A plan for real college reform
A draft op-ed Alyssa wrote in spring 2011, while a Thiel Fellow herself, with the idea of pitching it to The New York Times and asking Peter Thiel to co-sign. The frame: the public debate around the Thiel Fellowship’s “20 Under 20” program had split into stay-in-school and drop-out camps, with neither side addressing tuition’s underlying exponential growth. Her proposed third path: a nationwide college-equivalency exam, modeled on the GED.
There has been much debate recently about the Thiel Foundation’s 20 Under 20 program, which gives 20 people under the age of 20 $100,000 to take two years off from school and develop new technology. Many agree that college has gotten too expensive, and that young entrepreneurs should be encouraged to take the initiative and pursue their own ideas. On the other side, people argue that many high-paying jobs still require a degree, and this makes it too risky to leave college early.
However, neither side has addressed the fundamental problem, which is that tuition is not only high, but increasing exponentially. If trends continue, when the children of today’s students are applying to college, a private four-year degree will cost more than $1 million. A figure like that would mean the end of America’s middle class as we know it. It would be a return to old European aristocracy, where only the eldest sons of wealthy men could hope for a comfortable life.
To solve this problem, we need real fundamental reform, not just cosmetic changes. We need to establish a nationwide college-equivalency exam, similar to the GED for high school, which would certify that a student had attained a college graduate’s level of ability. This alternative to an expensive four-year program would restart our flagging economic engine, by giving new opportunity and hope for a better job to more than a hundred million Americans. It would give talented, but disadvantaged, youth a chance to make a real contribution to our society, by showing employers that they too had the right stuff.
In addition to helping the young, such an exam would also help colleges. Universities today are overwhelmed by students who have little interest in learning, but enroll anyway, because they were told that a college degree was the only path to a good job. Around half of all new college students now drop out before finishing their degrees. By providing an alternative path for these students, such an exam would help colleges return to their roots as places for learning, community, self-improvement, and discovery.
Establishing such an exam will not be easy. For-profit schools like the University of Phoenix are politically powerful, and they make a fortune by charging high tuition fees in exchange for the promise of a better future. Yet, though it is hard, we are ultimately faced with the choice of pushing for reform, or collectively going broke. Americans now carry more student debt than credit card debt, and forty percent of loans for for-profit education wind up in default, even though such loans cannot be discharged in bankruptcy court.
Some will argue that the large amounts of money spent on tuition are necessary for colleges to teach people real skills. Yet, we know this is not true, because the same colleges that now ask for $40,000 charged less than $5,000 a scant thirty years ago. No one argues that today’s CEOs, who mostly graduated during the 1970s, are all incompetent compared to today’s graduates, even though their degrees only cost one-tenth as much. We can and must increase affordability, by creating an alternative route to skilled, middle-class jobs.