Now that I've finally posted about social class as culture (and distinct from economic class) there's all sorts of other things I can tell you, o gentle readers, about. One of them is about the value of going to college.
I would like to make the radical proposal that, for any specific "you", whether or not it is worth the expense for you to go to college – and there is now open debate as to whether or not it is – depends entirely on what you intend to go to college for.
I don't mean what you plan on majoring in. Though that too.
People say this thing: "You can get just as good a quality of education at a cheaper school." Okay. Who the hell goes to college for the education?
Can we get real here for a moment? Is there anything in your life that you have wanted to know badly enough that you said, "I so greatly desire to learn this that I'm willing to pay $200,000 dollars to do so. In fact, I so ardently want to learn it that even though I don't actually have $200,000 right at this moment, I'm willing to take out an unforgivable loan for $200,000 to pay to learn it, and then take however many years – or decades – it requires to pay back that money, in order to learn this thing I so badly want to learn."?
Or if not $200,000, how about $100,000? How about $50,000? How about $20,000? How about $10,000? How about $5,000?
How many undergraduates feel that way, you think? Do you think that of the one million high school seniors who took the SAT last year, there are a lot who are so passionate about learning a specific thing – or about learning in general – that they're willing to sign up for potentially decades of crippling debt to do so? How about their parents co-signing the loans?
Can we please stop pretending that for the education is a legitimate or reasonable or even common reason to go to college? It is tremendously disingenuous. Only the very most economically privileged (and those who get free tuition from something like the GI bill) could afford to attend college just for the enrichment of their minds. Everybody else has to get something else out of it – something radically more valuable to them than an education – to justify the staggering expense.
Even "affordable" programs are so much more expensive than the vast majority of Americans could afford as personal improvement – and vastly more expense than most people are willing to pay for pure education, even in topics they want very much to study. We live in a reality in which most people who think they want to study a musical instrument blanch at the prospect of paying $50 a lesson for private instruction, coming to a mere $2,500/yr. But then, all you get out of music lessons is education in music.
And it's not just the expense of tuition, it's also the opportunity cost of attending college instead of doing something more immediately profitable. Whether we're talking about someone taking four years out of their lives to attend a full-time bachelor's program or someone curtailing their work hours or opportunities to study part time, college takes vast numbers of hours of your day you could be spending elsewhere, and getting compensated for. Frankly, we, as a people, simply do not love education enough to make that kind of sacrifice for it, even if we dared.
To say that people go to college to get an education is simply not what is happening, except in the case of those poor bastards who fall for the emic lie, and wind up saying things like, "You can get just as good a quality of education at a cheaper school," as if that mattered, as if whether or not that was true was relevant, because they have no idea what everyone else is going to college for.
Let me be clear: I'm not saying that college doesn't educate. I got a fabulous education at my graduate school. If you are a college student, the college you attend will offer you an education. Considering what you're paying to be there, I strongly recommend that you take it. You bought that orange; I suggest you squeeze every last drop out of it. Hopefully it will be a really great orange, considering what you paid for it.
I got a great education at my graduate school, but I didn't go to graduate school to get that education. I went to graduate school to get a credential. From my perspective, I paid them for the credential, and they threw in a complimentary education with it.
Not only do colleges offer educations to their students, an education is the thing that the college will, to some extent or another, require that you demonstrate having got some of before they complete their deal with you. They can't make you learn, but they can refuse to give you a diploma if you don't. An education may be the thing you have to get through to get what it was you went there for.
If you are thinking about college as primarily a means to an education it is possible that you are about to make – or have made – a terrible, costly mistake.
Here's the thing: going to college can be – and for many people is – the single most important determinant of your standard of living subsequent college.
Going to college is a tool to improve your life after college. It may be the single most powerful tool to do so that you ever have access to. That is why people are willing to go into hock for tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to go to college. Going to college is an attempt at buying a future.
(Well, a chance of a future. No guarantees. More on that below.)
People who say that awful thing about colleges and education often understand this, but in a dangerously vague way. They get that college is the gateway to your future, but they have no idea how it does that.
And the answer to how it does that is: variously.
There are multiple ways to use attending college to improve your life. Or put another way there are several different things that schools can provide you with to improve your life post-college.
(Yes, there is a list below. Bear with me for the moment.)
