A national debate is growing over the importance of a college degree, and how much it helps graduates to live a better life. Economist Richard Vedder fueled the concerns in a recent article called “The Great College-Degree Scam,” by citing the fact that “approximately 60 percent of the increase in the number of college graduates from 1992 to 2008 worked in jobs that the Bureau of Labor Statistics considers relatively low-skilled.” The results of Vedder’s study, put out by his Center for College Affordability and Productivity, caught the attention of a number of MindingtheCampus.com writers, who provided some additional observations about Vedder’s findings.
John Leo noted that the facts speak for themselves. There are 17.4 million college graduates in the U.S., “17.4 million are holding jobs for which college training is viewed as unnecessary.” That the number of waiters and waitresses with college degrees has more than doubled and the number of cashiers with college degrees has tripled makes the ongoing “push for more college graduates very controversial.” In fact, Vedder says that the continued push for higher education by those who know the truth amounts to a widespread deception of young Americans who still link degrees with prosperity.
City Journal Contributing Editor Stephan Kanfer noted that the reason for the increasing number of flight attendants, bellhops and manicurists with college degrees goes far beyond the economic downturn. He said that all you have to do is look at the college catalogues to realize that the fault lies entirely with the schools, which offer an array of glossy catalogs with courses, clearly “designed to separate the student from his cash, without imparting anything that might be defined as wisdom.” Today, the traditional core curricula that examined the great works of Shakespeare, Milton and Joyce have been dismissed as work by “dead white males,” and replaced by “banal courses in feminism, black studies and queer theory.”
Kanfer predicts that the next step in this downward spiral is that the devalued bachelor’s degree will soon be replaced by a masters degree as the new starting point for those entering the job market, which means that “colleges will grow richer and students poorer.”
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Deborah Lambert writes the Squeaky Chalk column for Accuracy in Academia.
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