What is College Good For?

Some thoughts on investments and return

The Wall Street Journal reminds us that it was college grads who propelled communist/Islamist candidate Zohran Mamdani to victory in the Democratic mayoral primary in New York City.

Which raises a question: If this is what college graduates do, why exactly are we in a hurry to send so many people to college?

Over the years, we’ve seen a lot of justifications for sending people to college — by which I actually mean, for subsidizing people’s attendance at college, and for maintaining a taxpayer-funded higher education apparatus. Probably the most important are:

• Creating wealth. College graduates earn more, so creating more college graduates will create more high-earners. A related argument suggests that rich societies have more higher education, so more higher education will make a society richer.

• Promoting public values. Higher education is supposed to be a place where our society’s highest values are nurtured and taught, ensuring that they are propagated to future generations.

• Encouraging critical thinking: Teaching people to think for themselves, not to accept what they’re told or to go along with the crowd.

• Maintain intellectual capital — like knowledge of history, ancient languages, philosophy, etc. — that is valuable for society as a whole, but not readily supported outside of an academic environment.

Okay, so how are we doing in serving those purposes? Not so great. I’ve written about this before, but here’s a sum-up.

How are universities at creating wealth? It’s hard to say. People point to technology and inventions, many of which came from universities. But many did not. Thomas Edison didn’t invent the light bulb at a university. Alexander Graham Bell didn’t invent the telephone at one. The Wright Brothers were bicycle mechanics. Electric motors, the airplane, and alternating current came from somewhere else. Nuclear power was pioneered in a squash court at the University of Chicago, but the nuclear industry came from military research, as did jet engines. Computer technology owes a lot to university research, but much of it has military roots as well.

I tried asking Grok if U.S. universities were net wealth creators and got this somewhat blurry answer:

The establishment narrative often overstates universities’ economic benefits without scrutinizing inefficiencies or inequitable access. While universities have undeniably spurred growth, their wealth creation is not universal, and systemic issues like cost escalation and unequal outcomes warrant skepticism about their efficiency as wealth generators.

Conclusion: U.S. universities have been net wealth creators, but their impact is uneven, and inefficiencies could diminish future returns without reform.

And, of course, we can’t know how much wealth the money and human resources invested in resources would have produced had they been invested elsewhere.

So maybe, but we must also note Nassim Taleb’s point about correlation and causation. He suggests that wealthy societies aren’t the product of increased spending on higher education, but the reverse: Rich societies spend a lot on universities, but they got rich some other way.

There’s also a widely acknowledged “replication crisis”: Scientists publish papers reporting results, but it’s increasingly impossible for others to reproduce those results, leading to what some have called an existential crisis for research.

We’re told cuts to federal spending on higher education will imperil research, but such claims would be more troubling if the “research” were of more reliably high quality.

It’s an open secret that the pressure to produce a constant flood of papers that are publishable and, better yet, interesting enough to spark headlines leads to corner-cutting, “data torture” and overclaiming — or, sometimes, outright fraud.

The result is an expensive self-licking ice cream cone of grant applications and publications, but the actual contribution to human knowledge is often lacking.

So I think it’s fair to say that the case for higher education as a wealth creator is not the slam-dunk it’s usually presented as, particularly since — as Grok notes — the returns from spending vary according to subject. I would venture to guess, for example, that the societal returns from gender studies are heavily negative.

What about for individuals? Well, there it’s uneven, too. Obviously, some people make more money because they go to college or graduate school. I went to Yale Law School, and it probably made me richer — though there are plenty of lawyers in my town who went to the University of Tennessee for law school, or even the YMCA night law school in Nashville, who make a lot more money than I do.

And how are schools doing at inculcating actual, you know, knowledge?

Not so well. In a recent study, Richard Arum and Josipa Aroksa found there’s not a lot of learning going on: 45% of students “did not demonstrate any significant improvement in learning” over the first two years of college; 36% failed to show any improvement over four years.

The reason: Courses aren’t very rigorous, and not much is required of students.

Then we see things like UCLA Medical School’s notorious dumbing down of admissions in the name of “diversity.”

Most of the economic benefit of colleges and universities, and especially of elite ones, is distributional in nature — that is, wealth flows toward people who have the credentials they offer, but the credentials don’t actually promote wealth, they just get you past the gatekeepers.

What about “promoting public values?” Higher education is supposed to be a place where our society’s highest values are nurtured and taught, ensuring that they are propagated to future generations.

Does anyone think that’s what higher education is about nowadays?

College grads were supposed to understand philosophy, government, literature and human nature in ways that people without such a higher education couldn’t.

They were supposed to gain a deeper appreciation of our society’s roots and purposes, and an ability to think critically, and to re-examine their views in the face of new evidence.

This is one reason for the requirement that military officers have college degrees — a requirement that probably should be rethought: Does anyone seriously believe this is what colleges and universities teach now?

An overriding theme at elite colleges — and by no means limited to them — is that Western culture is uniquely evil, white people are uniquely awful, and pretty much any crime is justifiable so long as the hands committing it are suitably brown and “oppressed.”

Meanwhile, numerous universities face federal civil-rights investigations for allowing and in some cases promoting antisemitism and violence against Jewish students.

We’ve seen riots, violence, Jewish students surrounded and attacked on campus or forced to hide out in attics as mobs rampage through buildings.

Likewise, it’s hard to argue that universities, with their groupthink, cancel culture, and shaming of nonconformists, are encouraging critical thinking. Maybe generations ago, but not now. To some degree they still serve the function of conserving knowledge, but as various disciplines are “decolonized,” that is falling by the wayside too.

The notion that our colleges and universities are encouraging students to follow their better instincts seems unsustainable. And taxpayers wonder why they’re paying for this mess. But there’s resistance to change, with insiders calling efforts to return universities to their public role, instead of letting them serve as incubators for hostile and destructive ideologies, a “hostile takeover,” to use the term employed by Glenn Altschuler and David Wippman in The Hill. Ron DeSantis isn’t buying it.

The Trump Administration has done a lot to hold universities accountable through civil rights investigations and actions for racial discrimination and suppression of free speech, and will doubtless do more. But although these efforts are important, and will be very painful for some institutions, they are not addressing the real question.

The real question is, is the post-World War II emphasis on higher education still a good idea?

Might the money be better spent in other ways? Might the workforce be better served by trade and technical schools — and efforts to improve our dreadful K-12 education system — than by shoveling more billions at higher ed? Are federally funded student loans a good idea, or counterproductive? Should employers continue to be allowed to use college credentials as under-the-table substitutes for IQ or job aptitude tests?

While the current brouhaha over racial discrimination, research fraud, and so on at higher education institutions is going on, we need to be preparing for a deeper national decision, on whether to spend that money elsewhere — or simply stop taking it from taxpayers and let them spend it as they wish.

The elevated place of higher education in America has been taken for granted for basically my entire lifetime. That will not continue to be the case, and it’s worth thinking about what the new order should look like.

Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments. [And, as always, if you like these essays, please take out a — preferably paid — subscription. Thanks!]