It is up to the student to capitalize on what they get. The things that colleges provide (by your attending them) don't (mostly) automagically confer increased income or other benefits. If you turn around from a college experience and go right back to the life you were (or could have been) living before, you will gain nothing from your sacrifices.
Different people have different approaches to life. Consequently different college-goers are prepared to leverage different college-attendance benefits. It is probably a good idea – and probably way too much to ask of a seventeen year old – to have at least some idea of which college-attendance benefits you're going to want or be able to leverage on the far side.
Think of it like playing a computer game: once you fight your way through the program, and slay the level boss, it will give you the option of which special power you get. Which special you pick should have something to do with how you prefer to play the next stage of the game – your strengths, weaknesses, preferred tactics and over-all strategy.
Furthermore, as we all know, the game isn't fair: different people start at different levels and are playing on different hardness settings. One consequence of this is that, if you chose poorly, you can wind up having spent an enormous amount of money and effort and irreplaceable days of your life not actually having one's life bettered. You can chose a special which advances you to... a level below you. You can chose a special which pays out at a rate less than your student loans.
Given all that, it's important to understand yourself – your aspirations and your location in society, or, put another way, where you are and where you want to get to – if you don't want to make an amazingly expensive mistake.
And most importantly, you need to realize that different schools offer different college-attendance benefits.
You should probably attend a school that does a good job providing the college-attendance benefit(s) that work for you, in accord with your goals.
The question of whether attending college – and especially taking out college loans – is economically wise cannot be answered in the general. It can only be answered in the specific.
The question is never really, "Is college worth it?"
The question is "What is your plan for making attending college worth it?"
Here's a list of benefits that one can get from attending college:
- Credentials, general – Simply being able to say "yes, I have a bachelor's degree" can make you more employable, even if it's a Bachelor of Art in Underwater Basketweaving.
- Credentials, specific – There are jobs that you can't have (sometimes legally) without the specific college degree that qualifies you for it. If you want to be a physician, you have to go to med school.
- Prestige – There are schools prestigious enough that simply being able to list them on your resumé makes you substantially more employable. There are hiring managers who will prefer you simply for having attended such a school; there are also highly competitive employment positions that it is effectively impossible to get unless one's credential comes from a sufficiently prestigious school.
- Networking, aka Social Capital – The social contacts you make during a course of collegiate study – both fellow students and faculty – are potentially extremely valuable, if they are good ones, for whatever purpose you have.
- Social class advancement – As previously discussed, residential programs provide one of the few avenues available to most people to trade up their social class, by means of providing a live/work social experience that acculturates the student into the new class.
- Schemes – Sometimes life presents people with weird situations in which they can beat rule systems by going to college. For instance, avoiding military conscription (the draft), or getting a visa.
Let's examine each of these in turn.
Credentials, general
Simply having a degree, any degree, can make you more employable. How much more employable is an interesting question. If you are already pretty employable, it might not help enough to be cost effective, which is what all those (typically white, straight, male) teenage programmers are doing noping out of higher education. Furthermore, in the present economy and possibly the future economy, a degree-any-degree may not make you all that much more employable, because competition is very fierce and likely will only be getting fiercer for the kinds of positions for which a-degree-any-degree is adequate qualification. Getting stuck with student loans and still having to work for $12/hr is not a win – which is something that happens. (Culinary programs are notorious for this.)
On the other hand, I went to a graduate program with a specific track for "People who cannot by organizational policy be promoted any higher by their employers until they have master's degrees", and they apparently did a brisk business; in my first day in seminar, a professor said to the class, "I know a bunch of you are here because the day after you graduate you get a raise at work," and a whole bunch of people nodded back.
If you have a personal life advancement plan that suggests you just need a-degree-any-degree, please check it for sanity with people in a later life stage and living the life you want. There's this horrible thing that happens, where kids who have internalized the message "you have to go to college to do anything with your life!" assume that, e.g., you need to get a bachelor's degree to be a writer or a welder or a ballet dancer.
The people for whom a-degree-any-degree are most likely to benefit are people for whom low-stature white-collar work is an improvement on where they would be otherwise. A bachelor's in interpretive dance may be adequate to, say, get you a job working in an HR department or as an administrative assistant; if you could not have gotten that job otherwise, and it's an improvement on the kinds of job you otherwise could have gotten, then it might be worth it to pursue.
