totally agree - not to mention attempting to decide on 30+ years of career at 18 years old involves significant uncertainty risk as well. all those hospitality management majors from last year and for the next couple years have lost out on upto 4 years of time plus whatever accompanying student debt.
my first job out of college was as a "financial analyst". my undergrad degree (finance) was largely not applicable - excel skills were about the only relevant experience. any 18 year old with a 2 month excel bootcamp and maybe 2 weeks of industry and department specific orientation could have done my job; meanwhile i was desperate and had no other offers so i took it making 50k per year with my shiny new 175k degree.
this sort of reads as self re-assurement for his son's path; the author is a Harvard professor and I assume daily interaction in academia all revolves around how great and virtuous higher ed is yet he's bucked the trend.
perhaps if he truly feels that way he could leave academia and cease perpetuating the myth?
imo calling it an "investment" is part of the problem. its a pure sunk cost and not an asset.
People call it an investment because they think: I put something in it with the goal of getting more out of it in total.
They don't see it as finance terminology and the concept of the word investment in the context of others like 'sunk cost' and 'asset' holds very little specific meaning in that case.
Ironically that is a 'problem' you can 'fix' by putting people in college and teaching them basic accounting.
You'd fix it by banning non-dischargeable loans (and potentially making Universities guarantee the loans so they're actually responsible for the candidates they shit out without prospects).
It's incredibly predatory to lure people who by definition don't know that much about the world yet (let alone finance) to take on six figures of debt for something that the investors know in a lot of cases won't pay for itself. It's usury. As an outsider, the fact the US allows it reeks of political corruption.
id argue that with an investment you can compare like to like alternatives and can use a greater degree of objectivity.
there are far more variables to consider in higher ed (student loan debt, opportunity cost of time, unemployment, alternative education experiences, etc) so looking at it as an outflow of cash with a predictable return is misleading at best.
no college has a monopoly on information and there is no proprietary info gained (other than network from elite schools). in a sense the knowledge component of a degree can only approach a value of zero as time goes on. the experience aspect is of course subjective and very important to some.
graduated from there. totally agree with what's in that article. at 18 I was swept away by the "allure" of their rapid ascent and aggressive re-development of campus (which has continued to this day) and went there, despite the insane cost.
faculty were generally pleasant to interact with, the education was probably average. job prospects were mediocre - alot of competition in boston and NU is in a lower tier, comparatively.
as a measure of quality, based on my experience, that ranking is worthless.
my first job out of college was as a "financial analyst". my undergrad degree (finance) was largely not applicable - excel skills were about the only relevant experience. any 18 year old with a 2 month excel bootcamp and maybe 2 weeks of industry and department specific orientation could have done my job; meanwhile i was desperate and had no other offers so i took it making 50k per year with my shiny new 175k degree.