Long time readers know that I’ve occasionally talked about edjumacation and how our failure to value it on a societal basis is going to cost us in the long run, whether we blame inefficient schools or legislatures for not picking up the costs. This article on whether education is a good financial investment, published in WaPo, makes me ever more gloomier:
So, before you borrow or allow your kid to take on debt to attend his or her dream school, I need you to read “Is College Still Worth It? The New Calculus of Falling Returns,” a recent journal article published in the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Review. It is this month’s Color of Money Book Club selection. …
The researchers used the Federal Reserve Board’s Survey of Consumer Finances to determine whether the economic and financial benefits of obtaining a postsecondary degree have changed over time. Their findings are disheartening.
“Our results suggest that college and postgraduate education may be failing some recent graduates as a financial investment,” the authors write.
The paper is extremely technical, but wade through the data to get to this important point: “The wealth-building advantage of higher education has declined among recent graduates of all demographic groups. Among all racial and ethnic groups born in the 1980s, only the wealth premium for white four-year college graduates remains statistically significant.”
Even for the latter group, the wealth premium is significantly lower than previous generations of graduates and “statistically indistinguishable from zero” for people of color, according to the research. [Michelle Singletary]
Singletary’s focus is relentlessly on the individual, because that’s where the burden falls these days. But let’s turn this around: where does the burden fall if the potential student chooses not to go to school?
Then we have one more citizen who has not been educated as well as they might. This isn’t about spreading liberal values or having one’s nose up in the air or any of that rancid crap. This is recognition that knowledge leads to progress: medical, technological, scientific, literary (through which important ideas and lessons spread), even (in light of this Andrew Sullivan diary entry) morality and ethics. More knowledgeable people – whether it’s in the technological or liberal arts – benefits everyone, i.e., society.
When society fails to invest in that most important of facets of civilization, knowledge, it has nothing and no one to blame but themselves. And this article is another symptom that we are, in fact, not investing as we should. When students look at this financially and realize that maybe investing in knowledge and in themselves will leave them broke because we’re too cheap to raise taxes a bit, well, I’ll tell you what: when we’re a second-rate nation wondering how China managed to take the lead in energy, computers, and many other fields, the popular finger pointing will be at the intelligence agencies for not stopping the Chinese from stealing all that tech, but the truth of the matter is that the fingers should be pointed at the legislatures, made up of people who bought into the assertion that only individuals benefit from investing in their education, and therefore the society which actually benefits even more from them was too cheap to pay for it.
And soon that society will have nothing.
