Is it time to write off the college experience? John Stossel thinks so.
Half today’s recent grads work in jobs that don’t require degrees. Eighty thousand of America’s bartenders have bachelor’s degrees.
Politicians such as Hillary Clinton promote college by claiming that over a lifetime, college graduates “earn $1 million more.” That statistic is true but utterly misleading. People who go to college are different. They’re more likely to have been raised by two parents. They did better in high school. They’d make more money even if they never went go to college.
Stossel’s argument is that, with college and university costs today, a higher-level education is no longer an investment in one’s future, but an economic hurdle to be cleared. Furthermore, taxpayers are the ones biting the economic bullet.
Most of America’s prestigious universities started out as training centers for the priesthood and ways of confirming your status as part of the upper crust. In many cases, that’s still true today. Taxpayers shouldn’t be forced to subsidize that. But we are.
Now President Obama proposes spending more of your money on “free community college.” Senator and presidential candidate Bernie Sanders goes further, proposing “free tuition” at four-year public colleges.
Of course, “free” just means taxpayers are forced to pay.
Should we encourage people to move away from the college model, and help them learn to invest their money wisely, while creating their own jobs? No cap, no tassel, but no crushing debt either.
