Competition in College

Pri­vate uni­ver­si­ties and state schools now face a new player in the mar­ket:

Florida leads the way, with 14 com­mu­nity col­leges autho­rized to offer bachelor’s degrees, and 12 already doing so, in fields as var­ied as fire safety man­age­ment and vet­eri­nary tech­nol­ogy. But nation­wide, 17 states, includ­ing Nevada, Texas and Wash­ing­ton, have allowed com­mu­nity col­leges to award associate’s and bachelor’s degrees, and in some, the com­mu­nity col­leges have become four-year insti­tu­tions. Oth­ers states are con­sid­er­ing com­mu­nity col­lege baccalaureates.

In most cases, the expand­ing com­mu­nity col­leges argue that they are ful­fill­ing a need, pro­vid­ing four-year degrees to work­ing peo­ple who often lack the money or the time to travel to a uni­ver­sity. But some of those uni­ver­si­ties are fight­ing back, say­ing the com­mu­nity col­leges are involved in “mis­sion creep” that may dis­tract them from their tra­di­tional mis­sion and lead to watered-down bachelor’s degrees.

For­get the “tra­di­tional mis­sion” of com­mu­nity col­leges ver­sus that of uni­ver­si­ties. The four-year insti­tu­tions are telling the New York Times, in code lan­guage, that com­mu­nity col­leges are for 1.) “Losers” who could not suc­ceed in high school and are try­ing reform their lives; and 2.) Poor, uncon­nected peo­ple who should not be able to afford a qual­ity edu­ca­tion. The uni­ver­si­ties want the best and the brightest.

For­get the clas­sism. I am tak­ing strictly about busi­ness. In today’s edu­ca­tional and eco­nomic cli­mate, tra­di­tional col­leges are offer­ing over­priced degrees whose util­ity is increas­ingly dubi­ous and likely not worth the cost. Although study­ing Plato, Russ­ian lit­er­a­ture, and polit­i­cal sci­ence in Africa is impor­tant to cre­ate and main­tain a func­tion­ing, lit­er­ate soci­ety, it is no longer worth­while to spend more than $212,000 to achieve that goal. (Go to the library.) After all, the return on a bachelor’s degree is increas­ingly not as much as adver­tised. (The study to which I have linked seems to aver­age salaries from all four-year degrees. I would be inter­ested in see­ing data from liberal-arts majors ver­sus those in fields like engi­neer­ing and com­puter sci­ence. Besides, the cal­cu­la­tions do not take inter­est pay­ments on stu­dent loans into account as well.)

The fact of the mat­ter is that com­mu­nity col­leges offer cheap, prac­ti­cal degrees — whether they are two-year or four-year ones. Uni­ver­si­ties know this, and they are scared because they will increas­ingly be unable to com­pete. It is sad to know that fewer peo­ple will be able to study the clas­sics that under­pin much of West­ern civ­i­liza­tion, but the prac­ti­cal real­ity is that the United States needs to reform its work­force and edu­ca­tion sys­tem to com­pete in a glob­al­ized world. But to quote Matt Damon’s char­ac­ter in “Good Will Hunt­ing,” lib­er­als arts can be learned for a few late-fee charges at the local library.