Is college a scam? John Stossel (B.A., Princeton University) thinks so. But he chooses the wrong examples to make his point:
What do Michael Dell, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and Mark Cuban have in common?
They’re all college dropouts.
Richard Branson, Simon Cowell and Peter Jennings have in common?
They never went to college at all.But today all kids are told: To succeed, you must go to college.
Hillary Clinton tells students: “Graduates from four-year colleges earn nearly twice as much as high school graduates, an estimated $1 million more.”
We hear that from people who run colleges. And it’s true. But it leaves out some important facts
That’s why I say: For many people, college is a scam.
Stossel should know better than to base his argument on outliers who have been wildly successful in their fields. But let’s take a closer look at the examples he provides:
Michael Dell – In 1980, at the age of 15, Dell made $18,000 ($47,000 in 2010 dollars) selling newspaper subscriptions. In 1984, while a pre-med student at the University of Texas at Austin, Dell started a computer business in his dorm room. He dropped out of school after getting enough business—including state contracts—to work full-time.
Mark Zuckerberg – While still in high school, Zuckerberg took a graduate course in computer programming, started a company (Intelligent Media Group), and built an application called the Synapse Media Player. Both Microsoft and AOL tried to purchase Synapse and recruit him, but he chose instead to enroll at Harvard. Like Dell, Zuckerberg started his business out of his dorm. He took a semester off from Harvard but decided not to return when his site became the second largest online social networking site and the 10th most-trafficked site on the Internet.
Bill Gates – At age 17, Gates—a computer programming prodigy—formed a venture with Allen, called Traf-O-Data. He served as a congressional page in the U.S. House of Representatives before entering Harvard. After a year, Gates dropped out to form the company that would become Microsoft.
Mark Cuban – Cuban engaged in several entrepreneurial ventures before skipping his senior year of high school to become a full time student at the University of Pittsburgh. He later transferred to Indiana University where he graduated with a bachelor’s in business administration.
Richard Branson – In 1966, at the age of 16, Branson started a magazine. Four years later, he set up an audio record mail-order business. In 1971, he was arrested and charged for selling records in Virgin stores that had been declared export stock. He settled out-of-court with an agreement to repay the unpaid tax and a fine. His mother mortgaged the family home to help pay the settlement.
Simon Cowell – Cowell attended prep schools and Windsor Technical College. His career was launched when his father, a music industry executive, got him a job at the recording giant EMI Music Publishing.
Peter Jennings – At the age of 9, Jenning got a job as a host of a radio program on the CBC (where his father Charles was a prominent radio broadcaster). Jennings went to both the University of Ottawa and Carleton University before dropping out to re-join the CBC as host of a public-affairs program.
The key to success seems to be:
- Go into a field related to computers or entertainment (Dell, Zuckberg, Cuban, Gates, Branson, Cowell, Jennings)
- Go to college before dropping out (Dell, Gates, Zuckerberg, Cowell, Jennnings)
- Start a business while you are still in high school (Zuckerburg, Gates, Cuban, Branson).
- Start a wildly successful business while you are going to college (Dell, Gates, Zuckerberg)
- Have a parent that can help you break into the entertainment industry (Cowell, Jennings)
- Have a parent who can bail you out when your business is sued (Branson)
- Get a Bachelor’s degree in business (Cuban)
If a young person can meet all or most of these qualification, then I agree that they may not need a degree. But most young people are not like these outliers. Most young people will have difficulty getting the job they want even after going to college.
We need to avoid making the mistake of assuming every young person in America needs to go to college in order to be successful. They don’t. But we also need to avoid the opposite mistake of thinking that many young people would be just fine if they don’t go to college. They won’t. Let’s also stop trying to make every average kid in America think they have the innate capacity to be Zuckerbergs and Cubans. They don’t.
How about we try a different approach. Why don’t we get to know these kids as individuals, develop an honest assessment of their character and capabilities, think hard about what we should say, and only then give them advice that will affect them the rest of their lives. That might be a better method than giving them generically bad advice.
(Via: Outside the Beltway)
July 7th, 2011 | 3:10 pm
Nice words of sanity.
I think that trying to sell one solution to everyone is generally a bad idea. College can be great, but in general going deep into debt is not a good route. Beyond that piece of advice, I am not all that interested in prescribing others’ futures.
July 7th, 2011 | 4:20 pm
Thank you for this. I am a high school teacher, and every time I hear a conservative or libertarian tear down college, I want to invite them to my classroom and meet my students who are emphatically not going to college and then inquire of the pundits: “Do you think these students will make good citizens?”