If after sanity checking it you are still convinced that this is all you need or want out of going to college – just to be able to get the damned diploma and say you have it – then there's approximately no reason not to optimize for price, and go to the cheapest available school. Nor is there much reason not to take the cheapest available path through school; for instance, if your logistics are such that you can save money by commuting instead of residing at the school, you can do that with impunity.
Note, if the school is inadequately credentialed, i.e. if is not appropriately accredited, any degree you get from it will basically be considered fake, and you might as well not bother. So you can't save by scrimping on accreditation.
Also, note I said there's approximately no reason not to optimize for price. There is one thing that you might want to consider paying more of a premium for.
The credential of a degree is a benefit you can only get if you complete the course of study. Not all schools are equally good at getting their students across the finish line.
There's this hack some people attempt in an effort to save money on bachelor's degrees: going to a two-year community college program on the cheap, and then instead of accepting the associate's degree, transfering into a four-year college as a third-year bachelor's student. It's doable (my sister did this, sort of.)
The problem with this is that the odds may be against you: a lot of community college programs have horrendous completion rates: 80% of students enter planning on transferring to four-year programs, and after six years, only 14% have graduated a four year program (n=700,000). Defenders of community colleges say this is an artifact of the populations they serve – students less "ready" for four-year programs – and surely to some extent it is.
But there is also horrible evidence that many community colleges use bogus measures of "readiness" to stall students' educational careers, as a scam to get more tuition out of them. This also applies to non-selective four-year state schools.
If you are going to try to economize on price, you need to be careful that the institutions of higher ed that you pick are not predatory. And you need to either find an institution that despite the low tuition spends sufficient money on student services (including professor advising time) to increase all their students' odds of completing their degree, or you need to have a justified belief in your capability to complete it anyways. Or both.
Here is a thing about schooling and privilege: what unconscious lessons you learned about schools and education from your own childhood experiences of being a student have an awful lot to do with how much privilege you had.
If you attended a school flush with funds, with an active PTA (flush with volunteers who did not need to work to the exclusion of volunteering), with a modest student-teacher ratio; if you had a gender, race, native language, (lack of) disability status, or social class which school staff felt indicated you would benefit by instruction and opportunities; if you had people telling you they expected much of you and noting your performance, good or bad – then you will likely think of school as a institution which has agency, which relates to its students, which gets involved in their outcomes. To whatever extent this is true, you will feel entitled to being served by the school; when in a school you don't immediately see where the services you need are offered, you seek them out, out of the unconscious assumption that surely they're around, somewhere.
Conversely, if you attended a school that didn't have enough money, with little parent involvement (because few parents could afford to spare the time), with more students than the teachers could handle; if your gender, race, native language, disability status, or social class suggested to school staff that instruction and opportunities would be wasted on you; if you were no more than just another anonymous cog in a school-machine – then you will likely think of school as an institution which is impersonal, just a structure you move through independently, like a maze-shaped swimming pool, in which you sink or swim on your own. To whatever extent this is true, it will simply not occur to you that the educational institution might owe you some sort of customer service or support for your tuition dollars.
More privileged kids think schools are like sit-down restaurants. Less privileged kids think schools are like vending machines.
When someone who comes from school experiences that are less privileged, they often don't know what they're missing, especially the subtle, interpersonal stuff. When they attend a school that is really bad at supporting students, it doesn't even occur to them that that is a thing they're missing out on.
(For the record, there are extremely expensive, fabulously prestigious schools that are unbelievably bad at supporting their students through their programs. There are professors and whole departments at many schools that consider a high drop-out rate a badge of honor – their classes are so hard core, "not everyone" can hack them. Giving a college an enormous sack of money is not a guarantee they won't abandon you.)
I am telling you: picking a school on the basis of their ability to support you to completion of your degree is totally a thing you can do. It can be challenging to evaluate schools from the outside on this basis, but it's not impossible. (Also note, individual departments which can vary across a single college.)
Lack of support and out-right predation are not the only two things that can make a collegiate program hard to complete; nor is this problem exclusive to community colleges.
When I was 17 and applying to bachelor's programs (this would be Fall 1988), I learned that there was a problem in the University of California system, particularly acute at the (reasonably prestigious) UC Berkeley: certain required classes for certain popular majors were so over-subscribed, that students were finding themselves wait-listed and locked out of classes required to advance, causing their bachelor's programs to stretch beyond four years. Since tuition was reckoned on a semester basis, not on a by-class-credit basis, this could add thousands of dollars of expense to their total tuition, through no fault of their own. I don't even know how that would work out for students on merit scholarships; poorly, I suspect.
