But all that changed as increasing numbers of employers began requiring a college degree for jobs that don't by any stretch of the imagination require a college education to perform. The Washington Post reports:
"Among the positions never requiring a college degree in the past that are quickly adding that to the list of desired requirements: dental hygienists, photographers, claims adjusters, freight agents, and chemical equipment operators."
In 2017, Manjari Raman of the Harvard Business School wrote that
"the degree gap the discrepancy between the demand for a college degree in job postings and the employees who are currently in that job who have a college degree is significant. For example, in 2015, 67% of production supervisor job postings asked for a college degree, while only 16% of employed production supervisors had one."
In other words, even though most people already doing such jobs don't have a bachelor's degree, companies are only hiring new people who do. Part of the reason: that requirement automatically eliminates a lot of applicants, reducing the time and effort involved in making hiring decisions. Rather than sifting through re'sume's for specific skills (like the ability to use certain computer programs or write fluently), employers let a college degree serve as a proxy. The result is not only that they'll hire people who don't have the skills they actually need, but that they're eliminating people who do have the skills but not the degree. You won't be surprised to learn that those rejected applicants are more likely to be people of color, who are underrepresented among the holders of college degrees.
Similarly, some fields that used to accept a BA now require a graduate degree to perform the same work. For example, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that "in 2015-16, about 39% of all occupational therapists ages 25 and older had a bachelor's degree as their highest level of educational attainment." Now, however, employers are commonly insisting that new applicants hold at least a master's degree and so up the pyramid we continually go (at ever greater cost to those students).
The Biggest Pyramid of All
In a sense, you could say that the whole capitalist economy is the biggest pyramid of them all. For every one of the fascinating, fulfilling, autonomous, and well-paying jobs out there, there are thousands of boring, mind- and body-crushing ones like pulling items for shipment in an Amazon warehouse or folding clothes at Forever 21.
We know, in other words, that there are only a relatively small number of spaces in the cockpit of today's economic plane. Nonetheless, we tell our young people that the guaranteed way to get one of those rare gigs at the top of the pyramid is a college education.
Now, just stop for a second and consider what it costs to join the 2021 all-American Airplane Game of education. In 1970, when I went to Reed, a small, private, liberal arts college, tuition was $3,000 a year. I was lucky. I had a scholarship (known in modern university jargon as a "tuition discount") that covered most of my costs. This year, annual tuition at that same school is a mind-boggling $62,420, more than 20 times as high. If college costs had simply risen with inflation, the price would be about $21,000 a year, or just under triple the price.
If I'd attended Federal City College (now the University of D.C.), my equivalent of a state school then, tuition would have been free. Now, even state schools cost too much for many students. Annually, tuition at the University of California at Berkeley, the flagship school of that state's system, is $14,253 for in-state students, and $44,007 for out-of-staters.
I left school owing $800, or about $4,400 in today's dollars. These days, most financial "aid" resembles foreign "aid" to developing countries that is, it generally takes the form of loans whose interest piles up so fast that it's hard to keep up with it, let alone begin to pay off the principal in your post-college life. Some numbers to contemplate: 62% of those graduating with a BA in 2019 did so owing money owing, in fact, an average of almost $29,000. The average debt of those earning a graduate degree was an even more staggering $71,000. That, of course, is on top of whatever the former students had already shelled out while in school. And that, in turn, is before the "miracle" of compound interest takes hold and that debt starts to grow like a rogue zucchini.
It's enough to make me wonder whether a seat in the Great American College and University Airplane Game is worth the price, and whether it's ethical for me to continue serving as an adjunct flight attendant along the way. Whatever we tell students about education being the path to a good job, the truth is that there are remarkably few seats at the front of the plane.
Of course, on the positive side, I do still believe that time spent at college offers students something beyond any price the opportunity to learn to think deeply and critically, while encountering people very different from themselves. The luckiest students graduate with a lifelong curiosity about the world and some tools to help them satisfy it. That is truly a ticket to a good life and no one should have to buy a seat in an Airplane Game to get one.
Copyright 2021 Rebecca Gordon
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
