Is college still worth it? What to consider to make the most of higher education.

On a special episode of The Excerpt podcast: The skyrocketing cost of college leaves many students with crushing debt that can take years, if not decades, to pay off. And while having a degree can open some doors, the burden of paying off student loans can end up closing others, like buying a house or having children. Unlike 20 years ago, many employers today, including high-profile ones like Apple, Google and Ernst & Young, have eliminated the degree requirement for many jobs, leading prospective students to wonder, is college really worth it? In his new book “The Career Arts: Making the most of College, Credentials and Connections” author Ben Wildavsky argues that the answer is most assuredly yes.

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Hit play on the player above to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript below. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.

Dana Taylor:

Hello and welcome to The Excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor. Today is Thursday, November 16th, 2023, and this is a special episode of The Excerpt. The skyrocketing cost of college leaves many with crushing debt that can take years, if not decades to pay off. While having a degree can open some doors, the burden of paying off student loans can end up closing other doors in life like buying a house or having children. Another perspective is that unlike 20 years ago, many employers, including high profile ones like Apple, Google, and Ernst & Young, have eliminated the degree requirements for many jobs, which leads many prospective students to wonder, is college really worth it? Our guest today, Ben Wildavsky, argues in his new book, The Career Arts: Making the Most of College, Credentials, and Connections that the answer is most assuredly, yes. Ben, thanks so much for joining us.

Ben Wildavsky:

Oh, thanks so much for having me.

Dana Taylor:

Okay, so let's dive right in. With the price of tuition so high and with so many employers now creating a career path for those who choose to forego a degree and just start work right away, some would argue that college isn't actually worth it anymore. You disagree, why is that?

Ben Wildavsky:

Look, I think it's very understandable that people have some concern about college value. It's a big investment. The fact is the evidence is very clear that people who earn college degrees on average have about a 70% higher earnings than people who only have a high school diploma. There is a lot of talk about focusing more on skills and hiring for skills, not degrees, but the fact is if you look at what employers actually do and not just what they're saying, what they're doing is having a strong preference for hiring people with degrees.

Dana Taylor:

Okay, so let's look at this from the opposite perspective. Others think that first you go to college and get your degree, then get the job you want. In your book, you call that trade off between going to college and getting practical job skills, a widespread and misleading notion. Why is that?

Ben Wildavsky:

I really think it's a false choice, and the reason is that if you look at what employers are looking for, what's really needed for career success over the long term, we're all living longer where we can have multiple jobs. People really need a mixture of broad skills and targeted skills, so if you do it right, you go to college, you're often going to get what they always talk about as the critical thinking skills, the analytical skills. Some of the people will ask you to take gen ed classes, but you also will often have majors like teaching, nursing, computer science. They're really very practical, and so you end up with that mixture that helps you navigate a career.

Dana Taylor:

Well, you've done some research here as to the value of a degree. What kind of research did you do and what does it say about the value of getting a degree?

Ben Wildavsky:

I talked to a lot of economists. I'm not an academically trained economist myself, but I feel like they have a lot of good data. They have a lot of good perspective, and there's just been evidence really going back to the 1970s when far fewer people were going to college that the so-called wage premium, the advantage of going to college has just gotten higher and higher. It's leveled off in the past 15 or 20 years, but what's interesting is that even as more people have gotten degrees, we're now at a record percentage of the population with four year degrees, about 37, 38%. The wage premium is also at very close to an all time high, so it hasn't gotten less. It's really just extremely high compared to back in the seventies or eighties.

Dana Taylor:

Well, do you think that parents and students are realistic about what college really offers? Are they prepared?

Ben Wildavsky:

A lot of times when people say fewer people should go to college, they're not talking about their own children. They kind of want someone else's kids to make that choice, and I think that's very problematic. Going to college is not always a magic ticket to success. You really do need to be aware of those things I've mentioned, the broad skills, the targeted skills, and also having networks, having what they call social capital to make sure that the skills that you have developed, whether it's in college or whether it's in some other way. Whether you know people who can vouch for you, who can talk about your abilities and who can really tell you about what jobs are available. Those three things are really what it takes to get ahead.