Similarly, only differently, I heard rumor (back in the early 90s) that the Physics Department (Course 8) at MIT had some breathtakingly sexist professors, who tended to thwart the careers of female undergrads, who in turn tended to transfer to the Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Science Department (Course 12) to escape. Obstacles to completion can be specific to certain demographics. You could do worse than seek out a photo of a recent graduating class and the stats on demographic distributions of a recent entering class and compare them, doing a little back-of-the-envelope calculation.
The graduate program I attended was very inexpensive on a by-credit basis, however, that savings came with a catch: the school did not provide the required clinical internships. That was the one big place where the money you didn't pay them didn't go: if you were in the clinical program, you had to land your own. This is something other graduate schools provide their students (including other schools we competed with, who inked exclusive contracts with internship sites for their students, locking us out). Students sometimes washed out of this graduate school without their degree because of their inability to land an internship; I had a brutal time of it, myself.
So when pursuing a college education for a credential, whether the general, a-degree-any-degree, or the specific, you need to evaluate a program's likelihood to be something you complete. One part of that is knowing your own needs for scaffolding and support. Another part of that is finding out, if possible, if the school (and department) you're considering has any additional obstacles to completion – or fails to remove obstacles that other programs remove for their students.
One more thing, specifically about bachelor's degrees. People, especially people from lower social classes who are not familiar with how the game is played, often make erroneous assumptions confusing prestige and price. If you're convinced that you just need "a bachelors, any bachelors", hold the toppings, and intend to economize on price, you might assume that prestige indicates expense and avoid schools to the extent they are prestigious. Why go to some fancy-pants school, when you don't actually want to pay for the fancy-pants brand name?
There may have been a point that was correct, but it is no longer. The very most prestigious schools have become the cheapest for the poorest students. Like free. The prestigious schools are the wealthiest schools, so they can have the most generous financial aid and tuition policies.
The trick, of course, is getting in. But if you can pull that off, you may find that going to an elite private college with enormous prestige is actually ultimately cheaper than going to a state school.
For instance, if you are a 17yo young woman from an impoverished family who doesn't know what she wants to be when she grows up, but knows she should have a degree and aces school, you might think Wellesley, one of the most prestigious women's colleges in the US, is beyond you and beside the point. But if you got admitted to Wellesley and they determined you need financial aid, they would not set you up with a loan. They would just give you the money. Or rather, just pay the bill to themselves. You would graduate without student debt.
And as a bonus, the box includes this incredible secret-decoder ring of prestige, and, for that matter, class socialization.
Conversely, just because a school charges a lot of money doesn't mean that it's prestigious. That is a particularly terrible mistake to make.
Credentials, specific
If you want a specific academic credential for a specific thing you want to do that requires or recommends that credential, for the love of all that's holy, make sure any program you attend actually provides the credential you are trying to buy.
My professional license requires that one have a master's degree, but not just any master's degree. The regulations for my license actually spell out all sorts of requirements for the academics and clinical preparation of a qualifying master's degree. The application for licensure requires that you demonstrate that in the course of your master's degree studies you took all the courses required by law. All of this is spelled out, conveniently enough, on the mass.gov website, and has been since at least the first day I ever looked at the website of the college that ultimately graduated me and wondered, "Hey, does this academic program meet the requirements for getting a license to practice in this state?" and went to look it up.
Nevertheless, I have met multiple graduate students (usually from other schools, but occasionally from mine) who (1) had no idea these requirements existed, (2) had no idea whether the program they were in fulfilled these requirements, (3) had no idea that there was a possibility that their academic program might graduate them with a degree that didn't qualify them for practice.
For instance, my college had several graduate degree programs in the School of Psychology and Counseling that wouldn't qualify you for licensure. One wasn't clinical at all, and merely fulfilled the "masters, any masters" requirement. Two others were just clinical enough to be able to say they were clinical – if that was what you needed for a promotion at work[*]. These other programs served other purposes than licensure. They are radically less expensive than the licensure qualifying degree, because they were shorter by about half. But if you didn't understand that you couldn't practice with them, and signed yourself up for one thinking thinking to economize on a licensure-qualifying degree, you could find yourself with serious student loans and a degree that is useless to your purpose.
