The BA still delivers a premium but it differs widely by major, institution, and occupation

For more than 50 years, higher ed’s marketing message was crystal clear: a college degree pays off. While that’s still true for both individuals as well as for the country as a whole—please, don’t read this as “college isn’t worth it” screed—the message about the value of the bachelor’s degree is much more muddled these days.

Background: In recent years, three big factors have driven the debate over the value of the BA.

• First, the degree premium—the wage gap between college and high-school graduates—has flattened. That’s in part because the premium grew so fast in the 1980s as college became more valuable and high school less valuable with the decline of manufacturing jobs. It was always going to be difficult, if not impossible, for BA wages to remain on that lofty trajectory forever.
• Second, a growing recognition among families that not all bachelor’s degrees are created equal. There is a growing disparity in earnings by major. As a result, students are fleeing academic programs they perceive don’t pay off. Enrollments are way down in the humanities—history, philosophy, English—at all kinds of colleges (even the elites) since the 2008 financial crisis.
• Third, employers from the state of Maryland to Delta Airlines have dropped their degree requirements for some jobs.

Reality check: Forthcoming research I’m working on with Matt Sigelman of the Burning Glass Institute shows that having a BA still delivers a wage premium—one worth more than four years of experience in the job market compared with non-BA workers—and one that also allows greater mobility.

• But we also found that the premium varies widely by major, college selectivity, and occupation.

What’s next in 2023: Until now, the debate over the value of the degree has focused almost exclusively on wage outcomes. But the discussion is pivoting to also focus on the job itself: What kinds of work are colleges preparing students for?

• There is evidence that American workers are tiring of the treadmill that is the “reward” for four years of college. Worker productivity in the first half of 2022 plunged by the sharpest rate on record going back to 1947.
• A headline in the Wall Street Journal last week proclaimed: “Your Coworkers Are Less Ambitious. 

And then…there’s the AI technology everyone is talking about right now—ChatGPT—which can potentially perform jobs currently held by college graduates. The BA needs to prepare students to complement such technology rather than just compete with it.

Bottom line: Higher ed can’t simply trot out the old arguments anymore that the BA is worth it. Colleges, especially those competing for students and facing declining enrollments, must find approaches to make the degree more valuable:

• Pair the BA with certificates for in-demand skills (think data visualization for history majors or project management for psychology majors).
• Embed experiential learning in every degree, such as co-ops and internships.
• Spell out for students the specific skills they’re learning in the liberal arts and in their courses overall so they can use that on their résumé and talk about it in job interviews.
• Integrate career services into the day-to-day undergraduate experience so that students understand how people find their passions, careers, and jobs. (I love listening to How I Built This with my kids for just this reason.)

A new classification scheme coming for higher ed could mean different ways to slice and dice the rankings

It’s unlikely the U.S. News college rankings will disappear anytime soon even after the controversies of 2022. But in a day and age when the rankings seem to only confirm what people already know about elite higher ed—and it’s more difficult (impossible?) to get into the top-ranked schools anyway—the U.S. News rankings are a lot less useful.

What’s happening: Over the last year, whenever I talked with parents, students, and counselors about widening their lens on the college search, the next question was inevitably, “What are we looking for in a college?”

• Yes, the U.S. News rankings filled a gap by organizing a vast and confusing higher ed ecosystem for the average consumer.
• But now that consumer is looking for different things than simply a “good” college (whatever that means anyway). Students are not the same nor are their interests in colleges, so a one-size-fits-all rankings scheme like U.S. News no longer works.

Reality check: U.S. News, of course, is not the only player in the rankings space. Other entities from the Wall Street Journal to Washington Monthly to Forbes have tried over the years to knock U.S. News from the rankings perch with their own twist on the methodology—and for the most part they haven’t succeeded.

Background: The foundation of the U.S. News rankings is what’s known by higher ed insiders as the Carnegie Classifications.

• The classifications were first published in the early 1970s by the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education, which developed them to better define the thousands of colleges and universities across the country. It uses descriptors such as “research university” or “master’s level institution,” and the further designations of “I” and “II” based on scale and scope—for instance, how much federal research money a college received.
• While the classifications were intended to aid researchers and policy makers, they eventually became a pseudo ranking as colleges tried to jockey for prestige by moving into what they perceived as “better categories.”
• In doing so, colleges became more alike and spent money on things like new academic programs, degrees, and research that benefited their standing in the classifications but not always benefited students.
• Because U.S. News has long used the classification as the foundation for its categories in the rankings, the two are closely linked. For example, Villanova University moved from a “regional university” to a “national university” in U.S. News after a years-long strategy to switch to a different Carnegie Classification in 2016.

What’s next in 2023: The American Council on Education (ACE), which is the umbrella national association of colleges and universities, acquired the Carnegie Classifications last year and is working on plans to reimagine the listings.

Bottom line: Yes, the changes to the Carnegie classifications are a bit inside baseball. But they will ultimately benefit consumers because whoever publishes rankings might have different options for organizing how higher ed is ultimately sliced up in the classifications—allowing applicants to also shop differently for colleges based on what they want out of the experience.

• What’s more, new data from the federal government on earnings of college graduates by major and institution allows people like Michael Itzkowitz at Third Way, the center-left think tank, to put together college-by-college spreadsheets on the ROI of their degrees.

A MESSAGE FROM WORKDAY

The Covid Generation won’t finish graduating from college until sometime around the end of next decade

The Covid Generation is now a majority on college campuses. These are students, starting with the high-school graduating Class of 2020, who saw their K-12 schooling disrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic.

• The Covid Generation won’t finish cycling through colleges until sometime around the end of next decade.

What’s happening: Much has been written about learning loss during the pandemic as well as the rise in mental health issues among teenagers.

• Less discussed are the social and executive function issues that college officials told me started to appear in new ways on campuses last fall: more students are getting disciplined for alcohol and drugs as well as students who miss appointments with faculty members “or don’t know how to send an appropriate email,” one admissions dean told me.

Background: For much of the last decade, student success has been at the forefront of many institutions’ strategic priorities, with campuses under pressure for better retention, higher graduation rates, and more engaged students.

• But those efforts are now stuck in neutral, or even going in reverse. The persistence rate—the percentage of students who return to any college for their second year even if they transfer dropped by 2 points last year, reaching its lowest level since 2012. 

What to watch: Peer-to-peer outreach and new technology that was successful during the pandemic is now being used to bolster student success going forward.

• At Robert Morris University in Pennsylvania, students in the admissions office’s peer-to-peer recruitment program are crucial to conveying the college experience to prospective students and are rewarded accordingly with stipends and swag.
• Arizona State University retooled its peer-to-peer academic coaching program so that when course data shows students failing to show up for class, a peer checks in with them.
• The University of South Florida is pushing student activities, organizations, and resources through its mobile and desktop apps and hopes to gain data-driven insights from those events to monitor student behavior as well as to promote future events.
• “The next frontier is to pull in behavioral indicators as well,” says Paul Dosal, former vice president for student success at the University of South Florida. “I want to know if they’re active in student organizations, do they go to events, and even the rec center. I want to know if they visit the library or hang out in the student union. All of those are indicators of student engagement with our campus community.”

What’s next in 2023: So much of the systems of higher ed from applying college to coursework to the student experience were designed for pre-pandemic students.

• Now that we had an academic year of normalcy, expect experiments and pilots from recent years become permanent. 
• Three examples: Test-optional is here to stay. Direct admissions—where colleges make offers to students who never apply—takes off at less-selective campuses. Students get more flexibility in how they get classes and their degree (in-person, online, and hybrid).

SUPPLEMENTS