College is expensive and getting
more so every year. Since most families don’t have tens of thousands of dollars
lying around, the government has responded with ever-more-generous student loan
programs.
First there were the loans
themselves, with interest subsidized while you’re in school. Then, when that
proved inadequate, we instituted income-based repayment, allowing students to
cap their payments at a percentage of their discretionary income (stretching
out the loan, and getting forgiveness on any balance remaining after 25 years).
Then, since that wasn’t quite enough, we made the terms more generous. Now the
Obama administration has announced that it’s making 5 million more people
eligible for the program.
You know what they say about
doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. This
is certifiable. College is too expensive, so have the government make it easier
to finance -- then keep shifting more and more of the cost burden to the
government, without doing anything about the underlying cost inflation that is
making it necessary for government to get into the finance business.
Obviously, this can’t go on
indefinitely. The income-based-repayment programs are relatively new, so the
government hasn’t yet been handed the bill for the loan forgiveness that will
be necessary as we give people payment rates that are often less than the
interest on the loan. But when the government gets that bill, people are going
to notice that this is a costly business.
Over decades, the government has
restructured the educational system to make it look more like the health-care
system, with the costs paid by third parties while the service is consumed by
individuals who have no incentive to think about price. The effects are
predictable for both.
There is actually some economic
logic to encouraging people to borrow money for school. Education is an
investment in human capital, and expensive capital goods are often financed.
Doing so makes everyone better off: The lender gets a tidy return, and because
the borrowers increase their ability to make money, they can make their
interest payments and still be richer than they would have been if they’d
painstakingly saved up the money for 10 or 20 years before making the
investment.
But this logic gets shakier when
you look at our nation’s system of education. If I invest in an advanced piece
of industrial equipment to make, say, delicious fried apple pies, I am actually
more productive than I would be if I tried to make them with a pot on the
stove. This surplus generates the additional income with which to repay the
loan. Along the way, the whole economy gets a little bit more productive -- a
lot more productive, when you repeat this experience millions of times. That is
essentially the history of the last 200 years.
Does college actually make people
much more economically productive? Yes, yes, I know: People who go to college
earn substantially more than people who don’t, and that earnings premium has
been increasing in recent decades. But what, exactly, do they learn in college
that makes them so much more productive? In certain technical professions, the
answer is obvious; engineers and nurses do need to master the rudiments of
their trade before they are unleashed on an unsuspecting public.
But that doesn’t describe the
whole higher educational system. It doesn’t even seem to describe the majority
of college degrees. Administrators defending the value of degrees in “business”
or liberal arts rely on nebulous claims that they are teaching students “how to
think.” However, they provide little objective evidence that these programs
impart thinking skills worth tens of thousands of dollars.
There’s at least some evidence
that a lot of the benefit of a college degree comes not from what you learn in
college, but from signaling to employers that you are the kind of
conscientious, hardworking student who can get into college and stick with it
long enough to get a degree. In other words, much of what we do in school is
not learn anything in particular, but obtain a credential that certifies us as
good potential employees.
As an individual, it’s still
perfectly rational to borrow money to invest in that credential, considering
the sizeable income bonuses it confers. But public policy has to look at the
system, not just what might benefit a particular individual. And at a system
level, helping people borrow money to obtain a credential is crazy. A
credential doesn’t increase anyone’s productivity; it just determines the
distribution of better-paying jobs. The net economic benefit is zero.
Now, ideally a degree is not just
a credential, so the productivity benefits of a diploma are probably greater
than zero. But if we could see that much of the economic benefit of college is
the credential, rather than the education, would we still pour vast sums of
money into higher education?
The payoff from college is not
just economic, of course. Regardless of whether the experience or the diploma
makes you more productive or raises your income, you ideally left college a
better citizen, leading a richer mental life. But let's get back to that public
policy question. If someone proposed a program to help people be better
citizens leading richer mental lives, you probably wouldn’t be prepared to
spend billions of dollars on it, nor would you encourage individuals to take on
crippling debt to pay for it.
The federal government now has $1
trillion worth of student
loan in its portfolio, a substantial portion of
which will be forgiven entirely or in part. But almost no one even dares to ask
what we’re getting for all this money. The economic and social benefits of
education are a political given, as axiomatic as mother-love or the speed of
light. Periodically, people complain about the cost, and ask whether we’re
getting value for our money -- but how can we figure out the answer to that
when we’re not even clear on what it is we’re supposed to be getting?
It’s hardly surprising, then,
that the only policy we’ve been able to come up with is bigger subsidies.
Politicians don’t know much about making people richer, smarter or better
citizens. But they’re pretty good at writing checks.
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