Is College Worth It?
College for Christians - Chapter 4
Last time we started the “how to choose a college” section of this book with a chapter diving into the cost of college. If you got to the end of that chapter wondering if college can possibly be worth that much money, today’s installment of College for Christians is for you!
When I first started teaching at Bethel, some older colleagues were still complaining about a talk that a new administrator had given fifteen years earlier. At colleges like Bethel, he had argued, we had to “hear and, yes, even cater to our customers.” While he knew it sounded “so crass, so business-like and totally unacademic” to call students customers, he insisted that “we are in the business of selling a product — Christian higher education.”1
You should be as wary of thinking of yourself as a customer as I am of calling you one. If we have to use the language of the economy to describe an educational process, let’s at least think of students as being investors in themselves, committing time, effort, and resources to a long-term project rather than making a quick transaction to acquire a disposable good.
But I do take that administrator’s larger point. Colleges don’t exist primarily to employ people like me, but to serve the needs of people like you — students and parents who are contemplating spending and borrowing money in the amounts we discussed in ch. 3. And whether we call it a product, service, or something else, colleges are having a harder and harder time selling higher education — or, articulating their return on investment (ROI).
For example, a 2024 Pew survey found that three in four Americans now think college isn’t worth its cost (29%) or is only worth it if a student doesn’t have to take out loans (47%). Also this year, Gallup discovered that not even a third of Americans had a lot of confidence in higher education — down from 57% in 2015. Maybe not coincidentally, overall college enrollment has declined in recent years.
That’s partly a consequence of the concerns I just tried to alleviate: rising sticker prices make families think college is less affordable than it actually is, and horror stories about student debt make them fearful to borrow money for college. But even if you have a clearer understanding of what college actually costs, you’re only going to spend — or borrow — that money if you believe that higher education carries value.
Value is an even harder concept to pin down than cost, since it’s entirely subjective. The net price of a college may vary by student, but you’ll still get it printed in black and white on your financial aid offer. But whether or not that number is worth it rests entirely on how you imagine what college is supposed to do for you, and whether you trust that it can meet its end of the bargain.
So if you skipped ch. 1 — “Why Should I Go to College?” — or don’t remember it, take a few minutes to read or review. Then once you’ve got your “mental model” of the purpose of college clear in your mind, come back here and I’ll walk you through three different ways of understanding the value of a college education. How they resonate with you may shape how you choose among the colleges on your list.
The Economic Value of College
Remember that I have a transformational view of college, so you know that I’ll eventually say something like, “The true value of college can’t be measured in dollars.”
But let’s start with the ROI to which we can attach dollar signs. Especially if you hold a transactional view of college and expect it to get you into a career, then you should be able to compare the aggregate cost of college (net price, including living expenses, times number of years to completion of degree) to the earnings you’re likely to accrue over the course of your working life.
The research isn’t hard. When you look up a college or university in the federal government’s College Scorecard, you can find both its net price and how much its alumni tend to earn once they’re settled into their careers. As we’ll see next chapter, more and more college ranking systems are factoring alumni earnings into their methodologies.
The details can vary widely by the professional path you take and the college you choose to begin that journey. But in general, the math is conclusive: most college graduates make much more money than most non-college graduates.
According to the Social Security Administration, American “men with bachelor's degrees earn approximately $900,000 more in median lifetime earnings than high school graduates. Women with bachelor's degrees earn $630,000 more.” Even if you adjust for other factors that may affect earnings, most college graduates still earn hundreds of thousands of dollars more over their careers than American workers whose educations ended earlier.2
Even in that pessimistic Pew survey I quoted above, the same Americans who doubted the value of college also seemed to understand that higher education had significant economic benefits. About three in five college graduates agreed that their education “was extremely or very useful in giving them the skills and knowledge they needed to get a well-paying job.” Only one in four non-college grads agreed.
That makes sense, given that Pew also found that what college graduates make (especially among women) has trended up since the 1970s, while the earnings of high school graduates have either been flat in that time (women) or gone down (men). According to a 2023 study by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the gap between the average annual salary of a college graduate (about $60,000) and that of a high school graduate (about $36,000) is as wide as it’s been in over thirty years.
