Two new studies offer emphatic answers to much-discussed questions about higher education: Yes, a college degree is worth it, but yes, it’s the middle-class that’s getting particularly squeezed with student debt in the pursuit of one.
Both studies make persuasive cases, though each could be misunderstood without important context. The first, released last week by the Lumina Foundation and Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce, seems to thoroughly demolish the idea that the Great Recession diminished the value of a college degree. Yes, recent college grads have struggled more than usual to find jobs matching their training. But overall, even as unemployment was rising past 10 percent, the authors found the economy actually added 200,000 jobs for workers with a bachelor’s degree. Since the recovery began, it’s created 2 million more.
Just as there wasn’t really a recession, at least in terms of job creation, for those with college degrees, there hasn’t been a recovery for those without them. Nearly 6 million high-school-only jobs have been lost since the downturn began, and they are still declining even in the recovery.
That recovery may well never come if you have no college at all (though people with some college have done reasonably well of late).
“This is the clearest information that we have seen to date about the advantage of having college-level skills in the employment market,” said Lumina’s president and CEO Jamie Merisotis. “Since the recovery started two years ago we’ve seen a real acceleration. The gap between those with a college credential and those without one is growing.”
Overall, the number of jobs for people with at least some college is growing at a healthy 4 percent annually. But the growth rate for high school-only jobs is zero and those jobs remain 10 percent below their pre-recession levels.
Still, there is another variable needed to answer the question, “Is college worth it?” That’s the cost of college, and that has been rising rapidly.
On average, the answer is pretty clear: A degree is worth it, to the tune of $1.3 million in additional lifetime earnings, a very good return on even an expensive degree.
The second study, being presented Monday at the American Sociological Association’s annual meeting in Denver, highlights the particular burden of growing student debt on middle-class families, who may be too well off to qualify for financial aid like Pell Grants that target students from the poorest families.
In the study, University of Wisconsin demographer Jason Houle finds students from middle-income families rack up more student loan debt on average than others: not only students from high-income families — no surprise — but also than those from low-income families.
The class of 2016
• Having grown up with MP3s and iPods, they never listen to music on the car radio and really have no use for radio at all.
• A significant percentage of them will enter college already displaying some hearing loss.
• They have lived in an era of instant stardom and self-proclaimed celebrities.
• For most of their lives, maintaining relations between the U.S. and the rest of the world has been a woman’s job in the State Department.
• They can’t picture people actually carrying luggage through airports rather than rolling it.
• Probably the most tribal generation in history, they despise being separated from contact with their similar-aged friends.
• Mr. Burns has replaced J.R. Ewing as the most-shot-at man on American television.
