四六级

　　Why are we spending so much money oncollege?

　　. And why are we so unhappy about it? We all seemto agree that a college education is wonderful, andyet strangely we worry when we see familiesinvesting so much in this supposedly essentialgood. Maybe it’s time to ask a question that seemsalmost sacrilegious: is all this investment in college education really worth it?

　　B. The answer, I fear, is that it’s not. For an increasing number of kids, the extra time andmoney spent pursuing a college diploma will leave them worse off than they were before theyset foot on campus.

　　C. For my entire adult life, an education has been the most important thing for middle-classhouseholds. My parents spent more educating my sister and me than they spent on theirhouse, and they’re not the only ones ... and, of course, for an increasing number of families, most of the cost of their house is actually the cost of living in a good school district. Questioning the value of a college education seems a bit like questioning the value ofhappiness, or fun.

　　Donald Marron, a private-equity investor whose portfolio companies have included a student-loan firm and an educational-technology startup, says, “If you’re in a position to be able to payfor education, it’s a bargain.” Those who can afford a degree from an elite institution are still inan enviable position. “You’ve got that with you for your whole life,” Marron pointed out. “It’s areal imprimatur that’s with you, as well as access to all these relationships.”

　　That’s true. I have certainly benefited greatly from the education my parents sacrificed to giveme. On the other hand, that kind of education has gotten a whole lot more expensive since Iwas in school, and jobs seem to be getting scarcer, not more plentiful. These days anincreasing number of commentators are nervously noting the uncomfortable similarities to thehousing bubble, which started with parents telling their children that “renting is throwing yourmoney away,” and ended in mass foreclosures.

　　An education can’t be repossessed, of course, but neither can the debt that financed it beshed, not even, in most cases, in bankruptcy. And it’s hard to ignore the similarities: therapid run-up in prices, at rates much higher than inflation; the increasingly freneticrecruitment of new buyers, borrowing increasingly hefty sums; the sense that you are somehowsaving for the future while enjoying an enhanced lifestyle right now, and of course, themountain of debt.

　　The price of a McDonald’s hamburger has risen from 85 cents in 1995 to about a dollar today.

　　D. The average price of all goods and services has risen about 50 percent. But the price of acollege education has nearly doubled in that time. Is the education that today’s students aregetting twice as good? Are new workers twice as smart? Have they become somehow massivelymore expensive to educate?

　　E. Perhaps a bit. Richard Vedder, an Ohio University economics professor who heads the Centerfor College Affordability and Productivity, notes that while we may have replaced millions offiling clerks and payroll assistants with computers, it still takes one professor to teach a class. But he also notes that “we’ve been slow to adopt new technology because we don’t want to. We like getting up in front of 25 people. It’s more fun, but it’s also damnably expensive.”

　　Vedder adds, “I look at the data, and I see college costs rising faster than inflation up to themid-1980s by 1 percent a year. Now I see them rising 3 to 4 percent a year over inflation. What has happened? The federal government has started dropping money out of airplanes.” Aid has increased, subsidized loans have become available, and “the universities have gottenthe money.” Economist Bryan Caplan, who is writing a book about education, agrees: “It’s agiant waste of resources that will continue as long as the subsidies continue.”

　　F. Promotional literature for colleges and student loans often speaks of debt as an “investmentin yourself.” But an investment is supposed to generate income to pay off the loans. Morethan half of all recent graduates are unemployed or in jobs that do not require a degree, andthe amount of student-loan debt carried by households has more than quintupled since 1999. These graduates were told that a diploma was all they needed to succeed, but it won’t even getthem out of the spare bedroom at Mom and Dad’s. For many, the most tangible result of theirfour years is the loan payments, which now average hundreds of dollars a month on loanbalances in the tens of thousands.

　　A lot of ink has been spilled over the terrifying plight of students with $100,000 in loans and ajob that will not cover their $900-a-month payment. Usually these stories treat this massivedebt as an unfortunate side effect of spiraling college costs. But in another view, the spiralingcollege costs are themselves an unfortunate side effect of all that debt. When my parentswent to college, it was an entirely reasonable proposition to “work your way through” a four-year, full-time college program, especially at a state school, where tuition was often purelynominal. By the time I matriculated, in 1990, that was already a stretch. But now it’s virtuallyimpossible to conceive of high-school students making enough with summer jobs and part-time jobs during the school year to put themselves through a four-year school. Nor are theirfinancially shaky parents necessarily in a position to pick up the tab, which is why somewherebetween one half and two thirds of undergrads now come out of school with debt.