July 7th, 2011 | 5:56 pm
Come on. Read the article. Stossel clearly is NOT “basing” his argument on the success of Dell, Gates, et al.
He’s simply using well-known examples of men who achieved success without a college degree as an entry point into his, very brief, argument that simply calls into question the conventional wisdom about contemporary higher education. Not to mention its cost.
He actually draws on two books written on this subject, and names them. Neither of which seem to be about the “outliers” or promote the myth that “you too can be Bill Gates if you don’t go to college.” Which is clearly a straw-man argument.
The two authors seem to be arguing that college education today doesn’t, and can’t, deliver value for the money students, and taxpayers, are investing in it.
And the question by “Mrs” shows the nature of the conventional wisdom around college degrees: that, without any evidence, a college degree automatically creates a “good citizen.”
For generations before college education became widely available and affordable, most citizens of the Republic (from what I can tell) lacked a college degree, possibly even a high school degree. Yet somehow we survived. Was that because of the college-educated elite?
July 7th, 2011 | 9:25 pm
I’ll throw in another “key,” that I learned from Malcolm Gladwell. I know for certain this applies to Gates, since Gates is the example he uses in “Outliers,” (note the name of the book) and I suspect it’s there for most of the others:
Have both a rare desire and a highly unusual opportunity to spend HUGE amounts of time outside school to develop a particular interest. In Gates’ case, it was access to a computer system that extremely few high school students were able to get near in those days, plus a desire to geek around for several hours each day, every day, learning to understand programming.
No matter “how bad you want it” by the time you’re 18-20, not every kid will have both the opportunity and the extreme desire at the right point in his life (generally, you have to start an outlier pursuit like this in the early teen years if not before, to see it come to fruition.)
July 7th, 2011 | 10:17 pm
Exept for the elites, people just don’t care. I’ve never heard anyone ask for higher taxes so the school can hire more guidance counselors, and spend more time on preparing teens for the choice of a career. Or even volunteering.
I agree tremendously with what you say. It’s just that many solutions need action, and it seems something about American culture specifically is hamstringing us from reacting collectively to do something about it.
July 7th, 2011 | 10:48 pm
There are lots of parallels between the let’s-get-everyone-to-go-to-college push and the let’s-get-everyone-to-buy-a-house push that blew up in all our faces so spectacularly. Just because the overall group of people who own houses tend to have, on the aggregate, desirable qualities and outcomes relative to those who do not, does NOT imply that home-ownership CAUSED those outcomes, or that it is necessarily a good thing to blindly push for increased home ownership, especially when the main tool for doing so is to make it easier for people to take on staggering amounts of debt. Same for college. For many people it is smart, for many others not so much.
July 8th, 2011 | 2:47 am
I’m inclined to agree with Mr. Carter. It really depends on the goals of the person. If one wishes to be a doctor, or a lawyer, well, of course one must go to college. But if one wishes to be a successful businessperson, then, perhaps a college education is not necessary. And, unless one wishes to go to Thomas Aquinas College, or St. John’s, or some of the other outstanding Liberal Arts colleges out there, sadly, one may not get a good liberal arts education, by going to a typical college. Of course, if one is sufficiently motivated, in college, to understand the rich repository of knowledge and critical thinking, that constitutes the liberal arts, one can do so, in any college, but one would have to spend vast amounts of money, taking elective courses to do so.
That is, in an average, community college, or even university, one can get a “degree” without ever taking a philosophy course, or even a history course. If one is motivated, to understand the liberal arts, one could do so, through “specializing” (ironic term) in a part of what constitutes the liberal arts, such as history, philosophy, literature, English, but it’s possible that, by specializing in, say, history, one may be deficient in philosophy, or English, for example. And to compensate, for this deficiency, one would have to go above what is required to get, say, the history degree, and spend extra money, to take the extra philosophy, English, classes, to complete one’s liberal education.
But if every college, had rigorous standards, that every student must adhere to, such as philosophy classes, history, literature, etc., everyone who graduated, regardless of subsequent specialization, could be liberally educated. But this is an argument for a different post, I don’t want to get to far off topic.
My central point is, for those who want a liberal education, a typical college, due to its tolerant elective class policy, may not be the best place, for someone who wants a liberal education, but doesn’t have the money to spend, taking extra classes.
