On a recent Minneapolis-Saint Paul to London-Heathrow flight, I watched the 2014 documentary Ivory Tower. The movie is about the rising cost of attending college in the US,* and what might have caused it. The movie spends some time showing the viewer a number of borderline white-elephant large-scale infrastructure projects (e.g., a new football stadium here, a new climbing wall there, etc.) and speculates that such investments as well as admin bloat (i.e., increases in the number of university staff who are neither faculty nor support staff) have caused the cost of college to rise at a much faster rate than the income of the average US household. Unfortunately, the documentary spends way too much time on Cooper Union’s transition from being tuition-free to charging tuition, and to the occupation of the office of the president of Cooper Union by students who were opposed to the transition.
Because I have an obvious stake in those issues, the documentary made me reflect a great deal about the state of university education in the US. While it is certainly true that in my last job, I often felt more like a GO at a four-year Club Med than as a college professor (something I no longer feel in my current job, thank God), the rising costs of college made me think about a question often posed in the media these days (almost always accompanied with some crappy stock photo of young college graduates in full academic regalia on the day of their graduation), namely “Is college still worth it?” Answers tend to range from a more liberal “Yes, but …” usually followed with “you have to major in something that will be in demand in four years” to a more conservative “No, college is useless, you have to make your own way,” followed by vague mentions of Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, and Bill Gates (all college dropouts, all billionaires).