[* Or, as in my case, to prove that I could handle the work and earn a transfer into the fully license-qualifying clinical program, which I did not originally qualify for admission to.]
Horrifyingly, I heard a rumor a couple years ago about a large local clinic that wound up having to purge a bunch of their staff. They had hired quite a number of clinical-enough-to-call-clinical degreed people to work as therapists, who were not license eligible. Something happened – an insurer found out? the state? – and they wound up having to fire all of them.
(I know another clinic that heard that rumor and quietly put all its not-license-eligible therapists on an approximately one year countdown timer to remediate their licensure status with either additional graduate study or the pursuit and attainment of some other license, such as in substance abuse counseling.)
If all you want of your degree is that it fulfills some specific requirement, it behooves you that you make sure that the degree you're pursuing will actually fulfill that requirement.
Do not – DO NOT – leave it up to someone else to ensure compliance. During my internships, I spoke with grad students from other schools who took the attitude, "Well, I'm sure my school must be looking after it and the program is qualifying." It's going to be your umpteen thousand dollars, maybe you should do your own damned due diligence.
But if a program does meet the requirements for what you want to do with it, and factoring in what I said about completion, above, which is just as true for a specific credential as a general one, there's no reason not to get through as cheaply as you can. I paid the lowest per-graduate-credit rate in Massachusetts for my licensure-qualifying degree, and the licensure board didn't give a damn.
Now, I could do that because I intended a career path that wouldn't need a prestigious degree (more on which below). I wasn't planning on impressing anybody with my masters-granting institution. I was already a member of the social class it socializes to, so I didn't need that function. I didn't need much of anything out of the degree than that it conformed to the regulations for the license I wanted, and so I economized with a degree that didn't come with anything else.
Here's the kicker: to evaluate whether such a degree is economically worth it to buy, you have to determine whether the degree qualifies you for the thing you're aiming to get qualified for, and you also have to determine whether the thing you are aiming to get qualified for will have an adequate return on your investment.
The one thing that my degree most definitely did not do was increase my earning power. This is okay with me because I did not become a therapist to increase my economic class. But if I had pursued a licensure-qualifying degree with the erroneous belief that having a license would mean I could get higher paying jobs than I already had – or that I could get sufficiently higher paying jobs as to be worth the expense – that would be tragic.
This happens all the time in my field. People pick the profession without realizing what its earning power is (or, as the case may be, isn't). People actually put themselves through the rigors and expense of graduate school only to find out after the fact that therapist compensation is so low it will take them decades to recoup their expenses, if ever. Tragically, sometimes these people are from lower social classes, and in their ignorance of the distinction of social and economic class, assume that if a career is associated with the professional social class, it must be much more remunerative than what they had been previously doing.
Prestige
Probably of all the things on this list, prestige is the one I'm least clear on the utility of – it may well be bumping up against the limits of my own social class knowledge – but I can tell you what I've figured out.
To my knowledge, prestige – that is, going to a prestigious school for its prestige – has two applications. One is for impressing authority figures who don't know you (yet). The other is that it's a kind of credential, which some jobs require.
Attending a prestigious school is like having a high-value person vouch for you. When you apply for a job or a graduate school or a loan, the person who is sitting in judgment of you and your suit knows nothing of you. You have no reputation with them. But if you went to a prestigious college, they know the reputation of the school you went to. And they think something like, "Oh, well, if Yale thinks you're okay, you must be okay."
Gaining admission to a prestigious school is a lot like getting a snapshot of your reputation as a very promising young person; graduating is then like having it notarized. Then you can send it on ahead to people who have never had the opportunity to assess your promise for themselves, and have them react as if they had (or at least an approximation thereof.)
In this way, if you make it to the end of high school at the top of your game, you can invest to preserve and perpetuate that accomplishment. Nobody cares after high school that you got all As in high school, that you whipped the SATs, that you raised lots of money for charity or won the science fair three years running. All that will fade away from everybody else's memory and interest almost immediately. But those are the things that can get you into a prestigious school, and then the fact you attended (and, better, graduated) a prestigious school will convert those accomplishments into the durable currency of the prestige of the school on your diploma, and that you will be able to trade on permanently.
This matters most if your career path will subject you to a lot of judgment. If you're planning on graduating and getting a decent middle-gentry job and just staying in it as long as possible, you probably don't need a lot of prestige. If you're trying to convince a lot of rich people to invest money with you, if you're going to try to climb a towering promotion ladder, if you're going to have a career with a lot of jobs, if you're going to run for office, you probably want the prestige.