Why the disparity? In part, it’s because college does provide training and credentials that open doors to high-paying careers. Every year U.S. News ranks the 100 Best Jobs in the American economy. About three-quarters of them require at least a bachelor’s degree.3
Now, if you’ve got a career in mind and aren’t sure how its earnings stack up against likely college cost, you’ll want to do some more research. Use a tool like O*Net to discover the profession’s typical range of salaries, then try Payscale.com, which updates its College Salary Report every year, to see where professionals who attended your preferred college fit into that range. But be wary of trusting self-reported, unverified data whose tiny sample sizes can skew results. Instead, ask the department chair or other faculty member from your likely major if they can share information about what their alumni go on to do and how much they earn.
But I’d also be cautious about deciding that college is worth it simply because you think it will be your ticket to the upper class. Many of America’s highest-paying jobs require a master’s degree or doctorate — which means that your aggregate cost and, very likely, student debt will also go up. Other careers require a bachelor’s degree in a major that may be hard to get into (if there’s an application process with high academic requirements for a limited number of spots) or hard to complete in just three or four years (if it requires a lot of credits and gives you relatively little choice in what you take).
For that matter, most new college students don’t actually know what they want to do for their career. By some estimates, as many as 80% of college students change their major at least once. Not that that’s a bad thing: I’ve already said that college is often where we get a clearer sense of our calling, and picking the right major can actually enhance your learning along the way.
And in any case, there’s an economic return on college investment that doesn’t depend on choice of major. Whatever you study, college can prepare you for a career that will probably last longer than your parents’ and very possibly be much less stable than theirs, as everything from technological change to globalization will cause jobs to change or even disappear with frightening speed. One way or another, the 21st century economy will reward people of all professions who have two qualities:
The soft skills — communication, critical thinking, problem solving, cultural competence, the ability to work both on your own and as part of a team, etc. — that are needed in most workplaces and least likely to be made obsolete by, say, artificial intelligence.
The ability to keep learning, retooling with different skills and added knowledge as jobs change and new opportunities arise.
There are many ways to develop either quality. But they’re both hard-wired into a college education, which will give you breadth and depth of knowledge and the capacity to keep adding to it.
The Civic Value of College
Before I get to the second value of college, ask yourself some seemingly random questions: How badly do I think that American democracy is functioning? How often do I complain about politics and government in this country? How much does it bother me when Americans seem indifferent to or cynical about the causes that matter most to me? Do I agree that Christians who don’t fully belong to any earthly kingdom should still “seek the welfare of the city” (Jer 29:7) where God has placed them?
If your answers were anything like Badly, Often, A lot, and Yes, and amen!, then you should factor in at least one non-economic argument for the value of going to college: It prepares citizens to participate effectively in a democracy.
To explain, let me go back to the Truman Commission, the post-World War II group I mentioned in the previous chapter.
Why were its members so insistent that many more Americans should go to college? “Long ago,” they observed in their 1947 report, “our people recognized that education is not only democracy’s obligation but its necessity. Education is the foundation of democratic liberties. Without an educated citizenry alert to preserve and extend freedom, it would not long endure.” Working just after Americans fought Fascism in World War II and in the early days of the Cold War against Communism, they knew that “the future of our civilization depends on the direction education takes, not just in the distant future, but in the days immediately ahead.” For while education under unfree regimes serves the purposes of the ruler, education in a democracy should “insure equal liberty and equal opportunity” and help people recognize threats to those values — even from the government itself.4
So the commissioners wanted college to prepare Americans for good careers, but not just that. It wasn’t enough to “[acquire] competence in some particular occupation” if education left one “short of that human wholeness and civic conscience which the cooperative activities of citizenship required.” We’ll say more about “gen ed” in ch. 17, but one of the reasons virtually all American colleges and universities require all their students to study broadly is because a well-rounded education prepares citizens for democracy. As the Truman Commission put it,
General education should give to the student the values, attitudes, knowledge, and skills that will equip him to live rightly and well in a free society. It should enable him to identify, interpret, select, and build into his own life those components of his cultural heritage that contribute richly to understanding and appreciation of the world in which he lives. It should therefore embrace ethical values, scientific generalizations, and aesthetic conceptions, as well as an understanding of the purposes and character of the political, economic and social institutions that men have devised.5
Apart from updating the pronouns to match an age when women are more likely than men to go to college, this statement is as true in the early 21st century as in the middle of the 20th. Then or now, a college education that includes everything from history to math, philosophy to science, arts to languages helps citizens ask good questions, gather reliable information, assess and make arguments, and look beyond their own interests to seek the greater good. “Higher ed promotes independent thought and curiosity,” said Lumina Foundation president Jamie Merisotis earlier this fall. “It exposes people to other cultures and ideas. It can equip people to handle complexity, differences, and rapid societal changes. A better-educated population, then, is not only essential to individual prosperity—what we have long called the ‘good jobs and good life’ dividends of education—but also shared prosperity, the strongest bulwark against growing threats to our democratic way of life.”