One’s best bet, unless one wishes to be a doctor, lawyer, college professor, etc., for someone who wants to be liberally educated, may be self education.
July 8th, 2011 | 7:52 am
I completely agree with Joe here. I love how people take people like Bill Gates and act like they are representative of the entire population. Not everyone is capable of founding a billion dollar company.
July 8th, 2011 | 9:11 am
Jeremy: I don’t think that Mr.Stossel was acting like Bill Gates was “representative of the entire population”. Who on earth could claim that? He was, as J.W. cox said above, merely using Gates and others as examples, that challenge the conventional wisdom. Certainly, no one could seriously make the extrapolation that, because a handful of people who dropped out of college, went on to become multi-millionaires, therefore, all people, or most people could do so. The statistics obviously don’t reflect that.
July 8th, 2011 | 10:26 am
Stossel has come up with some lame editorials but this one takes the cake. If we want to drop names, how about Paris Hilton, Casey Anthony and Lindsay Lohan? Since John used males I will use famous females. What do they all have in common? They never even finished high school and all have been in trouble with the law. Matter of fact, most people in our penal system lack even a high school diploma! Education is almost always the answer. I bet for every one college drop out that has hit it big in this country there are a million that did not. It’s called use and abuse of statistics, John! Read the book some time!
July 8th, 2011 | 11:18 am
But Bret, he was using outliers with rare opportunities and built-in advantages to challenge the conventional wisdom that ordinary people need to go to college to be successful.
You don’t even have to make the claim “You can be like Bill Gates” for it to be weak — “Bill Gates didn’t have to go to college to be even moderately successful so you don’t have to either” still doesn’t stack up in light of the fact that Bill et al had opportunities and talents that not everyone has. In order to prove that college is *generally* not necessarily for *typical* people, you’d need to show that a fairly significant number of people from fairly typical backgrounds succeeded moderately or well without college. And that information may be out there — but that’s the argument to make, not the fact that a handful of exceptional people from unusual backgrounds have done it.
July 8th, 2011 | 11:53 am
Not every person needs to go to college and they need to know the odds of a decent paying job by the degree they get. A degree in Art History, English, Literature is definitely going to pay off as well as if you never did go in the first place. To tell students that any degree from a 4 year college is a road to success is as fraudulent as claiming that if you are good at sports you will be set for life in the Pros. There is a world of good trade schools, ideas, and relationships you can cultivate to be successful.
July 8th, 2011 | 11:57 am
I have no desire to brag, but I graduated from a rather prestigious college.
I had a lot of fun there. And that college required me to read a lot of great books that I might never have picked up on my own. I don’t regret going there.
But as a practical matter, does ANYTHING I learned there come in handy at my current high-tech job? No! I’m glad I got to read Plato, Maimonides and Rabelais, but the truth is, a high school grad who took a few programming courses at a community college would have been about as qualified to do my job as I am!
Now, that high school grad probably wouldn’t have been given a chance to interview for my job, because my employer required a college degree. Many employers require applicants to hold college degrees. But I can tell you categorically that my college education was wholly irrelevant to my duties. And the same is true in MOST careers!
In general, a college degree is merely a signal to employers that an applicant is literate and is capable of showing up for class and doing basic tasks. A high school diploma SHOULD give the same kind of signal, but unfortunately, it doesn’t any more.
In some fields, higher education is a must (a doctor MUST know biochemistry, an engineer MUST know calculus, et al.) In others, it means little. Is a sociology major from UCLA really any more qualified to get a credit analyst trainee job at Bank of America than a high school grad who’s worked as a teller for 4 years? Is a psychology major from Ohio state notably more qualified for a junior executive at Procter & Gamble thana high school grad who’s been manager at a Taco Bell for 4 years?
I don’t see how. And considering how much a college education now costs (heck, tuition at the Catholic elementary school my son went to was higher than the tuition I paid at my Ivy League college a generation ago), I’m NOT sure it’s worth the investment, except for people planning to enter a handful of very specific fields.
July 8th, 2011 | 12:17 pm
“Not every person needs to go to college and they need to know the odds of a decent paying job by the degree they get.”
Unquestionably true, and I’m a big advocate for that position. But don’t exclude the middle — “not every person needs to go to college” is not the answer to the question “is college necessary for many/most people?”
July 8th, 2011 | 12:23 pm
From the brief biographical profiles Joe provided, one thing is very clear….these ‘outliers’ needed no advice either from people like Joe Carter or John Stossel. So why worry about giving advice to those who need no advice from you? And why use examples of people who don’t need advice to craft advice to people who DO need advice!!!!