Dana Taylor:

Well, are there other kinds of credentials though, or trainings that you think people should consider instead of college?

Ben Wildavsky:

We have this stereotype of a college student who's an 18-year-old who puts everything aside for four years and pays a bunch of money and goes off to some cloistered ivory tower, but that isn't really the reality for many people. There are a lot of people who are older students, maybe they're working, they have families. They may go to school part-time. If they're fortunate, they work for one of the growing number of employers who provides education benefits, so those let you do your job, support yourself and your family, but also to gradually get some college credits, and I think it's really good if we encourage people to do more of that and to build up their skills and eventually some of those may lead to degrees or they may just lead to better job opportunities over time. The key thing is to really take seriously this idea of being a lifelong learner.

Dana Taylor:

Okay. Ben, I want to talk about community college. Number one, they're usually much more affordable than state colleges and private universities. What's your perspective on them?

Ben Wildavsky:

I'm a big fan of community colleges. They're a very large percentage of undergraduates are at community colleges. It's something like 30 or 35% at the total. Community college is college, and I think that it has great potential. The challenge is that that potential is not always realized. There are a lot of people who enroll in community college, planning to do a couple of years there and then transfer to four year schools to get a degree, and a lot of them don't end up doing that. Quite a modest percentage, maybe 15, 17%. There needs to be a lot more work done to improve the transfer process to make it smoother. We don't want people having to spend money or spend time at community college and then not have their credits transferred. That's a big concern for some students.

Dana Taylor:

Okay, but for people who simply can't afford to go to college even with loans, what are some of the best alternatives?

Ben Wildavsky:

There's a program called Year Up, which has been very effective, which name comes from the fact that it's one year where it's a mixture of about six months of fairly focused skills training, also learning sort general professional job skills, but then six months of a paid internship for a company, which really prepares you to get into the workforce. Those kinds of programs are very effective because they're looking at in-demand sectors, and really what they're trying to do is create a pathway where you can get a job, maybe you can keep on learning, maybe you can take community college classes. It's not a separate decision from getting education and degrees, but it gets you some work experience and some income much faster, which is what a lot of people want.

Dana Taylor:

A lot of employers now offer education benefits. Is that a reasonable route for some people to take to get an education?

Ben Wildavsky:

Absolutely. I mean, I just don't see the downside. The real question is what are you going to do? I talked to a woman who helped run the Amazon Career Choice program, which is one of the very, very large employers, of course, and it's a very big program. First of all, they make the classes very accessible. They will, even for frontline workers, they'll even put classroom space in a warehouse, so people, when their shift is over, they can take a class or before their shift. They really try to make it accessible so it works around people's lives because people's lives are complicated. As I said before, they have jobs, they have kids. They can't just drop everything and go off to a four year college and many cases.

But what you want to avoid is what she called cul-de-sac jobs. You want to avoid a kind of certificate or a preparation that leads you to maybe a slightly better job, but that doesn't have a pathway, doesn't have advancement opportunities. You don't want to be in the dead end. You want to have something where you can keep on learning and keep on growing and also make more money.

Dana Taylor:

In the course of writing this book, what did you find that colleges and universities do right, and where do you think they struggle the most?

Ben Wildavsky:

Gosh, well, big question. I mean, look, I have maybe a bit of a love hate relationship with American higher education, mostly love. I mean, I do think that higher education is still much more of a gateway to opportunity than it is a barrier. Colleges have gotten much better about seeing that their job is to help students succeed and to support students to get them to graduation. There used to be a little bit of this kind of bootcamp mentality of when you're a first year student, look to your left, look to your right, and one of you is not going to be here by graduation. They no longer consider that a point of pride. They really want to help students succeed. So that's on the good side.

