College For All: The Murderer of the American Middle Class
When you flood an 'Elite' institution with anyone who breathes, it loses all meaning.
79,593. That is the number of Undergraduate students physically enrolled at Arizona State University, the largest University in the United States, as of Fall 2023. They host another 66,062 students online. This number alone, over 115,000, is almost triple the number of Optometrists in the US, over eleven times the number of Pediatricians, and even 50% more than the number of Officers in the Army. Each year, ASU awards over 20,000 diplomas, has over 240 unique majors, all spread out over a monumental campus containing over 1,200 buildings.
ASU was always big, but not this big. From 1995 to 2000, ASU had a respectable average of some 37,000-odd undergraduate students. For a State School, this number is about what we’d expect. But by the dawn of the new millennia, ASU began increasing total enrollment by 2,000 students, each year, every year, until about 2012. This was when ASU partnered its existing online degree program with Pearson, adding over 50,000 new online undergraduate students over the course of a decade. In just 10 short years, ASU saw an enrollment jump of 94%. And it wasn’t alone. In the past decade, the University of Central Florida saw enrollment balloon by 74% to 69,320, and Western Governors, 390% to 169,379. This growth, predictably, came at a cost – the least of which, larger class sizes; with as many as 1,200 students under a single professor, in the case of UCF’s mandatory class GEB-3006. It is generally accepted that higher class sizes tends to lead to lower absorption of the material by students, as they lose the ability to get personalized education by their professors. This alone diminishes the educational purpose of College, but that’s not all:
More degrees means more degree holders. The fallout from this rapid growth quickly spilled over into the job market. Here’s the problem: as of 2020, 40% of the labor force has a bachelor’s degree equivalent or better, but only 34% of jobs actually require these degrees (Hodge et al., 2023). That means 6% of the entire labor force, no small number, is ‘underemployed’ – working at a job they are overqualified for. When you look at graduates in the past decade, one year after graduating, 52% are underemployed; nearly all of them (86% of that figure) have remained that way to this day (Hodge et al.).
Inundated with qualified applicants, employers of high skill labor have the freedom to be extremely selective – pushing recent graduates down the ladder to low-skilled service jobs: today, more college graduates are employed as cashiers than mechanical engineers (Eckhardt, 2024). Now, basic market economics would suggest that this problem would resolve itself – as labor competition drives high skill wages down, and employer competition drives middle-skill (that is, trade, vocational, and apprenticed jobs’) wages up, the labor force should naturally sort itself out. Prospective workers will choose trade schools over universities and enter into these middle-skill fields until the labor supply reaches equilibrium again. However, we haven’t seen this even begin to happen, the problem seems to be getting worse year after year. There was a big hit to college enrollment over the Covid years, but these students weren’t exactly dropping out to become crane operators, welders, or glassblowers.
Now, the parents and grandparents of the struggling collegiates have quite a few opinions as to why this is. I’m sure you can picture what they are. We picked the wrong degrees. We’re just too lazy to properly job hunt. We’re entitled and refuse to do the hard physical labor of a plumber or carpenter, unlike them. In a way, they’re right. If every struggling graduate shredded their degree, their pride along with it, and picked up a trade today, they could see real wages of as much as $87,000 within four years (or the amount of time it would take to finish an Undergraduate degree) depending on the trade (Hodge et al.). Unsurprisingly, though, people are (perhaps naïvely) still clutching on to their degrees. Is this a problem of our generation’s seeming aversion to ‘real’ work? Perhaps listening to their elders, for once in their lives, could do the underemployed some good.
