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Discounting Education’s Value
By Anthony P. Carnevale, in the Chronicle of Higher Education (September 22, 2006)
In a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Anthony P. Carnevale challenges the “growing chorus of pundits, all with elite-college credentials, [who have] decided to prove that a college education may no longer be what’s best for other people’s children.” In suggesting that college education may not be as valuable today as it was in the past, Carnevale says, these liberal pundits risk “validating an elitist view that ‘not everybody needs to go to college’”—where “everybody” in fact means “the children of poor and minority families.”
Carnevale, who serves on AAC&U’s board of directors and works as a senior fellow at the National Center for Education and the Economy and as a nonresident fellow at the Education Sector, cites his own research on the economic benefits of education to make his case. “Those who want to claim that a college doesn’t pay are forced to highlight a few years of data to support overblown claims that a thirty-year trend of increasing college wages has come to a dead end,” says Carnevale; in fact, the wage advantage of a college degree has increased since the 1970s, and the best-paying jobs with the best benefits continue to go to those with college degrees. Moreover, Carnevale projects a 30 percent increase in new jobs for the college educated between 2002 and 2012.
Carnevale maintains that the debate over higher education’s value has as much to do with politics as statistics. Those who question the role of education “as the arbiter of economic opportunity” in the United States are right, he says, to identify continuing problems surrounding “issues like trade, unemployment, access to pensions and health care, immigration, race, and income dispersion.” But they are wrong in challenging the “only common ground that remains in the American political dialogue.” Educational systems need to be reformed to provide better access to those from poor and minority backgrounds, Carnevale concludes, but it is reckless to question the value of higher education itself.
The full article by Anthony Carnevale is available to subscribers at the Chronicle’s Web site.
AAC&U seeks to raise public awareness of the value of liberal education through its Liberal Education and America’s Promise (LEAP) campaign. As part of this campaign, AAC&U has collected speeches and articles and produced publications that serve as resources for campus leaders as they make the case for liberal education.
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