President and Michelle Obama have often insisted that everyone — everyone — go to college. William Bennett disagrees. He once said that he would have told his son “Yes” if his son came to him and asked, “Dad, rather than pay my college tuition, can you give me the money to start a business?” Given that Bennett was once Secretary of Education, he probably knew a lot about the value of an education, yet he also understood that not everyone is college material. Offhand, three that weren’t are Mark Zuckerberg, who dropped out of Harvard to start Facebook; Steve Jobs, who left Reed College to co-found Apple; and Bill Gates, who also dropped out of Harvard to start Microsoft.
Granted, most college dropouts won’t equal their success, and it is true that the unemployment rate for college grads is 4 percent lower than that for high school grads. It is also true that, over an average professional career, college grads earn around $830,000 more than high school grads.
Then again, an average college education costs $20,000 a year, or $80,000 total, and the average college grad will have accumulated $33,000 in student-loan debt. Put that way, the typical college grad won’t have caught up and surpassed in net earnings the typical high school grad until he is in his late 30s.
The other point is that some people are simply more talented, and therefore happier, pursuing a trade or technical skill at a specialized school or facility. One could be a plumber, an auto mechanic, or electrician, and chances are all three will earn a more comfortable living than a college graduate with a degree in, say, Western Philosophy, for the simple reason that there is a greater demand for those skills. Hundreds of millions of people own homes and cars, meaning they need plumbers, electricians and mechanics a lot more than they need philosophy majors.
I believe this over-insistence on a college education began after World War II when returning soldiers got married and had children — resulting in the Baby Boomer generation — and the mindset became that in the highly-competitive Baby Boomer world, achieving the “American Dream” meant our kids had to go to college, regardless of whether they had the skills or desire to get a college degree.
This belief comes from personal experience. At the University of Virginia (1967 – 1971), where I got an education that has served me well, I befriended dozens of people who openly admitted they were only at UVa because of their parents. “I really wanted to be a carpenter,” one of them told me, which he may have ended up being (albeit two years later) because he flunked out of UVa after two years.
