Editorial: Don’t judge higher education by its market price

Many college students insist that tuition rates overstate higher education’s real cost. But… Many college students insist that tuition rates overstate higher education’s real cost. But according to one blogger, universities like Pitt only charge a fraction of their market price.

This Monday, Mother Jones political analyst Kevin Drum used a supposed $1 million lifetime-income gap between college graduates and high school graduates as a basis for placing the net worth of a four-year education at $300,000, or $75,000 per year. Given that most universities have yet to demand more than $50,000 a year, Drum predicts tuition rates will continue to rise, underscoring the need for federal aid.

Needless to say, we hardly think this is an appropriate means of valuing higher education — and Drum, to his credit, admits the $1 million value, which he borrowed from a recent Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce study, might miss the mark entirely. But even if the number is accurate, it’s impossible to determine recent graduates’ lifetime earnings as the figure only applies to the past 40 years.

More importantly, Drum’s calculations belie the enormous income disparities between disciplines. According to 2010 Census data, student counseling majors earn a median income of $20,000 per year, while petroleum engineering majors earn a median income of $127,000 per year. Not adjusting for inflation, the former will amass a meager $800,000 in 40 years, while the latter will rake in a whopping $5,080,000.

Ultimately, of course, like-minded pundits can finesse the fine points of these calculations ad nauseam. But we hope they’ll refrain, and realize that reducing higher education to a numbers game — an approach that’s become increasingly popular during the past few years — is arguably more damaging than tuition hikes.

College is indeed a prerequisite for many high-paying jobs, but facilitating employment should by no means monopolize its agenda. If it did, educators would have no qualms about, say, scrapping gen-ed requirements or jettisoning certain humanities departments.

Despite the renewed importance of landing a high-paying job immediately after college, the less quantifiable benefits of a university education — exposure to a variety of worldviews, the opportunity to discover your real interests and goals — haven’t lost their relevance. And while bloggers like Drum don’t oppose them, they certainly aren’t improving matters when they assign definite prices to invaluable experiences.

Whenever an article purporting to reveal the “most profitable majors” or “the real cost of a college education” appears — which seems to happen every week — readers should recognize it for what it is: narrow-minded number crunching. College can be a singularly rewarding opportunity to broaden one’s worldview — but only if we understand it as such.