On the other side, look, we still have a very poor completion rate. Only 62% of first time full-time students at a given college will graduate from that same college within six years. So we really need to improve the graduation rates. Students need a lot more support. There's obviously the issues of costs as well. I think there's a lot of things that colleges could do better, especially with what I would call navigation assistance, helping people just make it through the system.

Dana Taylor:

In the book, you talk about the value of social capital. I know you touched on this, but what is it and why is it so important in your view?

Ben Wildavsky:

The simpler term would be building and accessing networks. There are people who just because of the accident of their birth, they may have a lot of inherited advantages, and that might include networks where you're a college student or you're looking for a summer job and one of your parents knows somebody who can help get you a job. You certainly have a network if you're from a more modest background, maybe from a low income background, but you need to really focus on how to build that so that you can find out about opportunities, so you can do things like part-time jobs, internships, apprenticeships, where people get to know you and they see what you can do and they can vouch for you, and that's the kind of thing that it really takes to build up a career over time.

There's a wonderful article, gosh, it's 50 years ago, called The Strength of Weak Ties, and it was a sociologist who interviewed a lot of men in the Boston suburbs about how they found their jobs, and he would always ask them, so did you find out your job from one of your good buddies? And they would tell them over and over again, oh, no. It was kind of more of an acquaintance, just someone they knew casually. So this is where he came up with the idea of weak ties being important. And that's your network. It's not just your close friends, it's not just your family. It's the people that you make a point of getting to know who can be really important information sources as you're trying to build your career.

Dana Taylor:

Well, do you think that the workplace of the future is likely to involve more job and career changes than in the past, and how does a college education play into that?

Ben Wildavsky:

We are living longer. The retirement ages have been raised, and we are more likely to have multiple jobs already. I believe it's something like 11 or 12 job changes is pretty standard, and that's going to only grow. And college, it's really this whole notion of transferable skills, the idea that, yeah, it's great to know the computer language of the moment. But look, when I was in college and back in the dark ages, I took an intro computer class in a language called Basic, well, guess what? I'm sure that four or five years later, nobody was using Basic anymore. The computer language changes, so it's definitely a useful thing to know, and it's what your employer needs right now, but what you need is to be able to kind of navigate change, and you need to be able to learn new things. You also need to be able to do things like work with other people, communicate in writing, communicate verbally, be part of the team. Those are all things that help you navigate many job changes over a career.

Dana Taylor:

Okay, so tell me what surprised you the most when you were researching this book?

Ben Wildavsky:

I think it would have to be the social capital piece, because I think like a lot of people, I had been a writer and a journalist for years writing about education, thinking about what happens on college campus and not really drawing the connection so much to how networks help you build careers.

Dana Taylor:

And then finally, what's the most important thing that you'd want people listening to take away from this interview?

Ben Wildavsky:

I think it comes down to trying to avoid that sort of either or thinking. There was kind of an old line from some presidential debate, you're going to be a philosopher, but we need more welders. The idea that there's a big stark divide between practicality and education. The fact is it's not either or, it's both. And I think we have to really take charge of our own learning, and it might be college right away for many people. I think that's a great choice, but it might also be developing skills, both targeted and broad skills and networks over time, and that combination is what's really going to help you get ahead in your career.

Dana Taylor:

Well, the book is called The Career Arts: Making the Most of College, Credentials, and Connections, and it's on bookshelves now. Ben, thanks so much for sharing your insights with us today.

Ben Wildavsky:

Oh, well, thank you for having me. It was a great conversation.

Dana Taylor:

And before we go, we have a correction to share for our episode that aired last week on Wednesday, November 8th about more women dying from alcohol related causes. The NIAAA, the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism is an organization under the National Institutes of Health. Thanks to our senior producer Shannon Rae Green for production assistance. Our executive producer is Laura Beatty. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending a note to [email protected]. Thanks for listening. I'm Dana Taylor. Taylor Wilson will be back tomorrow morning with another episode of The Excerpt.