This argument for the value of college is certainly political — a certain kind of education helps people govern themselves well — but it’s not partisan.
At least, it didn’t used to be. The Truman Commission may have reported back to a Democratic president, but its membership included the youngest brother of Truman’s Republican successor,6 plus lots of non-partisan educational and religious leaders. More recently, a similar commission during the George W. Bush administration placed more emphasis on the business benefits of higher education, but still affirmed that “our commitment to a kind of democracy that only an educated and informed citizenry makes possible” has been “centered in colleges and universities.”7
As recently as 2015, clear majorities of both Republicans (56%) and Democrats (68%) told Gallup they had a lot of confidence in American colleges and universities. Most Democrats still do, but that number is now down to 20% of Republicans.
This isn’t the place to try to unpack all the reasons for that trend. But no doubt one factor here is a growing belief among Republicans and conservatives that American colleges and universities don’t make citizens “free” at all, but try to indoctrinate them into left-wing thinking.
I can understand why people have that concern, but I think it’s misplaced. Surveys this fall by Inside Higher Ed did reveal that 78% of college faculty planned to vote for the Democratic presidential nominee, compared to 57% of their students. (One reason why I like working at a Christian college like Bethel is that our faculty is politically diverse.) However, 96% of the same respondents told Inside Higher Ed that they would never encourage their students to vote for any particular candidate, and only 30% even planned to discuss the election in class. Less than one in four said their politics were all that influential in their teaching.
Of course, sin makes all of us blind to ourselves in some ways; it may be that some of those professors are unconsciously inserting their politics into their on-campus work. But “even if you believe university faculty are trying to do this,” writes Dan Mahony, president of the Southern Illinois University System, “it would be extremely difficult,” since research demonstrates that “people are generally highly resistant to changing previously held beliefs.” In fact, American students’ political attitudes don’t tend to fluctuate much from the start to the finish of their college education.
Not that there’s not much evidence that professors actually try to force their students to share their beliefs. In my experience, even the most progressive and most conservative professors are most interested in helping their students wrestle with multiple perspectives in order to come to a clearer sense of their own convictions. As one of my (Republican) mentors told me, there’s no higher praise for professors than to have their students disagree well with them. Another mentor was a liberal Democrat who liked to say that his department specialized in graduating thoughtful Republicans.
The Immeasurable Value of College
In this chapter and the one before it, I’ve tried to use statistics as much as possible. Living in an age of metrics, I know it’s tempting to calculate value, like cost, by reducing it to a number.
But its role in American public life suggests one way dollars can’t measure the value of a college education, and such figures are even less useful as you get closer to what I’d regard as the true value of college. So I was glad to see that a recent book mostly written by economists and other quantitative researchers cautions that “metrics are all about simplification.
They clear away context and complexity, often replacing hundreds or thousands of conflicting assessments with a single number. This simplification can be useful. After all, sometimes we just need to know how many apples are in a basket instead of knowing every detail about each apple. But in many important ways, universities are not like apples and neither are students. Universities and colleges are diverse institutions in diverse places with different guiding principles, different teaching models, and different understandings of student achievement. Students have different backgrounds, goals, and visions of the future. Metrics can be useful, but you should be careful not to be seduced by their simplicity.8
In Metrics That Matter, Zachary Bleemer and his four co-authors push back against common ways of measuring the value of college. What I’ve written above has certainly been shaped by what they wrote about career earnings and choosing a major.9 And they warn that the “ROI metric” (as expressed in dollars) “excludes the nonfinancial benefits of earning a degree,” including what college does for the health and well-being of both graduates and their neighbors, since “communities that have higher levels of college degree attainment also have higher wages even for nongraduates and high participation in civic life through activities such as voting.”10
Then there’s what those authors and me regard as the most important “nonfinancial benefit” of college: the value of learning itself — about yourself and your world, other people, and (I’d add) God. Above all else, college is a place where you can grow as a whole person: intellectually, emotionally, relationally, ethically, and spiritually.
