Low tuition encourages career slackers?

by philg

The students whom I met during a brief stop at University of Wisconsin in Madison seemed to have chosen majors that aren’t very useful vocationally.  My friends who teach liberal arts at high-tuition schools in the Boston area report that their students are very focussed on getting into a high-paying career with an MBA or a law degree.  Two girls at U. of W. who stopped me to ask about Alex seemed like good examples of what happens when tuition is only around $3000/semester (in-state).  One was majoring in philosophy and headed for a Ph.D. program in philosophy.  The other was in women’s studies and headed for graduate school at UCLA in women’s studies.


Were these a statistical anomaly or is there a correlation between low tuition and students pursuing the intellectual life?

25 thoughts on “Low tuition encourages career slackers?”

  1. Well, consider that if you want to pursue the philosophical life, which doesn’t really pay that well, you’re better off going to a school with low tuition.

    But if you’re aiming to be a lawyer, you know you’ll be making lots of money later, so you don’t mind spending a lot of money on an expensive school.

    I say causation is: choice of career determines choice of school.

  2. I have always thought there is. Some people may use this to argue against low tuition but most use it to argue for it. After all, we need our artists, philosophers and dreamers, even if we don’t want to pay them as much as our investors, managers and technicians. I like thinking that some people can pursue education for its own sake instead of looking at it purely as an investment for monetary gain.

  3. Yes in the sense that if tuition is very high you’re only going to get students from rich families where their field of study is more-or-less independent of their income and students willing to go deeply into debt for what is effectively a business investment, in which case they’ll probably choose relatively low risk fields. I think it would be much harder to support a claim that people choosing high-payoff fields (of their own free will) would tend to select low-payoff fields when tuition is lowered as your title implies.

  4. Others have said this in one way or another, but it seems obvious:

    It’s the other way around.

    Smart slackers pick low tuition schools so that they won’t have a student-loan albatross hanging around their necks for years into the future.

    Of course, I wasn’t that smart when I was 18. It’s really hard for someone that age to understand exactly what it is they’re signing up for when they take out $20k+ in loans.

  5. $3000/semester is a reasonable investment for middle-class students seeking acadmeic/research employment (which have far more, and better, benefits than a ‘real world’ job).

    Likewise $30,000/semester is a reasonable investment for upper-class students seeking academic/research employment (where it is the academic glory, cliquish fame, or chance to piss off your rich dad, which are the valued targets).

    I bet if you compared the percentage of middle-class state school students pursuing academic (or “non-vocational”) fields with the percentage of upper-class private school students doing the same, the numbers would match up.

  6. Just a note – my sister took the “useless” PHD in philosophy and now teaches at Duke U, where she is well paid and not that stressed (aside from the challenges in getting tenure).

    Women’s studies – now THAT, is truly useless, but just what you would expect from someone in Madison.

  7. Much of the ivy league is arguably cheaper than U Wisc with the new policies in place. Places like Princeton (and I believe harvard) have eliminated loans and give full grants for financial aid. The fun question would be, is there a correlation between low income (=low tuition) students ending up in low income careers more than rich kids? (the hard part is controlling for the statistical likelihood that lower income parents generally results in lower income kids if indeed financial aid recipients got lower paying jobs than rich kids)

  8. I think the competitiveness of the school influences the types of fields students will pursue more than the tuition. The “high-tuition schools in the Boston area” that you refer to probably include MIT and Harvard, which attract many competitive students that want to go into business, law, medicine, politics, etc.

    Also, for wealthy people your question would reveal no correlation. If you have parents that can afford to pay the $40k/year it costs for a private university these days, the cost of tuition would not be a factor in what school the student chooses.

  9. If you were 18 right now and had to incur debt for all college expenses would you go to MIT ?
    I know I wouldn’t.

  10. Depends on what your definition of “useful” is.

    Perhaps it is midwestern values that believe in the American dream that everyone should have an equal opportunity to higher education to better themselves, be productive in society, and to be better citizens, and the people of the state are willing to pay the taxes to support it. Madison has a well respected agricultural department, medical school, law school, and engineering program. It is great value. Truly great students will achieve whether it is $3k or $30k. And as long as they get the fundamentals, the company can pickup the tab and they can learn on the job (OTJ).

    Perhaps the true question is not about tuition, but rather are any liberal arts programs, even those at MIT and Harvard, useful.

  11. Who says that a JD or an MBA is “useful”?

    I suppose they *are* useful if you have all that debt, or you have rich parents who will be peeved by a “non-useful” career choice…

    I had a friend who graduated from Yale and became a Methodist minister. He used to tell me how his career choice was sometimes looked down on by his fellow alums. Was he a “career slacker”? Come on.

    So be careful of throwing around those “career slacker” stereotypes. Personally, I’m grateful for my vocation-affirming middle-income parents and my “non-useful” liberal arts degree. I know how to learn, and I don’t have to be snowed under by a completely mundane career, unlike my cohorts with JDs and 100k owed to the man…

  12. I vaguely remember a study that concluded that it’s getting accepted to a pricey school that is most predictive of future earnings, regardless of whether the student actually attends the school. I.e. students who gets accepted to Harvard but attend State U. end up making just as much money as those who attend Harvard.

    If I can find a reference to the study, I’ll post it.

  13. 25 years ago, Ivy League tuition was $3K per semester and state schools were under $1K. Other than real estate, that’s about 4-5 times inflation. Why does college cost so much these days?

  14. this is the most ridiculous post yet. why do you assume someone majoring in philosophy and going into a phd program is a slacker? since when are phd students slackers? all the ones i know (in social sciences or otherwise) are completely burned out and overworked and have zero time for personal lives. and i do recall that harvard has one of the top ten philosophy programs in the country–are those students slackers, or do you just assume the low-income ones are?

  15. I really feel that most of eductaion is outrageously priced to begin with. I also think that credentializing was a major step backwards economically for this country. Does a teacher really need a masters degree or doctorate degree to teach second grade? Does a pharmacist really need 6 years of post high school education to count out pills and check his computer for other meds the patient might be taking that are contraindicated?

    Most of education is a scam. Unfortuantely, if we want to make a decent living some day we need to fork over the money and “play by the rules”.

  17. (Oops. Should be “cheapest education systems in the world“. Next post: “English Lit degrees encourange geography slackers?”…)

  18. It is kind of ironic that Philip G would post a comment about Low Tuition encouraging slackers when he was the founder of a (short lived) tuition-free computer science “university” — ArsDigita University.

    Does that mean that he thinks that all of us that attended AD university are the ultimate slackers because it was tuition free?

  19. It is kind of ironic that Philip G would post a comment about Low Tuition encouraging slackers when he was the founder of a (short lived) tuition-free computer science “university” — ArsDigita University.

    Does that mean that he thinks that all of us that attended AD university are the ultimate slackers because it was tuition free?

  20. I believe most formal education is outrageously priced. The old fashion apprentice programs were better and cheaper. Education has gradually become just another beauracracy. You pay your money, then study a lot of crap that is worthless to learn in the first place. As you proceed further through the process you pay more money, and forget most of what you learned. Then when you finally get your degree you essentially are given permission to now earn a decent living.
    You then get your first job, only to find that mostly everything you learned was either obsolete or completely worthless.

    Formal education is a ripoff.

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