By happy chance, the Learning = Earning numbers worked out perfectly for the college and university sector. It turned out that, on average, a four-year degree produced $1 million in additional lifetime income for a university graduate over a nongraduate. The world’s best marketing agency could not have found a better set of numbers. Even with the costs of going to school—and before the 1990s, tuition costs were reasonable and within reach for most middle-class families—and the delayed earnings, these young people enjoyed accelerated incomes, as well as cleaner and more attractive office environments.
College and university recruiters jumped to capitalize on the salary numbers. Sitting at dining room tables with prospective students or talking to an eager and earnest family at a recruiting fair, they could wipe out anxiety about high tuition costs and college living expenses with a simple reference to the million-dollar promise. Viewed this way, a degree was not simply an education. For parents, it was an investment, a financial commitment in their children’s future. And as alternative pathways to comfort and prosperity dried up—often for the parents themselves, as they lost their jobs or struggled with a changing workforce—the college promise hung out there like a bright and compelling beacon. Come hither, it said, to jobs and opportunity.
But from the outset, these statistics had been misleading. Averages are averages, indicating what will happen across a broad population. The averages dealing with college graduates include the Harvard-educated doctor, the Wall Street financier from Princeton, the McGill graduate with a degree in neuropsychology, and the oil and gas engineer from Texas A&M, as well as the English literature specialist from Minot State, the psychology graduate from Cal State Northridge, and the film studies major from New York University. Even the most superficial analysis would suggest that the first four would have dramatically different career outcomes than the last three. But the average figures were undeniably true, as averages, and parents and high school graduates, eager for reassurance, accepted the idea, or, to put it baldly, the lie that a degree—any degree from any institution—would provide a ticket to the middle class.
Parents and prospective students were even more strongly seduced by the additional promise of high-quality institutions. If the promises of universities and colleges in general might be suspect, then at least the best institutions provided better prospects. Harvard, University of Southern California, and University of Texas-Austin were clearly going to offer greater hope than a third- or fourth-tier college. Ditto Stanford, Duke, Princeton, Duke, and Yale. The data seem to bear this out. The simple dominance of Ivy League graduates in the American finance sector provides seemingly irrefutable evidence of what many North Americans take to be an unassailable truth. If Learning = Earning, then Learning at an Elite Institution = Even More Earning. The result, of course, is intense competition for entrance to the elite schools, with the best institutions attracting many times more applicants than there are first-year spaces. In one of the many perversions of the United States’ post-secondary education system, institutions are rated on the ratio of applicants to admissions. Clearly, a college that turns down more students is more selective and therefore more elite and more attractive. And so institutions seeking to position themselves as among the very best in an intense and overcrowded North American marketplace make a strong effort to recruit more applicants, even when they already have ten to fifteen times more would-be students than spaces.
The Jobs Crisis
But as the truth about graduate outcomes slowly became clear, the return on investment or ROI—an acronym that took over from a high-quality education as a primary goal for post-secondary education—started to decline. It also started to split between career-ready degrees and more general fields of study that lacked a precise career focus. Business schools, the weak cousin of colleges and universities in the 1960s, had become institutional superstars by the 1990s. Top business faculty members attracted rock-star salaries and attention. Students who had flooded into Arts and Science programs like lemmings in the 1970s and 1980s shifted gears in the 1990s and 2000s and headed for business schools. Even the prestigious American liberal-arts institutions—Colorado College, Middlebury College, and Swarthmore College—did the previously unthinkable and added business and economics degrees to what had once been the best Arts and Science undergraduate degree programs in the world.
The job crisis, which started in the low-skill industrial sectors, has started to infect the professional ranks. Law students, lured into degree programs by the prospect of high-profile and high-income jobs, have faced brutal job prospects across the United States and Canada in recent years. In the mid-2010s, thousands of new law graduates struggled to find articling positions, ringing up mountains of debt, and then failing to find the lucrative jobs they expected. The crisis here was driven higher by the out-of-sync career and salary expectations of aspiring lawyers who may have watched too many episodes of Law and Order or seen Michael Douglas’s turn in Wall Street (“greed is good”) as an enticement rather than an indictment against a failed financial system.
But you can’t fool all of the people all of the time, as a self-educated American lawyer once said, and students eventually caught on and responded to the collapsing job market. In the United States in 2014, law school admissions fell by some 40 percent over the previous high. Law schools felt they had two choices: close their doors (several did) or lower their academic standards to fill their classrooms and pay the bills. The latter practice was particularly noticeable at the larger for-profit schools that had sprung up to meet the seemingly insatiable demand for legal careers. Canada, incidentally, followed a contrary track, with continued strong demand for spots in law schools—but equally severe difficulties for graduates looking for articling positions and full-time employment. In fact, two new law schools opened in Canada, both in smaller regional centres that had struggled to find lawyers willing to work in the areas.
In 2012, some American law schools, in desperation, reportedly gave in to the temptation to game the system.[12] After-graduation surveys are often pretty superficial and do not inquire deeply about the positions that former students hold. Surveyors simply want to know if the graduates have a job and if the position is related to their law degree. So, the solution must have seemed obvious. The law schools hired their own graduates and gave them quasi-legal jobs that were of long-enough duration to cover the survey period. The results improved, the law schools looked better, and no one complained; at least, not until the truth came out. When it was revealed that certain law schools responsible for training the nation’s lawyers had betrayed the very principles they were teaching, many observers were disgusted, although the scandal did not get nearly as much attention as did the New England Patriots’ “deflate-gate” scandal in the American Football Conference finals in January 2015.
Other law schools have become bottom-feeders. The classic example is Florida Coastal School of Law. In 2013 the median score of its entering class lay in the bottom quarter of everyone in the country who wrote the LSAT test, something that the LSAT administrators say makes it unlikely that these students will ever pass the bar exam. Nevertheless, the school charges nearly $45,000 a year in tuition. Ninety-three percent of the 2014 graduates had debt averaging $163,000—this for a degree they may well be unable to use, if they graduate.[13]
A substantial number of graduates in many disciplines, particularly in the Arts and Sciences, have had dismal job experiences. As a result, many students have chosen to continue their studies at graduate and professional schools in a search for careers and a decent salary. The continued pursuit of graduate qualifications has, for many aspiring students, proven disappointing as well. This is particularly true at the Master’s level, where ROIs in certain Humanities fields have dropped below zero—a fancy way of saying that the cost of completing the degree plus the loss of deferred income is greater than any increase in earnings associated with the degree. So no million-dollar bonus here. This career calculus is fine if the motivation for completing the degree is learning and self-fulfillment. If the students (and the parents and governments that fund the system) select the degree in anticipation of a better job and higher income, then the outcome is a disaster.
Four Backup Careers for