OPINION: New research underscores need to reimagine some college programs
New research from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York finds college “may not be worth it” for about a “quarter of college graduates.”
But the results also show the importance of policymakers thinking creatively about how to train the workforce for important jobs at a lower cost.
Economists Jaison Abel and Richard Deitz found “the economic benefits of a college degree still far outweigh the costs for the typical graduate, with a healthy and consistent return of 12 to 13 percent over the past few decades.”
“But there are many circumstances under which college graduates do not earn such a high return,” the pair wrote.
Valuable degrees include business, engineering, and economics, the researchers found. This should be no surprise.
Meanwhile, the lower-paying degrees include education, religion, and social services.
However, the simple answer is not to just tell everyone to study engineering and economics. Rather, the problem to address is how to train people in important fields such as social work, education, and theology at a more affordable cost.
We do need teachers, and we do need theologians, and we do need social workers. In some ways, the colleges that offer these programs may be constrained by government regulations.
There might be more affordable ways to train teachers that would align the costs more closely with their projected salaries. But if most teachers must have a four-year degree, they are going to pay the same as a student studying engineering. But these degrees have vastly different payoffs.
The same could be said for social work, which generally requires at least a bachelor’s degree along with supervised training. But there is a pay ceiling for social work, and no one, except crooks, is going to make $250,000 a year as a social worker.
Some solutions might include allowing students to obtain an associate’s degree and then earn the equivalent of a bachelor’s degree through an apprenticeship model. Social work seems like a job, as the name implies, that is learned through interacting with people and doing the job, not simply learning from a book. Of course, book learning can play a role in learning how welfare systems work, learning about mental illnesses, and providing other important baseline knowledge.
The same could be said for teaching. The field might benefit from a shift to focusing more on an apprenticeship model and less on classroom learning, as ironic as that would be.
Aspiring teachers already need to do student teaching, so perhaps their learning could be combined with a paid job as a teacher’s aide.
Students will benefit from creative ways to ensure they are properly trained for their jobs at a reasonable cost, relative to the expected return on investment.
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IMAGE CAPTION AND CREDIT: A professor lectures to a small college class; Yan Krukau/Pexels