There are, I am told, career paths that involve such such ruthless judgment, that prestige moves from being something very helpful, to something much more like a credential, sine qua non. I knew a man who was a lawyer, who told me that his dream had been to be a law professor – but that he did not know when he chose his law school that it is impossible to become a law professor unless one got one's law degree from a very prestigious school, and his has insufficient prestige to do that. He was very bitter about this fact.
As I mentioned above, prestige is not necessarily expensive. Schools that sell prestige often are very generous in their financial assistance to those of low economic class. Young people of low social class often do not know this. Pass it on.
Networking, aka Social Capital
It is said, "It's not what you know, it's who you know." (Whom, damn it.) College is when you get to meet them.
In your life, your network of social contacts is your primary source of leads on employment opportunities, your primary source of potential lovers and spouses, your primary source of emergency assistance of all sorts.
There was a famous paper written by a guy named Granovetter about how people find jobs. It was called "The Strength of Weak Ties". He found out that it's not your BFFs who help you find work, because you already know all the same job leads they know. It's the people you are friendly acquaintances with who get you job leads. They are well disposed to you (being friendly) and they know things you don't, being as they are enmeshed in different families and friendship groups than you are.
People talk about the strength of friendships made in college, and that may be true. But the big economic value of social contacts made in college is the huge wealth of friendly acquaintances – Granovetter's "weak ties".
Not all social networking opportunities are the same. The resources of your network have direct bearing on how useful it will be to you. If everyone you know is a struggling artist, they're probably not going to be in a position to be as financially helpful to you as a social network full of stock brokers. If everyone you know is a stock broker, they probably don't have a lot of leads on places to book gigs or gallery shows.
Few people – at least in my social class and, I believe, lower classes – deliberately chose colleges on the basis of what networking opportunities it provides, but it is one of the things a college can be useful for. I know one person who has done this.
I have a friend who is a CPA. One night over pizza, I learned from him that he did his undergraduate degree at Hampshire College, one of the most expensive private schools in the country, and not particularly prestigious. Now, I knew he came from a blue-collar family in a rough, urban neighborhood. "Wait, the Hampshire College out in Western Mass? The one rich kids go to for degrees in underwater basket weaving?" "Yep." "What did you study there?" "Accounting." "Huh. I didn't know they had an accounting program." "They don't. I had to cross-register for all my accounting classes." I chewed on this for a moment. "Okay, why did you go to Hampshire to study accounting?"
"Well, the way I saw it, here were all these rich kids who had trust funds and would be inheriting huge amounts of money. They were mostly all artists – terrified of money and can't count. They would all figure out eventually that they'd need to hire an accountant. And I'd be the one guy they'd all know."
So one thing attending a college can be useful for is providing you with a pool of potential social contacts that is very valuable to you. But this only works to the extent that:
(1) You are willing to go out there and meet people. If you're going to be bashful and so socially avoidant nobody ever gets to learn your name or strike up an acquaintance with you, the opportunity is wasted.
(2) Your fellow students and your professors are willing to be met – and interested in networking back. One of the things that was somewhat disappointing about my graduate school is how weak many of my classmates were at cultivating social contacts. (I once ran into a classmate after graduation, one who was specializing in child therapy; I asked her for her card so I could send her referrals and she looked at me quizzically, "My card? But you're down in Cambridge, and I'm up on the North Shore.")
(3) The school experience you get affords opportunities to meet and interact with people. This is one of the downsides to commuter schools. You don't have as much opportunity to meet classmates and chat with them as when you live with them. Commuter schools also don't have student activity groups the way residential schools do, and those activities are often excellent ways to get to know and bond with others (*waves to all my Scadian peeps*).
The other way that colleges provide social networking is by formal means. Some schools have formal programs to provide students with opportunities that, typically, are ostensibly educational, but the primary value of which is networking opportunities.
One locally famous example is Northeastern University's undergraduate "co-op" program where the school itself arranges for industry work experiences for all its undergrad students, thus providing them all with workplace social pools. Another is MIT's UROP program, which connects undergraduates with laboratories and research groups they would never otherwise see the inside of. Some schools have study-abroad exchange year programs; some provide institutional affiliations that lead to internships and jobs.
