The advantages of ivy league universities

The notion that a college degree is essentially worthless has become one of the year’s most fashionable ideas, with two prominent venture capitalists (Cornell ’89 and Stanford ’89, by the way) leading the charge.

the skepticism is spreading, even among foot soldiers on the academic front lines.

In March, “Professor X,” an anonymous English instructor at two middling northeastern colleges, published In the Basement of the Ivory Tower, an expansion of an Atlantic essay arguing that college has been dangerously oversold and that it borders on immoral to ask America’s youth to incur heavy debt for an education for which millions are simply ill-equipped.

Professor X’s book came out on the heels of a Harvard Graduate School of Education report that made much the same point. The old policy cri de coeur “college for all,” the report argues, has proved inadequate; rather than shunting everyone into four-year colleges, we should place greater emphasis on vocational programs, internships, and workplace learning.

the data gathered in recent years on the value of college has been mixed at best, blunting the moral edge of “college for all” and turning some higher-ed advocates into skeptics like Altucher and Thiel.

This new criticism of higher education comes from three main sources. The first is the reality that, while all parents want their kids to complete college, little more than half of those millions who haul their laptops to campus each fall actually end up with a bachelor’s degree. The United States now has the highest college-­dropout rate in the industrialized world, and in terms of 25-to-34-year-olds with college degrees, it has fallen from first to twelfth.

The second source is the quality of the education available on campus. Nearly half of all students demonstrate “exceedingly small or empirically nonexistent” gains in the skills measured by the Collegiate Learning Assessment, even after two years of full-time schooling, according to a study begun in 2005 by sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa. (Many education reformers have focused their attention to gains from investments on the other end of the spectrum, in pre-K schooling.)

In 1961, the average undergraduate spent 25 hours a week hitting the books; by 2003, economists Mindy Marks and Philip Babcock recently found, that average had plummeted to thirteen hours.

In a typical semester, one third of the students Arum and Roksa followed for their recent book, Academically Adrift, did not take “any courses that required more than forty pages of reading per week” and half did not take “a single course that required more than twenty pages of writing.”

Another possibility is that college is an investment—an expenditure on which one can expect high future returns.

This answer is one to which many mainstream economists subscribe. When I spoke to Stephen Rose, a research professor at Georgetown’s Center on Education and the Workforce and the author of Rebound, an optimistic forecast of the postrecession economy, he pointed again and again to what he calls the “totemic number”: 74 percent.

That is the financial benefit—the so-called B.A. wage premium—that economists calculate college graduates can now expect to reap relative to their peers with high-school diplomas. It is a number that has nearly doubled over the past 30 years.

Still another possibility is that the primary role of college today is to serve a “signaling” function—like an elegant business suit, an impressive B.A. advertises talent, pedigree, and ambition employers can use as a hiring shorthand.

College is impractical. The liberal arts are hazy, its lessons inapplicable to the real world. “The best way to learn is through purpose-driven education,” Max Marmer, a Stanford student who also dropped out recently in favor of entrepreneurship, told me. “Taking classes in itself is worthless.”

The vast majority of undergraduates are in a peculiar and as yet unresolved bind. On the one hand, a college education will likely saddle them with crippling debt and consign them to four underwhelming years in classrooms with fluorescent lighting and drop-tile ceilings. On the other hand, opting out will likely consign them to a lifetime of unsatisfying, low-wage employment. What’s an average kid to do?

Obviously there are major academic advantages,

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the lifetime earnings potential for high school grads is $1.2 million. Those with a Bachelor's degree can expect to make considerably more, roughly $2.1 million. A Master's will give a person slightly more, an average of $2.5 million. The largest payouts, however, are with those with Doctoral or professional degrees, making between $3.4 and $4.4 million over a lifetime.

Michael Ignatieff