The Atlantic: The False Binary in Higher Ed
Excerpt from article by Ben Wildavsky in The Atlantic
For much of the past century, America believed that college was essential to upward mobility. A four-year degree has long been a symbol of the American dream, seen as away to ensure that millions of students could be better off than their parents and grandparents. Today, however, that faith is plummeting. A Gallup poll earlier this year found that Americans’ confidence in higher education has fallen to a new low of 36percent, down from 57 percent in 2015. Although a record share of Americans had a bachelor’s degree as of 2021, degree skepticism and pandemic-related disruptions led undergraduate enrollment to drop 8 percent from 2019 to 2022.
This pessimism is understandable. The earnings advantage afforded by a bachelor’s degree, although still sizable, has leveled off in the past15 years while tuition has continued to rise. And according to the National Student Clearinghouse, 40 million Americans have enrolled in college but haven’t ultimately graduated—an all-time high. As a result, college has left many students in debt, without a degree to help them get out of it. In response, many Americans have adopted an either/or approach to higher education, one that pits abstract academics against career preparation. Some prospective students are giving up on traditional degrees altogether, favoring instead cheaper, shorter, career-focused credentials. This fall, for example, a Clearinghouse analysis found that enrollment in nondegree-certificate programsrose nearly 10 percent compared with last year.
The job market rewards this combination. Using a database of hundreds of millions of online job postings, résumés, and social profiles, the labor-market-analytics company Burning Glass Technologies has documented the rise of “hybrid jobs,” which demand a blend of technical skills and creative thinking. The company (now rebranded as Lightcast) showed that hybrid jobs pay more than those that require a narrower set of skills. They are “the jobs that are growing the fastest, that are of highest value,” Matt Sigelman, Lightcast’s chair and one of the authors of the report, told me. That’s why liberal-arts degrees, according to Sigelman, have “twice as much value when combined with some specific technical skills.”