　　In a normal market, prices would be constrained by the disposable income available to paythem. But we’ve bypassed those constraints by making subsidized student loans widelyavailable. No, not only making them available: telling college students that those loans are “good debt” that will enable them to make much more money later.

　　G. It’s true about the money—sort of. College graduates now make 80 percent more thanpeople who have only a high-school diploma, and though there are no precise estimates, thewage premium for an elite school seems to be even higher. But that’s not true of everystudent. It’s very easy to spend four years majoring in English literature and beer pong andcome out no more employable than you were before you went in. Conversely, chemicalengineers straight out of school can easily make triple or quadruple the wages of an entry-levelhigh-school graduate.

　　H. James Heckman, the Nobel Prize–winning economist, has examined how the returns oneducation break down for individuals with different backgrounds and levels of ability. “Even withthese high prices, you’re still finding a high return for individuals who are bright andmotivated,” he says. On the other hand, “if you’re not college ready, then the answer is no, it’snot worth it.” Experts tend to agree that for the average student, college is still worth it today, but they also agree that the rapid increase in price is eating up more and more of the potentialreturn. For borderline students, tuition hikes can push those returns into negative territory.

　　Effectively, we’ve treated the average wage premium as if it were a guarantee—and then we’veencouraged college students to borrow against it. The result will be no surprise to anyone whohas made the mistake of setting his or her teenager loose in a shopping mall with a credit cardand no spending limit. Eighteen-year-olds demand amenities—high-speed Internet, well-upholstered classrooms, world-class fitness facilities—and in order to stay competitive, collegeadministrators happily provide them. Then they raise the tuition for which the 18-year-olds areobediently borrowing the money.

　　“We have an academic arms race going on,” says Vedder. “Salaries have done pretty well. Lookat the president of Yale. Compare his salary now with his salary in 2000.” In 2000, Richard Levinearned $561,709. By 2009, it was $1.63 million. “A typical university today has as manyadministrators as faculty.”

　　Vedder also notes the decrease in teaching loads by tenured faculty, and the vast increase innonacademic amenities like plush dorms and intercollegiate athletics. “Every campus has itsclimbing wall,” he notes drily. “You cannot have a campus without a climbing wall.”

　　Just as homeowners took out equity loans to buy themselves spa bathrooms and chef’skitchens and told themselves that they were really building value with every borrowed dollar, today’s college students can buy themselves a four-year vacation in an increasingly well-upholstered resort, and everyone congratulates them for investing in themselves.

　　Unsurprisingly those 18-year-olds often don’t look quite so hard at the education they’regetting. In Academically Adrift, their recent study of undergraduate learning, Richard Arum andJosipa Roksa find that at least a third of students gain no measurable skills during their fouryears in college. For the remainder who do, the gains are usually minimal. For many students, college is less about providing an education than a credential—a certificate testifying that theyare smart enough to get into college, conformist enough to go, and compliant enough tostay there for four years.

　　When I was a senior, one of my professors asked wonderingly, “Why is it that you guys spendso much time trying to get as little as possible for your money?” The answer, Caplan says, isthat they’re mostly there for a credential, not learning. “Why does cheating work?” he pointsout. If you were really just in college to learn skills, it would be totally counterproductive. “Ifyou don’t learn the material, then you will have less human capital and the market will punishyou—there’s no reason for us to do it.” But since they think the credential matters more thanthe education, they look for ways to get the credential as painlessly as possible.

　　There has, of course, always been a fair amount of credentialism in education. Ten years ago, when I entered business school at the University of Chicago, the career-services person whocame to talk to our class said frankly, “We could put you on a cruise ship for the next two yearsand it wouldn’t matter.”

　　But how much, exactly, does credentialism matter? For years there’s been a fierce debateamong economists over how much of the value of a degree is credentials and how much theeducation. Heckman thinks the credentialism argument—what economists call “signaling”—is “way overstated.” His work does show that a lot depends on outside factors like cognitiveability and early childhood health. But he says flatly that “no one thinks that schooling has noeffect on ability.”

　　That debate matters a lot, because while the value of an education can be very high, the valueof a credential is strictly limited. If students are gaining real, valuable skills in school, thenputting more students into college will increase the productive capacity of firms and theeconomy—a net gain for everyone. Credentials, meanwhile, are a zero-sum game. They don’tcreate value; they just reallocate it, in the same way that rising home values serve to rationslots in good public schools. If employers have mostly been using college degrees to weed outthe inept and the unmotivated, then getting more people into college simply means morecompetition for a limited number of well-paying jobs. And in the current environment, thatmeans a lot of people borrowing money for jobs they won’t get.