I think it is hard to overstate the economic value of these sorts of opportunities – if you can make the most of them. If you are, then they can be worth absolutely enormous amounts of money.
Social class advancement
As I wrote previously, college's primary function in our society is to socialize people into higher social classes.
Our society is like a card game where if you don't like the hand you're dealt, you can turn it in for a re-deal – but the ante is enormous. Large enough, most people can only ever manage to do it once in a lifetime.
Now, it is not the case that if you don't go to college right after high school, you can never, will never, go to college. But that's the way to bet. Our society is set up to support that life pattern as it supports no others.
So basically, in our society, you're assigned a social class at birth. If you want to be in a higher one, for reasons I described previously, your best – and maybe only – shot at that is "going to college". If that works out for you, you get to trade up, at the expense of being
From the point of view of (some? many?) people in the classes into which colleges discharge their charges, higher education thereby has a civilizing function on the savages of the lower classes. The lower classes are exhorted to get college educations to stop being lower class, which the people in these other classes consider desirable to stop being, prima facie.
From the point of view of the people in the classes below that to which colleges discharge their charges, they know at least in an inchoate way, that higher education has something to do with getting into a higher social class, but they have no idea how it works.
This social-class socialization function of college is perhaps its most mysterious function for most people, especially people who don't have first-hand experience with it. It's widely understood that college is a thing you do to "better yourself", but insofar as most people understand it has something to do with class, that something is chalked up to economic class: college improves your earning power, because you get a diploma which makes employers more willing to hire you or willing to pay you more. It is also surmised that college teaches you how to do high-paying jobs you would otherwise not be qualified for, which can be true, though is less true than most people who are unfamiliar with the realities of college often think it is.
The thing that college most fundamentally does is teach its students how to comport themselves in a culture and milieu in which the work is organized around the written word, which is to say, in our society, to the white-collar and higher classes. This is basically what higher education has been doing since it really got going about one thousand years ago in the West: transforming promising young (historically male) people into clerics and clerks, professors and potentates, lawyers and doctors.
While at college, one's activities – now, as for the last millennium – are primarily absorbing, internalizing, and synthesizing semantic information from lecture and from the written word, and expressing oneself in formalized, moderated speech and writing. The college student functions primarily as a clerk in his own service.
But that is not all that is going on. The student must meet the expectations of and function within a society – a culture – that valorizes this work above other works. The student must dress the part, speak the part, follow the rules written and unwritten. The student learns how fellow students spend their time and their money when left to their own devices. The student is introduced to new ideas, new people, new foods, new habits, new fashions, new codes of conduct – and expected to adopt these by her fellows and by her faculty. She is provided with new role models by the score, by the hundred. From them she learns how to ask a superior for an extension of a deadline, what shoes to wear to a job interview, how to discuss administrative matters via email, how to follow arbitrary formatting conventions, how to sound confident, how much she should expect to be paid coming out of school, how her vowels should be shaped, how to give a presentation to two hundred people, and a thousand things besides. Perhaps she learns how to pick a wine, use chop sticks, order sushi, crack a lobster; do her makeup and hair to excel by the standards of her new community; discriminate between fashionable and unfashionable clothes; comport herself at a faculty-student dinner; network at conferences; conduct her sex life. She picks up ideas and attitudes about what work is most prestigious or remunerative, about what age it is becoming to become a parent, about what are good places to live, about what are good things to do with your leisure time.
In short, the student is being socialized into a social class.
I think one of the reasons we don't talk about this function of higher education explicitly is because it's simply not socially acceptable to express an aspiration to become a member of a higher class. To the extent the (potentially) class-elevating function of college is admitted to, it's described as an unfortunate thing: "I don't want to forget where I came from", which is code for "I don't want to be thought a class traitor."
That makes it awfully hard to reason clearly about this part of the college experience and make judicious choices.
Here are some things to think about concerning the social-class promoting function of colleges.
1) Different colleges socialize to different social classes. (And different departments in the same college can socialize to different social classes.)
2) You presumably already have a social class.
Consequently, if you want to move into a higher social class, you'd better pick a college (and/or department/program) that promotes its students into a higher class than the one you started with.
If you're labor class, you probably don't have to be too terribly fussy. (Be careful of aggies, techs, and trade schools.)
