Harvard Shouldn’t Be So Important

Over the last decade, the American public has lost faith in the worth of a traditional college education.

In 2013, 74 percent of young adults said that a college education is “very important.” By 2019, this number had fallen to 41 percent. Today, only about a third of Americans express significant confidence in higher education. Many other polls paint the same dreary picture.

College used to represent a guarantee of financial prosperity and social mobility. Now, it’s a gamble.

For the uber-wealthy — or for the select few that attend elite colleges with the resources to offer comprehensive need-based financial aid — the odds of economic success look good. But for everyone else, rising tuition costs and the impending threat of student loan debt pose serious challenges.

Since 1992, tuition at four-year public universities is estimated to have doubled. Even after financial aid, the average annual cost of a four-year public university degree now stands at approximately $19,000, and private universities at $33,000.

To pay for such degrees, many American students must resort to borrowing costly student loans. Factoring in interest rates, most of these students end up owing more than they initially borrowed.

As a result, for many young people, it now seems fiscally irresponsible to pursue a degree. This seems to be a primary driver of the rising disillusionment with higher education: It has become significantly more unattainable for the average American.

For decades, America has over-invested its resources, both public and private, in a handful of burnished institutions like Harvard. Meanwhile, options better tailored to generate social mobility and prepare people for a changing economy have been neglected.

The solution? Harvard shouldn’t be so important. We need to refocus our efforts on institutions that can touch more than a small fraction of the population.

Namely, we continue to believe in the transformative power of community colleges and desire they be made more accessible. In the same measure and for similar reasons, we now express our staunch support for vocational programs and public higher education in general.

America’s underinvestment in skill-focused higher education has sustained a false and damaging fiction: that vocational programs are in some way a less worthy, less serious, less valid option than a liberal arts education. This is elitist, and it does a profound disservice to many people for whom learning a specific trade is the desired next step.

We reject the idea that a liberal arts tertiary education is superior to other forms of post-secondary education, such as community colleges, trade schools, job training, and apprenticeships.

Institutions beyond four-year degree programs consistently provide professional pathways to students who don’t want to go to college, or for whom it’s inaccessible. An education system that only prioritizes liberal arts institutions will tend to leave behind people on less-traditional pathways, including single parents, older adults, and veterans.

To be clear, we support intellectual exploration for all, and we believe that whether you attend a four-year liberal arts institution, a trade school, or no post-secondary institution at all, you can engage thoughtfully with a broad range of ideas. That does not, however, mean you should be shoehorned into committing four years and tens of thousands of dollars to do so.

Further, we do not believe that investing in a diversity of good, affordable options for public education must in any way harm Harvard or its peer institutions.

Higher education isn’t zero-sum. Harvard needs to be less important in the sense that the economic stakes of admission should not be so high and that policymakers should not be so focused on it. It should remain important in the sense that it should maintain its top-quality research, innovation, and intellectual discourse.

Still, the reality is clear: Elite liberal arts institutions like Harvard have historically served the wealthy, and disproportionately continue to do so. It is a naked inequity that our country neglects public education to pour resources into schools that serve a select, privileged few. America would do much more good for many more people if it focused its energies on creating a genuinely strong system of public education.

So long as that continues, institutions like ours must work to increase their socioeconomic diversity, and those with large numbers of student borrowers should push for federal loan forgiveness. Investment in public education should not substitute for improving accessibility at elite private schools, and vice versa.

Ultimately, the value of the system of post-secondary education derives in part from one’s ability to choose among different sorts of institutions. Until all options — public and private — are truly accessible, this choice will remain an illusion.

Bringing back choice in postsecondary education for American citizens will require the combined efforts of both the government and private institutions. No less than the future of higher education is at stake.

This staff editorial solely represents the majority view of The Crimson Editorial Board. It is the product of discussions at regular Editorial Board meetings. In order to ensure the impartiality of our journalism, Crimson editors who choose to opine and vote at these meetings are not involved in the reporting of articles on similar topics.

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