other kinds of training sponsored by business, labor unions and the armed forces. For now, the greatest case against college is that for millions of students, it is the only game in town.

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