If you're gentry class, you should probably pay more attention. If you pick a college where everyone is just like you're used to, it's all terribly familiar and comfortable, and it barely feels like being away from home? You're not actually getting any social class advancement.
Which may, of course, be perfectly fine if you're there for something else (a credential either general or specific, prestige, networking, or a scheme). You're not required to use college-going this way.
But do bear in mind. There are a lot of people out there complaining that college wasn't worth it to them; that they graduated with a degree dearly bought and eternally to be paid for, and it hasn't actually done them a damned bit of good in the workplace; that they are unemployed and saddled with huge debt, which they took on in obedient submission to the doctrine that good middle class kids go to college so that they can get jobs.
Generally when I hear these stories, the people so complaining:
1) Have a degree that is not a specific credential for anything in particular they want to do (e.g. a degree in English, which is totally a necessary specific credential if you want to be a professor of English, but otherwise functions as a general credential) .
2) Went to a college which doesn't have much prestige.
3) Apparently haven't been able to leverage their network into employment, assuming they have something like a network.
4) Have no other scheme that makes college rewarding for them.
5) Are generally pretty privileged upper-middle social class young people who attended schools that promote to... the upper-middle social class.
As best I can tell from the outside, the complainants approached college with the belief that a general credential would be highly valuable, and had no other plan for getting value from going to college. That might have accidentally worked out okay if they hadn't already been upper-middle-class young people. Had they come from lower classes, the socialization would have made them much more employable. But they more-or-less already had that level of employability. So getting the diploma was not much of an improvement.
I recommend you try not to make that mistake. You have to optimize for something. If you don't optimize for something, you will probably get screwed. But the thing you optimize for had better be worth what you pay for it.
To make the most of the social class socialization function of a college, first pick one that goes somewhere you want to be. Then when you're there, you will need to make like an anthropologist and figure out who are the best role models to emulate, then emulate them. Seek out explicit mentorship and advice; it is always easy to find people to tell you what they think you should do, just pick ones whom you have reason to believe know what they're talking about. And then use their advice. Assume that there are better and worse ways to do everything, and ask other people in your target class explicitly what they are in any particulars that come to your attention. Don't try to make people justify why some things are considered better than others; if you demand justifications and argue, people will stop answering your questions.
Schemes
If you happen upon a scheme, you'll know it. A scheme is a reason for going to college that is contingent upon some completely other benefit that has somehow become tied to attending college. Like avoiding the draft.
My favorite story I can't really tell you. It concerns my sister, who kinda-sorta got a bachelor's degree by accident, as a side effect from a zany and successful scheme to live in Europe for a year, and not pay for it all herself. I gather that from her perspective, she only paid for one year of tuition to get a four year bachelor's degree – because from her perspective, all of the other tuition she paid was actually just the cost of doing business for completely other ends. As far as I know, she's never used her degree for anything whatsoever; she's a yoga instructor and a SAHM.
So I'll tell you my second favorite story.
Legend has it that there was an MIT undergraduate who took over 20 years to get a degree; according to the story, he came from a wealthy family, and had had a trust set up for him, the terms of which said that his upkeep and tuition would be paid, so long as he was pursuing his first degree. Being no dope, he kept switching his major at the last minute to reset the clock and protract his education. The story has it that eventually he took so many classes, MIT could no longer construe him as not having completed any of its undergraduate programs, and issued him at least one SB and regretfully kicked him out.
Whether or not a given scheme is worth the money is way beyond the scope of this, or possibly any, post. You'll have to figure it out for yourself.
But the importance of college-going schemes is two-fold. If you have a scheme all other considerations may go out the window, and that's okay. Schemes often wind up with their own rules, and if that means ignoring everything else, that's fine, if the scheme is a good one. You're more on your own with schemes, so it's even more necessary that you do your own due-diligence. (I still can't believe my sister pulled off the scheme she did; I would never have imagined that that was possible, but she researched it and established it was, and did it.)
The other things about schemes is that they confuse other people. The primary reason I'm alerting you to the existence of schemes is so they don't confuse you about what is possible if you don't have one making college worthwhile in the absence of the above listed benefits.
At a college you may, from time to time, encounter somebody who is not optimizing for any of the other college-going benefits because they have some racket going. If you can, learn about it, so you understand what is going on (and you might pick up a great story!) and not accidentally conclude something weird and wrong about college-going. They may be making very different choices, against very different criteria ("I must not graduate or they'll turn off the money!") than you are.
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