Let’s take a trip back to the origins of this college craze – the 1980s. The recently established Department of Education published a report, A Nation At Risk, which harkened the then poor public education system to “an act of war” against our population. According to the report, America was behind the rest of the world in terms of holistic education, more importantly – the Soviet Union. Education, which was at that point a largely partisan issue, quickly became a matter of National Security. If we were to win the war against the Soviets, we needed more education – we needed more college. The resulting push for education reform led to programs like the infamous Common Core and No Child Left Behind. Slowly, as Politicians realized that ‘education’ itself was too nebulous, not measurable enough to put on campaign posters, they became laser focused on the much easier to understand talking points – standardized test scores and college enrollment. From the Report’s initial urge to develop career skills, apprenticeships, vocations, and heuristics, we got proficiency benchmarks on the SAT and college students per capita. Of course, when viewed from the distant, high towers of government bureaucracy, everything looked great – it was a known fact that college education leads to greater salaries, literacy, and even general health and happiness. A diploma was like a golden ticket to everything we want in life, so of course, more college equals more better.
And just like that, College for All was born. What was once told to children as ‘one path among many’ quickly became ‘the only acceptable path’, in the eyes of parents, teachers, and politicians alike. It was the solution to every problem voters cared about: inequality, unemployment, financial security, and sweet, sweet tax revenues. In the chase for enrollment, all else was forgotten. For the next thirty years, American youth were told three words over and over again: “Go to College”. From Reagan to Obama, from Conservative to Liberal, parents and students across the country took this phrase to heart. By 2012, 96% of Democrats and 99% of Republicans wished for their kids to attend college (Heimlich, 2012). It’s not hard to see why – middle class parents, increasingly concerned about their children’s futures in an era of Globalization-wrought outsourcing, immigration-wrought labor competition, and the general job instability of the .com bubble and 2007 financial crisis, were sold a convenient solution. The only thing parents needed to do was save up six figures worth of tuition (no small task) and send their children to college, where they would earn it all back and then some! And, if parents didn’t have the cash on hand, a few convenient loans would be more than worth it – the returns were so guaranteed banks would even hand them out to students with zero credit history!
Of course, parents wanted their children to get into the best universities they could afford, and with large financial aid incentives for top performers, parents turned up the heat on their early-teenaged children – College was the only way forward, it was the only solution to the only problem. If their children weren’t the top of their class, they’d end up flipping burgers for the rest of their life. The early 21st century has been the century of tiger moms and helicopter parents – sheltering their children from unproductive social activities, ushering them to tutors from extracurriculars after music lessons, demanding excellence at every opportunity, just to get their kids in the door.
Speaking to the children themselves, the vast majority never even considered not going to college – at least, that is, before they got their degrees. According to a national survey, 64% of former college students say they would have chosen a different path, had they the knowledge they do now (Belkin, 2024).
In 2009, the median wage premium between college and high school graduates was $19,550. In 2022, the premium was $18,411. Neither figure is adjusted for inflation.
The biggest reason for this reduction in wage premium is largely due to the steep rise in underemployment as the value of diplomas have diminished. Now, this isn’t a completely unknown phenomenon. The ‘PhD working at Starbucks’ meme has been around since the early 2000s at the least! But, even as the younger sibling watched the older sibling struggle to find work after college, move back in with their parents, and work the same summer job they did during high school – they still attended anyways. College, after all, equals more money. The younger thought they’d do things differently. They’d pick a better field; they’d be the ones to land a corporate job. What, it’s not like they were not going to go to college. Like a chronic Gambler, instead of deciding not to go to the Casino, they came up with strategies that would maximize their chances of ‘winning big’.
For those actually looking to ‘win big’ in today’s economy, trades are becoming more and more lucrative, but less and less popular among young people. Take, for example, elevator installers. According to the BLS, the 2023 mean wage for elevator and escalator installers was $102,420 – meaning over half make six figures – and this job only requires a high school diploma. Now, you likely had no idea this job existed, never mind that it’s more lucrative than the median Mechanical Engineer. So, why aren’t we clamoring to become Elevator Installers? Well, typically, elevator installers work as part of extremely small, dedicated firms – and, as of 2017, the people most likely to become elevator installers, were the relatives of existing elevator installers, at a rate of 1,254 times the general population (Bui & Miller, 2017). In a field estimated to be only 49,000 strong, that means there is an estimated 39 individuals without family ties, total. Who knew Elevators were the domain of the Nepos?
