The Sociological Imagination

WHAT ARE THE TRUE COSTS AND RETURNS OF COLLEGE?

Now that you are thinking like a sociologist, let’s compare the true cost of going to college for four or five years to calling the whole thing off and taking a full-time job right after high school. First, there is the tuition to consider. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that you are paying $10,116 per year for tuition (Powell & Kerr, 2019). That’s a lot less than what most private four-year colleges cost, but about average for in-state tuition at a state school.

Using a standard formula to adjust for inflation and bring future amounts into current dollars, we can determine that paying out $10,116 this year and slightly higher amounts over the next three years (assuming a 3.3 percent annual rise in tuition and a corresponding discount rate) is equivalent to paying about $40,500 in one lump sum today; this would be the direct cost of attending college. Indirect costs—so-called opportunity costs—exist as well, such as the costs associated with the amount of time you are devoting to school. Taking into account the typical wage for a high-school graduate, we can calculate that if you worked full-time instead of going to college, you would make $30,000 this year. Thus we find that the present value of the total wages lost over the next four years by choosing full-time school over full-time work is about $144,000. Add these opportunity costs to the direct costs of tuition, and we get $184,500.

Next we need to calculate the “returns to schooling.” For the sake of simplicity, we will regard the $56,000 annual earnings figure for recent college graduates as fixed for the first 10 years past college graduation. We will use a higher estimate for annual earnings after that, to take into account the fact that mid-career workers make more. But remember, those who start working right out of high school begin earning about five years earlier than those who spend that time in college (the average time it takes to complete a bachelor’s degree at a public university is 5.2 years [Shapiro et al., 2016]). Assuming you retire at age 65, you will have worked 42 years (high-school grads will be in the workforce for 47 years because of that 5-year head start). However, given your higher average earnings per year of work, when we compare your lifetime earnings to the lifetime earnings of someone who has only a high-school education, we find that with a college degree you will make about $1,500,000 more than someone who went straight to work after high school (Figure 1.1). On top of this substantial financial return to schooling, research also shows that earning a high-school and/or college degree makes us healthier and less likely to engage in unhealthy behaviors like smoking, even after accounting for other factors like income (Heckman et al., 2016).

But wait a minute: How do we know for sure that college really mattered in the equation? Individuals who finish college might earn more because they actually learned something and obtained a degree, or—a big OR—they might earn more regardless of the college experience because people who stay in school (1) are innately smarter, (2) know how to work the system, (3) come from wealthier families, (4) can delay gratification, (5) are more efficient at managing their time, or (6) all of the above—take your pick. In other words, State U. graduates might not have needed to go to college to earn higher wages; they might have been successful anyway.

Maybe, then, the success stories of Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, Lady Gaga, and other college dropouts don’t cut against the grain so sharply after all. Maybe they were the savvy ones: Convinced of their ability to make it on their own, thanks to the social cues they received (including the fact that they had been admitted to college), they decided that they wouldn’t wait four years to try to achieve success. They opted to just go for it right then and there. College’s “value added,” they might have concluded, was marginal at best.

Figure 1.1 Returns to Schooling

GETTING THAT "PIECE OF PAPER"

Even if college turns out to matter in the end, does it make a difference because of the learning that takes place there or because of our credentialist society that it aids and abets? The answer to this question has enormous implications for what education means in our society. Imagine, for example, a society in which people become doctors not by doing well on the SATs, going to college, taking premed courses, acing the MCATs, and then spending more time in the classroom. Instead, the route to becoming a doctor—among the most prestigious and highly paid occupations in our society—starts with emptying bedpans as a nurse’s aide and working your way up through the ranks of registered nurse, apprentice physician, and so forth; finally, after years of on-the-job training, you achieve the title of doctor. Social theorist Randall Collins has proposed just such a medical education system in the controversial The Credential Society: A Historical Sociology of Education and Stratification (1979), which argues that the expansion of higher education has merely resulted in a ratcheting up of credentialism and expenditures on formal education rather than reflecting any true societal need for more formal education or opening up opportunities to more people.

