On choosing colleges

I have been involved a great deal lately in helping to find colleges for my grandchildren. In the course of this I have done a good bit of research and a lot of thinking. The results of this research and thinking will not please – and indeed may well offend – those who work in colleges, but I offer it for consideration by others facing the same daunting task.

College is certainly an important part of growing up middle- or upper-class in America, though of course for 7 out of 10 American youngsters college isn't even an option they are interested in. But let’s put some realistic perspective on it.

1. College is not highly correlated with success in life. For example, a number of billionaires, beginning with Bill Gates (who created Microsoft), and including Steve Jobs (who created Apple computing) and Steven Spielberg (who doesn’t know who he is?), never finished college and many more successful people never even started college. But of course, a lot of hamburger-flippers are also college dropouts, so dropping out isn't a predictor of high wealth either!

2. Colleges, for obvious marketing reasons, like to quote the correlation between college education and higher earnings through life. The correlation is real, and substantial, but it does not logically follow that college is the cause of those higher earnings. People who go to college in the first place are (a) brighter than average, (b) more motivated than average, (c) more disciplined than average, (d) usually come from a more intellectual home than average, (e) and generally come from relatively well-off families who start them off with more financial support, better education, and better health. Those factors alone would correlate highly with more work success and higher earnings, even absent college.

3. Nonetheless, it is true that having a college degree substantially increases job opportunities, and is a pre-requisite for many jobs. But only in a very few fields does it matter what college granted the undergraduate degree, or even what one’s major field was. That is even true for those going on to graduate school. While it is true that colleges offer specialized undergraduate preparation for some fields, like pre-med or pre-engineering, in fact I have known a number of people who went on to graduate school in fields completely unrelated to their undergraduate major, and did just fine.

4. College does not really educate people (yes, I know this will be a controversial claim) . Most of what they will teach (though perhaps less so in math and some sciences) is, if not outright wrong, at least heavily biased by the narrow academic outlook and/or oversimplifed and dumbed-down to the level of the mediocre student -- after all, professors who flunked almost all their students wouldn't last long.

Unlike trade schools, where electricians learn to do real wiring and welders learn to actually weld and accountants learn to actually keep real books and doctors learn to actually treat real sick people (yes, medical school is a trade school too), undergraduate college teaches very few practical skills of use in the job market. Good expository writing may be one of the few exceptions here, and since the majority of graduates don't even learn that very well, colleges can hardly take much credit. In general, companies train their new employees in what they need to know, because their college degree didn't teach them that.

5. College these days is exorbitantly expensive for what one gets from it. As one parent put it, “putting your child through college is like driving a brand new $60,000 Maserati luxury sports car to the college every year, leaving it parked unlocked with the keys in it, and taking a bus back home”. College prices have gone up much faster than inflation for years now, as colleges grew from modest educational institutions into big businesses. But is college really worth that much?

Bright Asian students all over India and China are training themselves to be top-flight engineers and scientists and programmers and entrepreneurs for free over the internet and from used, dog-eared textbooks without spending $200,000 for an undergraduate degree. It is true they don't by this method get exposure to an anal-retentive analysis of American short stories, an abbreviated and biased survey of European history, or the economic fallacies and useless oversimplifications taught in Economics 101, but one would be hard pressed to argue that is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to anyone except the college faculty members who teach these courses.

6. College rankings are largely meaningless. Read Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker article The Order of Things. Of course, if status is important, than going to a “high-status” school does matter, whatever it costs.

7. The average college curriculum, and for that matter the college entrance requirements as well, have emerged from a complex mix of historical precedence (the so-called "liberal" education of 19th century rich and privileged young men), marketing requirements (to keep up with other colleges), and bitter faculty infighting (about the amount of funding for each department). It has very little to do with what students really require to prepare them for today's world or today's job market.

8. In that regard, it is worth noting that European universities, following the Bologna Process, which aims to standardize university-level education across Europe, offer undergraduate programs that last only three years (6 semesters of 13 weeks each). And students can complete their undergraduate studies in two years if they participate in two intensive summer semesters. American undergraduate schools bulk that out to 4 years or more with “distribution” requirements to force students to take courses in fields that don’t even interest them. This is rationalized as “broadening their education”, but in reality has more to do with assuring that every academic department gets enough enrollments to survive and prosper. Of course it also costs students and their parents 25-30% more in money and time.

The objective, I have decided, is to find a college where one’s children or grandchildren can earn an undergraduate degree without (a) bankrupting the family or (b) leaving the child with a massive student loan debt at the end of college, and where (c) they can get some reasonable contact with good teachers. There are colleges that fit these requirements, but one has to look

College is important in today's America, but it is not all-important, whatever college recruiting materials like to say.