On a more serious note, 27% of skilled tradesmen are within 10 years of retirement. When these people retire, who will take their place? Today, more 30-40 year olds enter the trades than 16-26 year olds, which is both a grim reminder of our aging demographic (with below-replacement level native birthrates having been the norm for the past two decades) and a serious concern for the future of trades as a whole. The reason why a lot of trades don’t require diplomas is because their skills are taught on the job. The less workers who have already mastered their trade, the less workers who can master the trade. And when the demographic with the most lived experience in their trade is on its way out, and the demographic with the most potential for lived experience isn’t on its way in, we are facing a massive potential brain drain on some of the most critical jobs creating and maintaining the infrastructure we take for granted today. What happens when there aren’t enough electricians to maintain the transformers supplying the nation with power? In a large-scale blackout, I’d garner software developers will be among the first to reconsider their career paths.
Now, the biggest thing supporting the notion of college = success is that wage premium. While yes, it has shrunk – both inflation adjusted, and sheer numbers – it still exists. Over a 40-year career, an extra $20,000 in salary adds up to an average of $800,000 more than the high school graduate. Ignoring the fact that this wage premium has trended downwards in the past decade, and that $20,000 is already an overstatement, there is still a seemingly strong argument to be made that college is still worth it to the average American. Strong, however, it is not. Firstly, this wage premium does not include tuition costs or loan repayments. Subtracting the median 4-year college ticket price of $166,000 (assuming one pays out of pocket), this number shrinks to $634,000. Now, the median amount loaned to college students over all 4 years adds up to $117,600 – so, doing some more math, the premium further shrinks to $536,156. Most critically, this premium assumes everyone entering college actually graduates with a bachelor’s degree. This is a problem, because… they don’t. Only 62% of students actually graduate – the other 38% having found college to be nothing more than a sink of money. Assuming these students dropped out after one year, they are still $41,150 in the hole, and have zero wage premium to cushion their fall. For 38% of college hopefuls, college brings them negative value. For the rest, their premium is less than expected. Doing a quick weighted average, the average 18-year-old can expect college to generate them $316,779 in value over the course of their entire life, less than half of what is promised – and not even enough to cover a decent home in a major city, where college graduates are most likely to find high skill jobs.
Now, the primary question among recent graduates is: ‘what’s next?’ – in theory, there is nothing stopping them from taking a torch to their degree and pursuing an apprenticeship in elevator installation. In fact, they could almost double their expected wage by doing it. Hell, $104,000 is a great consolation prize when the median ‘Employee Engagement Manager’, bachelor’s in business required, makes $78,000 a year. However, sunk cost hits us hard. Like a gambler on a run of bad luck, these underemployed graduates aren’t committing two more years to retrain themselves for blue collar work – that would be admitting defeat, admitting the past four years of their life were for nothing. So, these people take up a ‘stop-gap’ job in low skill service industries, accepting paltry pay barely above minimum wage, with the mental consolation that it’s ‘only temporary’. To remind, 86% of these people will remain underemployed for at least the next decade. It gets harder and harder to justify the gap on your resumé as you get older and older, after all. And these high skill companies have the privilege of choosing among the best, why would they settle for the person whose spent more time managing the local McDonalds than an ivy league graduate spent in school?
Now, none of this is to undercut the achievements of those who make college work. Some, particularly those entering STEM fields, make lifechanging, generational wealth using their diploma. Some use college as a way to escape their generational poverty. Furthermore, some use college as a way to escape war-torn countries and start a new life. For these people, college really could be the only solution to their troubles. For others, though, they have been fed a lie (at most, a half-truth) about their prospects after college, and ushered through an increasingly predatory system – burdening themselves with debt just to end right back up at square one.
