Student Debt and Inflated Credentials

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Thursday, September 15, 2022

 

One could spend a merry week listing the problems with President Biden’s recent act of student-loan “forgiveness.” It’s capricious. It’s illegal. It’s regressive. It’s divisive. It’s expensive. It plays favorites. It will make Congress weaker than it currently is. It worsens, rather than improves, the problem it is pretending to address. It damages the Constitution. It gestures at class war. And on, and on, and on we might go.

 

But I’d like to focus on a drawback that has not gained as much attention as it should have, but that, in the long run, is as serious as any of the others: namely, that it inflates the mythology around college degrees at the precise moment we should be busy bursting it.

 

When discussing federal spending, President Biden likes to say, “Don’t tell me what you value, show me your budget, and I’ll tell you what you value.” Clearly, then, what Biden values are college degrees — and the people who seek them. The United States is hopelessly in debt, its entitlement programs are going bust, the deficit is projected to stay with us indefinitely, we have just come out of an unexpected global pandemic that cost the Treasury more than $5 trillion, and President Biden, without any input from Congress, has chosen to funnel up to a trillion bucks to Americans who took out loans to go to university. 

 

Of all the daft ideas!

 

The United States is a free country, and, in a free country, people who wish to go to college should feel at liberty to do so. But there is an enormous difference between that proposition and the proposition that college is for everyone, that everyone must be encouraged to attend, and that the people who decline to go have been failed — or, worse, have themselves failed. Alas, by prioritizing the transference of student debt over every other political idea on his table, President Biden just gave all of these notions a vital shot in the arm. For shame.

 

Many of today’s college graduates claim that they felt obliged to enter higher education because, in the modern world, college degrees have come to be treated as the primary — or, even, the sole — means by which a person is able to convey their generalized competence to prospective employers and to the outside world. In this estimation, these graduates have a point. But that college degrees are treated in this manner is not a law of the universe or an ineluctable by-product of modernity; it is a choice — and a damaging one at that. As a society, we should stop making that choice.

 

Privately, Americans would do well to cease imbuing college degrees — or the assorted paraphernalia that are involved in obtaining them — with any form of mystique. Most of America’s universities are unexceptional. Most of America’s professors are unremarkable — both as people and as thinkers. Most of America’s college graduates are conformists. In certain circumstances, academic credentials can be useful as signifiers of practical skill: For doctors and engineers, this is arguable. In most circumstances, however, they are not, and citizens who wish to help prevent the further establishment of an American clerisy have a role to play in insisting as much.

 

Publicly, Americans would do well to demand that their institutions not require the possession of a college degree as a precondition of gainful employment. This year, the city of Washington, D.C., will implement a rule that requires all child-care workers in the district to have a degree. This is ridiculous. Leaving aside the deleterious effect that this is likely to have upon the supply (and, thereby, the cost) of child care in D.C., the mere existence of such a rule must prompt one to cry, “Why?” For millennia, human beings have managed to care adequately for children without first producing government-approved pieces of paper, and there is nothing in the water in our illustrious capital city that makes their doing so less possible. All told, the move smacks of conquest — of the powers that be recognizing that, by establishing accreditation schemes in every last nook and cranny of American professional life, they will be granted yet another forum in which they might spread their political ideas. Resisting such encroachments — and removing those that already exist — ought to be a priority for any voter who does not wish to see acquiescence to state-led ideological indoctrination become a prerequisite to gainful employment.

 

Apologists for the status quo will undoubtedly bristle at these descriptions. But it is telling that, when describing the present landscape, even they acknowledge that there is a profound disconnect between the cost and the value of the average degree. Those who have seen fit to defend President Biden’s recent loan-“forgiveness” scheme, for example, have routinely attempted to have it both ways. Naturally, they have cast the development of a college-educated population as a self-evident societal good that ought to be more aggressively subsidized by taxpayers. And yet, in making their case for this particular action, they have been forced to complain about the “debt crisis” that has resulted from the widespread mismatch between what college graduates have spent to obtain their degrees and what they have gained by having done so. If, on balance, the procurement of a college degree represents a ticket to the good life, then there is no “debt crisis” to speak of, and no need for a taxpayer-funded bailout. And if it doesn’t, then the system is a crock.

 

If American colleges were profoundly different sorts of places from what they are today, one could imagine circumstances in which the acquisition of a college degree might tell us something useful about a person’s outlook, experiences, or affect. A college degree, for example, could suggest that a person is widely read, or that they are open-minded, or that they have been subjected to an unusually high level of free debate. In the year 2022, however, these ideas seem rather risible. Does today’s average college graduate seem widely read, open-minded, or well versed in untrammeled argumentation to you? 

 

How about worldly? Historically literate? Practically skilled? Civically sensible? Attached to their country and its institutions? 

 

I think not. On the contrary: The most common virtue exhibited by the average college graduate is persistence. Persistence to jump through the necessary hoops to get into college in the first instance. Persistence to jump through the hoops to make it through college without falling behind, flunking out, or committing a sufficiently grave social mistake to inspire the mob. Persistence to parlay the resultant credential into the sort of job that made the whole game worthwhile to begin with.

 

Persistence is a virtuous trait. But college degrees are not the only — or even the best — indicators of persistence. A frightening number of people go to college because they think they should — that circular logic is at the heart of our current problem — or because, having reached the age of 18, they cannot think of anything better to do. It seems perverse to privilege their persistence over those who, say, join the military, or start their own business, or work for a charity, or stay at home and look after a family. We do, though.

 

Historically, the federal government’s role in the “forgiveness” of student debt has been to reimburse students who were explicitly defrauded by the institutions to which they had paid their loans. By widening this practice to cover almost every student in the country, President Biden has now implied that this fraud is, in fact, being perpetrated by the entire American higher-education system. Out of fear of his own coalition, Biden has taken no steps to alter that system; indeed, by relieving the debts of its customers at taxpayers’ expense, he has sought to ensure that whatever flaws exist within the system will persist well beyond their sell-by date. Those taxpayers should respond by thanking the president for the heads-up, and by making their own adjustments — via the ballot box, at the town hall, and, eventually, to the ongoing instruction of their children.