If Collins is correct and credentials are what matter most, then isn’t there a cheaper, faster way to get them? In fact, all you need are $29.95 and a little guts, and you can receive a diploma from one of the many online sites that promise either legitimate degrees from nonaccredited colleges or a faux college diploma from any school of your choosing. Thus why not save four years and lots of money and obtain your credentials immediately?

Obviously, universities have incentives to prevent such websites from undermining their exclusive authority over conferring degrees. They rely on a number of other social institutions, ranging from copyright law to magazines that publish rankings to protect their status. Despite universities’ interest in protecting their reputations, I had never had a university employer verify my education claims when applying to teach until 2015 when I moved to Princeton. Every other employer, including NYU, accepted my résumé without calling my graduate or undergraduate universities. NYU does check to make sure student applicants have completed high school, however. Are universities too lazy to care? Probably not.

There are strong informal mechanisms by which universities protect their status. First, there is the university’s alumni network. Potential employers rarely call a university’s registrar to make sure you graduated, but they will expect you to talk a bit about your college experience. If your interviewer is an alumnus/alumna or otherwise familiar with the institution, you might also be expected to talk about what dorm you lived in, reminisce about a particularly dramatic homecoming game, or gripe about an especially unreasonable professor. If you slip up on any of this information, suspicions will grow, and then people might call to check on your graduation status. Perhaps there are some good reasons not to opt for that $29.95 degree and to pay the costs of college after all.

On a more serious note, the role of credentialism in our society means that getting in—especially to a wealthy school with plenty of need-based aid available—can make a huge difference for lower-income students. I sat down with Asha Rangappa, the dean of admissions at Yale Law School (and former FBI agent), who explained that by the time students are old enough to apply to law school, middle-class and upper-class students have already been granted all sorts of opportunities that make them appear to be stronger candidates even if they do not have better moral character or a stronger aptitude for law than their less affluent counterparts in the same applicant pool:

I read anywhere from three thousand, four thousand applications a year, and I do a kind of character and personality assessment. I decide who gets in. . . . I think that there’s a meritocracy at the point where I’m doing it, but I think accessing the good opportunities that allow you to take advantage of the meritocracy is limited. I think that’s the problem, I think that’s what somebody like me in my position works very hard to correct for. When twenty-two to twenty-five years of someone’s life are behind them, it is too late to correct the disparity in access that really needed to have been corrected from like zero to five years, zero to ten years.

INTERVIEW WITH ASHA RANGAPPA

Do I think that people who have had access to more resources and opportunities and money are going to do better in the admissions process? Yeah. Because they’re just going to have the richer background. And [admissions counselors] have to be able to be in a position where [we] can afford to account for that and take the risk. (Conley, 2015a)

What’s more, law schools’ rankings in magazines like US News and World Report are impacted by the average LSAT scores of their incoming classes. Rangappa’s school, Yale, is so elite that it is able to maintain its ranking even if its average LSAT score drops a little. But for other schools, a drop in LSAT scores will cause their ranking to drop, leading to a decline in high-quality applicants and a further drop in rankings. From Rangappa’s perspective:

I’ve now read over ten years, over thirty thousand admission files. To me, the LSAT is one number, and I can look at the rest of the file. There may very well be somebody who has a crappy LSAT score, but . . . I can tell in the totality of the application that the applicant is going to be a better person at the school. I have the luxury of taking that person because it’s Yale Law School and the way the US News formula is created, we’re not going to suffer a consequence if our median LSAT drops one point.

Rangappa’s account shows that elite educational institutions perform a balancing act whereby they often seek to broaden the population who gains from the opportunities and status they provide while at the same time maintaining their own rank in the hierarchy of similar institutions. That is, even when such institutions do want to level the playing field, they themselves are trapped in a highly competitive environment that does not allow them to fully counteract preexisting inequalities. Social institutions thus have a tendency to reinforce existing social structures and the inequalities therein. College (and graduate school) is no exception.