Dissent: College Is Worth It — But Not Every College.

One of the great privileges of attending Harvard is that you can spend four years studying philosophy, or classics, or the history of art. When graduation comes around, there’s a good chance you’ll find yourself at a consulting firm anyway.

For most Americans, college is a considerably riskier investment. Whether it pays off can determine their financial security for decades to come.

Today, the Editorial Board encourages prospective students to look beyond graduate earnings and pursue their intellectual interests. We share the Board’s belief that education has intrinsic value. But there’s a difference between believing that education is valuable and believing that every college provides a valuable education. As such, we dissent.

For decades, Americans have been told that college is the surest pathway to economic prosperity. Indeed, between 1980 and 2000, the average wage premium earned by college graduates nearly doubled, from around 39 to 79 percent. The response seemed obvious: Send more people to college. Federal aid expanded, enrollment climbed, and for-profit colleges proliferated.

But somewhere along the way, we confused getting students into college with giving them an education worth paying for.

For too many students, that education never paid off. For-profit colleges disproportionately enroll low-income and disadvantaged Americans, promising them a path to economic security. Yet their students experience lower earnings, higher unemployment, and substantially higher student loan default rates than comparable students at public and nonprofit institutions.

Nor is this merely a problem with for-profit colleges. Recent research finds that, by 2000, the college wage premium for students from the wealthiest third of families was twice that for students from the poorest third. Differences in university resources, enrollment in community and for-profit colleges, and choice of major explain much of the divide. Unequal returns to higher education may now account for as much as a quarter of persistent economic advantage across generations.

Of course, college remains an excellent investment for many students. But the average wage premium obscures enormous differences between institutions — differences that can determine whether college is a ticket to the middle class or an expensive mistake.

Nor does restricting aid to poorly performing colleges necessarily mean denying students an education. When the federal government sanctioned for-profit colleges with high student-loan default rates in the 1990s, enrollment at those institutions fell by 68 percent. Yet 60 to 70 percent of those losses were offset by increased enrollment at community colleges, where students were less likely to default on their loans. Overall enrollment in affected markets fell by just 2 percent.

This is why accountability matters. Prospective students can’t always distinguish worthwhile educational opportunities from costly miscalculations. Whether or not students will benefit, colleges have powerful financial incentives to persuade them to enroll. Subsidizing institutions without sufficient regard to outcomes risks financing the very practices that leave students worse off. Public support for education is justified by its enormous private and social benefits; those benefits hardly justify keeping every college in business.

None of this means the Education Department’s new rule is beyond reproach. Under the regulations finalized this summer, undergraduate programs whose graduates consistently earn less than typical high school graduates risk losing access to federal loans, and persistent failure can jeopardize Pell Grants.

The Board is right that small samples can mislead, that early-career earnings may understate eventual returns, and that graduates’ incomes reflect more than the value of their degrees. Nor should we pretend a social worker’s contribution to society can be measured by their paycheck. Whether the Department’s particular threshold adequately distinguishes good programs from bad ones is a separate question.

But these objections don’t render earnings irrelevant. The government must decide which institutions deserve taxpayer support, and it cannot demand certainty before making that decision.

The Board urges students to pursue their own definitions of success, whether in scholarship, public service, teaching, or elsewhere. Fair enough. But for students borrowing thousands of dollars in pursuit of economic opportunity, financial security may be central to that definition. Encouraging them to discount earnings data isn’t necessarily empowering them to follow their passions. It may simply make it harder to judge whether those passions are financially sustainable.

Students deserve more than the opportunity to go to college. They deserve an education worth going to college for.

Zakiriya H. Gladney ’27, a Crimson Editorial Chair, is a double concentrator in Statistics and Social Studies in Dunster House. Benjamin Isaac ’27, an Associate Editorial Editor, is a double concentrator in Government and Economics in Eliot House.

Dissenting Opinions: Occasionally, The Crimson Editorial Board is divided about the opinion we express in a staff editorial. In these cases, dissenting board members have the opportunity to express their opposition to staff opinion.