I’m not sure you can really quantify the value of such growth. But if the authors of Metrics That Matter had to pick just one metric that truly matters, it would be “data about how much each college spends per student on education.”11 It can be harder than you may expect to figure out exactly how much a college or university spends on teaching and learning, as opposed to all the other things it does. However, there are a couple of easily accessible numbers that should give you a good idea of how much colleges are investing in their students’ learning.
First, graduation rate, which the Metrics That Matter authors find to be the most reliable predictor of both academic quality and career earnings. I don’t think you could talk me into sending my children to an expensive college with a low graduation rate. On the other hand, colleges and universities with high graduation rates tend to invest not only in the quality of their teaching and variety of their courses, but in tutoring, advising, library services, instructional technology, and other academic support that enhances learning for all students.12
Now, graduation rate — like any other metric — can be misleading. As I mentioned in the last chapter, graduation rates are often much lower at non-flagship state universities. In part, that’s because those public institutions tend to serve students — e.g., first-generation, lower-income, persons of color, second-language learners — who often have to overcome more obstacles to get their diploma. That doesn’t necessarily mean you won’t find those schools investing in their students’ educations. In fact, one of the college ranking systems that I’ll discuss in the following chapter will give special credit to colleges that have higher graduation rates than you’d expect given the composition of their student bodies.
But I would worry about an institution with a low graduation rate that also compares badly according to one other common metric: student-faculty ratio. I believe that students can learn a lot from a large-group lecture when it’s done well (see ch. 16), but in general, high-quality education can’t be taught at scale. Colleges with low student-faculty ratios are places where teachers will know you personally and do more to customize their teaching to your learning, where you’ll likely have more classes to choose from, and where you’ll have more chances to participate in “high-impact practices” like reading seminars, writing-intensive courses, independent research projects, and off-campus study.
Conversely, universities with high faculty-student ratios are probably keeping costs low by paying fewer professors to take on heavier teaching loads. Very likely, they’ve also streamlined programs and cut academic services, giving students fewer choices and less support.
So take that as one closing reminder that cost and value are separate but related concepts. Saving money on the former may negatively impact the latter.
Next week: “Should I Pay Attention to College Rankings?”
H. David Brandt, “The Customer,” Bethel Faculty Journal 15 (Fall 1988): p. 23. After his stint as provost at Bethel, Brandt went on to serve as president of two other Christian colleges: Tabor and George Fox.
If you’d like to see more data confirming the economic value of higher ed, read Ben Wildavsky’s 2023 op-ed in The New York Times, which also points to hiring practices by leading companies.
Several of those that don’t, while good jobs in several respects, pay less than $60,000 per year.
The Truman Commission, Higher Education for American Democracy (Government Printing Office, 1947), vol. I, pp. 5, 7, 25,
Ibid., pp. 48, 49.
Milton Eisenhower was president of Kansas State University after World War II, then took the same job at Johns Hopkins University while his brother Dwight was president of the United States. (Dwight Eisenhower, by the way, served as president of Columbia University before entering the White House.)
The Spellings Commission, A Test of Leadership: Charting the Future of U.S. Higher Education (U.S. Department of Education, 2006), p. ix.
Zachary Bleemer, Mukul Kumar, et al., Metrics That Matter: Counting What’s Really Important to College Students (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023), pp. 132-33.
The book also has helpful chapters on sticker price, student debt, college rankings, and selective admissions.
Metrics That Matter, p. 19.
Ibid., p. 51, emphasis mine.
On average, American colleges and universities graduate over 60% of their students within six years. That number is higher for private colleges and with women, and far lower with for-profit institutions.