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Another Perspective

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To be fair, this is illustrative and extreme; only about 60 per cent of bachelors degrees and half of masters degrees are vocationally useless. You might find this lenient, and I encourage you to visit Tables 254 and 255 of the Department of Education's annual Digest of Education Statistics and construct your own proportions.

Of course, college attendance entails not only lost income, but forgone tax revenue. If six million full-time U.S. students were working rather than studying, on $40,000 a year income and a total average tax rate of 30 percent, U.S. governments would gather an extra $72 billion a year in tax in the short-run, enough to fund the entire Departments of Justice, the Interior, Commerce, and Energy.

Reasonable people can quibble with my exact figures, but not the general message: Having an enormous full-time college population has significant economic costs in terms of forgone national income and tax revenue, in fact far greater than the accounting cost of subsidizing the costly pursuits in the first place.

ACADEMIC TRADITIONALISTS might take issue with my apparent disdain for non-vocational fields, such as classics, history and philosophy. But far from heralding their demise, a withdrawal of public subsidies would reduce enrollment in these fields, leaving only the keen and bright. Academic standards would recover, and their pejorative, public dismissal as "soft-options" would fade.

Of more concern is the rapid growth of trendy, inherently useless fields, for which a cut in subsidies may prove fatal. The fastest growing majors for both bachelors and masters degrees are gender studies, communication studies, visual and performing arts, and fitness studies, all up by around 25 percent since 2000.

Is it fair to question whether some disciplines are more deserving of public money? Well, let's take gender studies. Recent publications in the field include "Negotiating Anal Intercourse in Inter-Racial Gay Relationships in Hong Kong," and "Beyond the Vagina-Clitoris Debate -- from Naming the Genitals to Reclaiming the Woman's Body," appearing respectively, for your reference, in scholarly journals Sexualities and Women's Studies International Forum. Hardly topics to be sniffed at, and doubtless deserving of funding, but public funding?

In others words, should we use the coercive powers of the state to take individuals' property to fund research into location-specific intercourse, of any sort, or to deconstruct the apparently raging vagina-clitoris debate? One might also question the utility of fitness studies, whose popularity has been matched by obesity itself.

SO WHY, THEN, if much college education is useless, do so many still attend? Including masters and PhD students, close to 18 million students attend college in the U.S., and their numbers have grown at twice the rate of the U.S. population since 1970.

Such a rapid increase should surely have initiated a labor productivity revolution, yet nothing of the sort has emerged. On the contrary, U.S. productivity growth slowed dramatically in the 1970s, before resuming normal levels in the 1990s. In fact, top Yale economist William Nordhaus has observed that productivity growth was no faster after 1995 than before 1973.

Economics Nobel-prize winner Michael Spence suggested an explanation for growing enrollment in 1974: A person goes to college to send a signal to employers that she is smarter than someone who didn't go, even if she doesn't actually learn anything vocationally relevant. But now that everyone is trying to signal, we are back to square one, except with millions of people pointlessly hanging-around on campus for four years before doing anything productive. Highly intelligent or dedicated students can end up hanging around for a good ten years, doing degree after degree just to make a point.

If this process results in janitors requiring masters degrees in cleaning technology, the educational race to the top will have become a serious problem. To avoid this, government should withdraw subsides completely from college courses that do not add productive value to the economy. Cultural Studies professors would not be thrilled: Foucault's witty musings on sexual identity would not get the same subsidy as the general principals of accounting and engineering, for instance. But these are the hard decisions we elect politicians to make.

In time, government could scale back higher education subsidies altogether. If time spent at college continues to spiral out of control, a lump-sum tax on college students of a few thousands dollars might be warranted. Brilliant and dedicated students from all backgrounds, in whatever discipline, would still percolate to the top of the academic tree owing to elite public and private scholarships, but the labor force, national income, and tax revenues would expand.

A tax on students may well prove too provocative, yet platitudes that colleges and their students are under-funded should get short shrift. A college education is a fine ideal, imparting both vocational and abstract benefits, but the costs should be borne privately.

Adam Smith wrote that "the more [people] are instructed the less liable they are to the delusions of superstition, which, among ignorant nations, frequently occasion the most dreadful disorders." But wait did Adam Smith have a PhD? Actually, he didn't, so perhaps he's not qualified to comment... One of our contemporary superstitions is that blank checks from the public to colleges and their students are productive and justified.

Adam Creighton is a Commonwealth Scholar at Balliol College, Oxford, and in 2007 was a summer research fellow at the Tax Foundation, Washington D.C.

topics:
Taxes, Education, Economics, Law, Energy