‘College for All’, the push to make as many college students as possible, has backfired. It has devalued the diploma, driven down high skill wages, dulled the prestige of once-noble fields, and crushed the financial futures of hundreds of thousands. All because American politicians in the 80s really wanted to show the Soviets who was boss. Now, there is no Soviet Union; now, there is no future in higher education.
Those who are looking to attend college, heed ye this: First, if your family cannot already afford the full four years of tuition, don’t bother. Your odds of college paying you off are barely better than flipping a coin. Second, those who enter trades or vocations can make more money, and make it faster, than those who commit four years to higher education. Now, more than ever, America needs blue collar workers. Software Development doesn’t build homes. Journalism doesn’t keep the lights on. For thirty years, young people were fed one extremely narrow definition of success: ‘go to college’. Now, the garbage collector makes $59,380 a year; and the ‘administrative assistant’ makes $50,726.
College itself is not the problem. ‘College for All’ is the problem. Trade school is one solution. Trade school is not the solution. One-size-fits-all solutions are how we ended up here to begin with, after all.
References
Annual Report. (2023). Western Governors University. https://www.wgu.edu/about/annual-report.html
Army military personnel by rank U.S. 2024 | Statista. (2024). Statista. https://www.statista.com/statistics/239383/total-military-personnel-of-the-us-army-by-grade/
Belkin, D. (2024, January 19). Why Americans Have Lost Faith in the Value of College. The Wall Street Journal. https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/why-americans-have-lost-faith-in-the-value-of-college-b6b635f2
Bui, Q., & Miller, C. C. (2017, November 22). The Jobs You’re Most Likely to Inherit From Your Mother and Father - The New York Times. The New York Times - Breaking News, US News, World News and Videos; The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/11/22/upshot/the-jobs-youre-most-likely-to-inherit-from-your-mother-and-father.html
Eckhardt, F. (2024, February 23). The Divide Between Graduates’ Aspirations and Industry Demand | Recruitonomics. Recruitonomics. https://recruitonomics.com/the-divide-between-graduates-aspirations-and-industry-demand/
Facts and figures | Arizona State University. (2023). https://www.asu.edu/about/facts-and-figures
Heimlich, R. (2012, February 27). Most Parents Expect Their Children to Attend College | Pew Research Center. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2012/02/27/most-parents-expect-their-children-to-attend-college/
Hodge, N., Andreason, S., & Van Horn, C. E. (2023, September 21). The Labor Market, Then and Now: The First Two Decades of the 21st Century, Part One. https://www.atlantafed.org/-/media/documents/cweo/workforce-currents/2023/09/07/the-labor-market-then-and-now-the-first-two-decades-of-the-21st-century.pdf
Occupational Employment and Wages, May 2023 | 17-2141 Mechanical Engineers. (2023, May). Bureau of Labor Statistics. https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes172141.htm
Occupational Employment and Wages, May 2023 | 47-4021 Elevator and Escalator Installers and Repairers. (2023, May). Bureau of Labor Statistics. https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes474021.htm
Optometrists | Data USA. (2024). Data USA. http://datausa.io/profile/soc/optometrists/
Pediatrician Demographics and Statistics [2024]: Number Of Pediatricians In The US. (2024, January 29). Zippia. https://www.zippia.com/pediatrician-jobs/demographics/
The Labor Market for Recent College Graduates. (2023). FEDERAL RESERVE BANK OF NEW YORK. https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market
UCF Facts 2023-2024 | University of Central Florida. (2023). www.ucf.edu/document/ucf-facts-and-stats/
United States. National Commission on Excellence Education. (1983). A Nation at Risk.
French translation?
Well said. The horric part is that this is a career centered approach and doesn't even begin to address the cultural-economics of college. Huge football stadiums hosting overpaid athletes attended by legacy students who have little care for studies!