　　But we keep buying because after two decades prudent Americans who want a little financialsecurity don’t have much left. Lifetime employment, and the pensions that went with it, havenow joined outhouses, hitching posts, and rotary-dial telephones as something that wide-eyedchildren may hear about from their grandparents but will never see for themselves. Thefabulous stock-market returns that promised an alternative form of protection proved evenless durable. At least we have the house, weary Americans told each other, and the luckierones still do, as they are reminded every time their shaking hand writes out another check for amortgage that’s worth more than the home that secures it. What’s left is ... investing inourselves. Even if we’re not such a good bet.

　　Between 1992 and 2008, the number of bachelor’s degrees awarded rose almost 50 percent, from around 1.1 million to more than 1.6 million. According to Vedder, 60 percent of thoseadditional students ended up in jobs that have not historically required a degree—waitress, electrician, secretary, mail carrier. That’s one reason the past few decades have witnessed suchan explosion in graduate and professional degrees, as kids who previously would havestopped at college look for ways to stand out in the job market.

　　It is in that market that students may first, finally, have begun to revolt. For decades, whenformer English majors wondered how to get out of their dead-end jobs, the answer was “go tolaw school”—an effect that was particularly pronounced in economic downturns. In 2010 in theLos Angeles Times, Mark Greenbaum warned prospective lawyers that “the number of newpositions is likely to be fewer than 30,000 per year. That is far fewer than what’s needed toaccommodate the 45,000 juris doctors graduating from U.S. law schools each year.”

　　That was the year that LSAT taking peaked, with 170,000 prospective lawyers signing up forthe test. But then students apparently started heeding Greenbaum’s warning. Two years laterthat figure dropped to just 130,000, lower than it had been in more than a decade. Law-school applications also dropped, from 88,000 to 67,000.

　　That’s a heartening sign for those of us who believe that we’ve been graduating too manyunemployable lawyers. But as we saw with the housing and dotcom booms, what comes after abubble is not usually a return to a nice, sustainable equilibrium; it’s chaos. Of course, thefirst thing to do when you’re in a hole is stop digging. But that still leaves you in a pretty bighole.

　　I. Everyone seems to agree that the government, and parents, should be rethinking how weinvest in higher education—and that employers need to rethink the increasing use of collegedegrees as crude screening tools for jobs that don’t really require college skills. “Employersseeing a surplus of college graduates and looking to fill jobs are just tacking on thatrequirement,” says Vedder. “De facto, a college degree becomes a job requirement for becominga bartender.”

　　J. We have started to see some change on the finance side. A law passed in 2007 allows manystudents to cap their loan payment at 10 percent of their income and forgives any balanceafter 25 years. But of course, that doesn’t control the cost of education; it just shifts it totaxpayers. It also encourages graduates to choose lower-paying careers, which diminishes thefinancial return to education still further. “You’re subsidizing people to become priests andpoets and so forth,” says Heckman. “You may think that’s a good thing, or you may not.” Either way it will be expensive for the government.

　　K. What might be a lot cheaper is putting more kids to work: not necessarily as burger flippersbut as part of an educational effort. Caplan notes that work also builds valuable skills—probably more valuable for kids who don’t naturally love sitting in a classroom. Heckmanagrees wholeheartedly: “People are different, and those abilities can be shaped. That’s whatwe’ve learned, and public policy should recognize that.”

　　L. Heckman would like to see more apprenticeship-style programs, where kids can learn in theworkplace—learn not just specific job skills, but the kind of “soft skills,” like getting to work ontime and getting along with a team, that are crucial for career success. “It’s about havingmentors and having workplace-based education,” he says. “Time and again I’ve seen examplesof this kind of program working.”

　　M. Ah, but how do we get there from here? With better public policy, hopefully, but also bymaking better individual decisions. “Historically markets have been able to handle these things,” says Vedder, “and I think eventually markets will handle this one. If it doesn’t improve soon, people are going to wake up and ask, ‘Why am I going to college?’?”

　　参考答案：

　　46. K --- Caplan suggests that kids who don’t love school go to work.

　　47. C ---An increasing number of families spend more money on houses in a good school district.

　　48.E--- Subsidized loans to college students are a huge waste of money, according to one economist.

　　49. B--- More and more kids find they fare worse with a college diploma.

　　50. H --- For those who are not prepared for higher education, going to college is not worth it.

　　51. D --- Over the years the cost of a college education has increased almost by 100%.

　　52. J --- A law passed recently allows many students to pay no more than one tenth of their income for their college loans.

　　53. C --- Middle-class Americans have highly valued a good education.

　　54. L --- More kids should be encouraged to participate in programs where they can learn not only job skills but also social skills.

　　55. F --- Over fifty percent of recent college graduates remain unemployed or unable to find a suitable job.

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