Donald Marron, a private-equity investor whose portfolio companies have included a student-loanfirm and an educational-technology startup, says, “If you’re in a position to be able to pay foreducation, it’s a bargain.” Those who can afford a degree from an elite institution are still in anenviable position. “You’ve got that with you for your whole life,” Marron pointed out. “It’s a realimprimatur 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 give me.On the other hand, that kind of education has gotten a whole lot more expensive since I was inschool, and jobs seem to be getting scarcer, not more plentiful. These days an increasing numberof commentators are nervously noting the uncomfortable similarities to the housing bubble, whichstarted with parents telling their children that “renting is throwing your money away,” and ended inmass foreclosures.

　　An education can’t be repossessed, of course, but neither can the debt that financed it be shed, noteven, in most cases, in bankruptcy. And it’s hard to ignore the similarities: the rapid run-up inprices, at rates much higher than inflation; the increasingly frenetic recruitment of new buyers,borrowing increasingly hefty sums; the sense that you are somehow saving for the future whileenjoying an enhanced lifestyle right now, and of course, the mountain 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 a collegeeducation has nearly doubled in that time. Is the education that today’s students are getting twiceas good? Are new workers twice as smart? Have they become somehow massively moreexpensive to educate?

　　E. Perhaps a bit. Richard Vedder, an Ohio University economics professor who heads the Center forCollege Affordability and Productivity, notes that while we may have replaced millions of filing clerksand payroll assistants with computers, it still takes one professor to teach a class. But he also notesthat “we’ve been slow to adopt new technology because we don’t want to. We like getting up infront 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 the mid-1980s by 1 percent a year. Now I see them rising 3 to 4 percent a year over inflation. What hashappened? The federal government has started dropping money out of airplanes.” Aid has increased,subsidized loans have become available, and “the universities have gotten the money.” EconomistBryan Caplan, who is writing a book about education, agrees: “It’s a giant waste of resources thatwill continue as long as the subsidies continue.”

　　F. Promotional literature for colleges and student loans often speaks of debt as an “investment inyourself.” But an investment is supposed to generate income to pay off the loans. More than halfof all recent graduates are unemployed or in jobs that do not require a degree, and the amount ofstudent-loan debt carried by households has more than quintupled since 1999. These graduateswere told that a diploma was all they needed to succeed, but it won’t even get them out of thespare bedroom at Mom and Dad’s. For many, the most tangible result of their four years is theloan payments, which now average hundreds of dollars a month on loan balances in the tens ofthousands.

　　A lot of ink has been spilled over the terrifying plight of students with $100,000 in loans and a jobthat will not cover their $900-a-month payment. Usually these stories treat this massive debt asan unfortunate side effect of spiraling college costs. But in another view, the spiraling college costsare themselves an unfortunate side effect of all that debt. When my parents went to college, it wasan entirely reasonable proposition to “work your way through” a four-year, full-time collegeprogram, especially at a state school, where tuition was often purely nominal. By the time Imatriculated, in 1990, that was already a stretch. But now it’s virtually impossible to conceive ofhigh-school students making enough with summer jobs and part-time jobs during the school year toput themselves through a four-year school. Nor are their financially shaky parents necessarily in aposition to pick up the tab, which is why somewhere between one half and two thirds of undergradsnow 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 widely available.No, not only making them available: telling college students that those loans are “good debt” thatwill enable them to make much more money later.

　　G. It’s true about the money—sort of. College graduates now make 80 percent more than peoplewho have only a high-school diploma, and though there are no precise estimates, the wagepremium for an elite school seems to be even higher. But that’s not true of every student. It’s veryeasy to spend four years majoring in English literature and beer pong and come out no moreemployable than you were before you went in. Conversely, chemical engineers straight out ofschool can easily make triple or quadruple the wages of an entry-level high-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 and motivated,” hesays. On the other hand, “if you’re not college ready, then the answer is no, it’s not worth it.”Experts tend to agree that for the average student, college is still worth it today, but they alsoagree that the rapid increase in price is eating up more and more of the potential return. Forborderline 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 who hasmade the mistake of setting his or her teenager loose in a shopping mall with a credit card and nospending limit. Eighteen-year-olds demand amenities—high-speed Internet, well-upholsteredclassrooms, world-class fitness facilities—and in order to stay competitive, college administratorshappily provide them. Then they raise the tuition for which the 18-year-olds are obedientlyborrowing the money.

　　“We have an academic arms race going on,” says Vedder. “Salaries have done pretty well. Look atthe 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’s kitchensand told themselves that they were really building value with every borrowed dollar, today’s collegestudents can buy themselves a four-year vacation in an increasingly well-upholstered resort, andeveryone congratulates them for investing in themselves.

