Read Matt Yglesias on the value of college, and the David Leonhardt column he links to. For all of our disagreements, I’ll continue to say: when Yglesias gets it right, I do think he’s as good as there is. (And when he’s wrong, I think he’s usually catastrophically wrong, but you knew I felt that way.)
Since the vogue for “college isn’t worth it” articles and blog post appears to be resistant to logic, argument, and evidence, and shows no sign of abating, I’d like to give you a little advice for assessing them. Note that almost universally– in fact without exception as far as the ones I’ve read, and I’ve read a lot– these articles are written by people who went to college. And! I know that because they continue to make that information publicly available, in the same space as their arguments against going to college! I think that there’s a tension there. Why, if a college degree is worthless, do those who argue such still find it necessary to announce their credentials, either in a bio attached to their argument, or (as is common) in the text of the piece itself? It is not difficult to find the value added in a self-contained argument posted online. You can read the argument and decide if it has value for itself. In other words, the value is easier to gauge than that of a bridge or a prescription or a piece of software code, the creation of all of which usually requires higher education and credentials. Yet even in this context, where the quality of the work in question is immediate and fairly obvious, those crafting it find it necessary to announce their credentials, both to the audience of their pieces and the editors that commission them. I would argue that all three sides– the authors, the editors, the audiences– find easy access to this information non-trivial and valuable.
So I would simply say that you should at your most generous take such pieces with a grain of salt, and at your least generous, skip reading them altogether. If you’re reading a piece where someone at once announces that they attended the Iowa Writers Workshop and have an MFA, and they claim that such degrees are irrelevant and unnecessary, it is perfectly rational to find the author’s credibility lacking.