Second, it’s kind of ironic but a lot of the stuff these people did basically lowered the opportunities for non-college grads while expanding them for college grads. Maybe Bill Gates was a college drop out but on average Microsoft employes more degreed people than non-degreed. Contrast this to, say, Henry Ford or Rockerfeller….their companies probably created more jobs for non-degreed people.
Third, this is kind of related to the second point….the premium on a college degree has increased over time. Going back to the 60′s, 70′s and even 80′s ignores the point that the difference in expected earnings between those with and those without college degrees was narrower back then. Now its wider. If you’re going to advise kids….a good starting point is to note that the present age is not 1966 or 1976 or even 1986 but 2011. If you fail to do this, trust me they will pick up on it.
July 8th, 2011 | 1:54 pm
Unquestionably true, and I’m a big advocate for that position. But don’t exclude the middle — “not every person needs to go to college” is not the answer to the question “is college necessary for many/most people?”
It’s also helpful here to remember Stephen Jay Gould’s insight that there “is no Average Average person”….the ‘average’ college degree adds $10-$30K per year to your income. But the average is just an average. The average American likes hamburgers and ice cream but a hamburger with a bun made out of ice cream won’t work. If you’ve already started several businesses, if you’re also in negotiations with Google for them to purchase one or more of them, then maybe you don’t need an MBA. On the other hand if you’ve spent your High School years mastering multiple Xbox games and little else, noting simply that Bill Gates didn’t finish college is not likely to be a good ‘average’ for you to base your plans on.
July 8th, 2011 | 2:21 pm
It used to be that to get a decent job you needed a high school education. That is still true today, except that you need to go to college to get one.
There is also a distinction between a college degree and a college education. We live in an age of credentialism because no one wants to take a chance on judging character. Easier to go with an objective “college degree… Check!”
To all the folks with “no degree + success” and the rebuttal “no degree + failure,” we may as well add all those with “degree + failure,” like the Unabomber, who taught mathematics at Berkeley.
It also might depend on what the degree is in, as an earlier commenter pointed out.
July 8th, 2011 | 6:17 pm
I’m skeptical that we are in an ‘age of credentialism’. We are in an age where companies think nothing of offshoring entire offices to areas with cheaper labor like India and China. Are companies really so star struck by ‘credentials’ that they will simply insist on only hiring college grads for an extra $20K a year for jobs that good high school grads can and would happily take for less?
July 9th, 2011 | 3:10 am
Pentemom: You make a good point. I did say that, I’m inclined to agree with Mr. Carter’s assessment, of Stossal’s point. I was essentially challanging Jeremy’s claim that, as Jeremy put it, “I love how people take people like Bill Gates ans act like they’re represenative of the entire population”. Stossal wasn’t doing that.
but your point is well taken, clearly no one can claim that, because bill Gates, or Peter Jennings, or I’ll add Rush Limbaugh (Limbaugh dropped out of college after a year, I think), one coukld argue that, a substantial portion of the population should expect the same positive results as these men.
In general, one should at least give college a try. Of course, as Mr. Carter pointed out, one must, assess everyone as individuals, and give them advice on the basis of their strengths and weaknesses.
We all have particular gifts, and for some, these gifts may not be fully developed in college.
But is college essential for pragmatic, economic success? No, but it helps. Is it essential for intellectual success? No, but it helps. These two aspects of success should always be kept in mind. I think Stossal may have been referring to purely econimic success. He has a point, as long as people don’t read too much into it. I think young adults are probably smart enough, in general, to not make the extrapolation that his advice would necessarily apply to them. My point, in my previous comments was, college could be a hinderance to aqcuiring a sufficient liberal arts education, because of the soft, leinent, elective class policy of many schools.
This is unfortunate. In the ninteenth century, in the US, as a great article, in the WISON QUARTERLY, Greek and Latin, were part of University education. http://www.wilsonquarterly.com/article.cfm?aid=1808
July 9th, 2011 | 3:17 am
I’m sorry for the spelling in my preceding comments. I was trying to do too many things at once, and too fast, and I forgot to spell check. The irony of this, in an article on education, is amusing ;-)
July 11th, 2011 | 6:36 am
If people who don’t go to college earn less, that has to negatively affect the economy. Maybe our government could outlaw not going to college and fine the miscreants to help pay for the lost unearned money. Like healthcare.
Seriously, though, it does seem over-priced.
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