　　Unsurprisingly those 18-year-olds often don’t look quite so hard at the education they’re getting. InAcademically Adrift, their recent study of undergraduate learning, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa findthat at least a third of students gain no measurable skills during their four years in college. For theremainder who do, the gains are usually minimal. For many students, college is less aboutproviding an education than a credential—a certificate testifying that they are smart enough to getinto college, conformist enough to go, and compliant enough to stay there for four years.

　　When I was a senior, one of my professors asked wonderingly, “Why is it that you guys spend somuch time trying to get as little as possible for your money?” The answer, Caplan says, is thatthey’re mostly there for a credential, not learning. “Why does cheating work?” he points out. If youwere really just in college to learn skills, it would be totally counterproductive. “If you don’t learnthe material, then you will have less human capital and the market will punish you—there’s noreason for us to do it.” But since they think the credential matters more than the education, theylook 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, whenI entered business school at the University of Chicago, the career-services person who came to talkto our class said frankly, “We could put you on a cruise ship for the next two years and it wouldn’tmatter.”

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

　　That debate matters a lot, because while the value of an education can be very high, the value of acredential is strictly limited. If students are gaining real, valuable skills in school, then puttingmore students into college will increase the productive capacity of firms and the economy—a netgain for everyone. Credentials, meanwhile, are a zero-sum game. They don’t create value; they justreallocate it, in the same way that rising home values serve to ration slots in good public schools. Ifemployers have mostly been using college degrees to weed out the inept and the unmotivated,then getting more people into college simply means more competition for a limited number ofwell-paying jobs. And in the current environment, that means a lot of people borrowing money forjobs 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, have nowjoined outhouses, hitching posts, and rotary-dial telephones as something that wide-eyed childrenmay hear about from their grandparents but will never see for themselves. The fabulous stock-market returns that promised an alternative form of protection proved even less durable. Atleast we have the house, weary Americans told each other, and the luckier ones still do, as they arereminded every time their shaking hand writes out another check for a mortgage that’s worthmore than the home that secures it. What’s left is ... investing in ourselves. Even if we’re not such agood bet.

　　Between 1992 and 2008, the number of bachelor’s degrees awarded rose almost 50 percent, fromaround 1.1 million to more than 1.6 million. According to Vedder, 60 percent of those additionalstudents 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 such an explosionin graduate and professional degrees, as kids who previously would have stopped at college lookfor ways to stand out in the job market.

　　It is in that market that students may first, finally, have begun to revolt. For decades, when formerEnglish majors wondered how to get out of their dead-end jobs, the answer was “go to lawschool”—an effect that was particularly pronounced in economic downturns. In 2010 in the LosAngeles Times, Mark Greenbaum warned prospective lawyers that “the number of new positions islikely to be fewer than 30,000 per year. That is far fewer than what’s needed to accommodate the45,000 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 for thetest. But then students apparently started heeding Greenbaum’s warning. Two years later thatfigure dropped to just 130,000, lower than it had been in more than a decade. Law-schoolapplications 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, the first thingto do when you’re in a hole is stop digging. But that still leaves you in a pretty big hole.

　　I. Everyone seems to agree that the government, and parents, should be rethinking how we investin higher education—and that employers need to rethink the increasing use of college degrees ascrude screening tools for jobs that don’t really require college skills. “Employers seeing a surplus ofcollege graduates and looking to fill jobs are just tacking on that requirement,” says Vedder. “Defacto, a college degree becomes a job requirement for becoming a 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 balance after 25years. But of course, that doesn’t control the cost of education; it just shifts it to taxpayers. It alsoencourages graduates to choose lower-paying careers, which diminishes the financial return toeducation still further. “You’re subsidizing people to become priests and poets and so forth,” saysHeckman. “You may think that’s a good thing, or you may not.” Either way it will be expensive forthe government.

　　K. What might be a lot cheaper is putting more kids to work: not necessarily as burger flippers butas part of an educational effort. Caplan notes that work also builds valuable skills—probably morevaluable for kids who don’t naturally love sitting in a classroom. Heckman agrees wholeheartedly: “People are different, and those abilities can be shaped. That’s what we’ve learned, and public policyshould 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 on timeand getting along with a team, that are crucial for career success. “It’s about having mentors andhaving workplace-based education,” he says. “Time and again I’ve seen examples of this kind ofprogram working.”

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

　　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 oneeconomist.

　　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 theirincome 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 onlyjob skills but also social skills.

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