Inequality among American colleges and the continued failure of the online revolution

“U.S. Colleges Are Separating Into Winners and Losers” (WSJ) is an interesting article on an industry where the U.S. spends more than any other country (some data):

Concord University in West Virginia and Clemson University in South Carolina were both founded shortly after the Civil War. During the 20th century, each grew rapidly. Now, the two public universities that sit just 300 miles apart face very different circumstances.

Clemson, a large research university, enrolled its largest-ever freshman class in 2017 and in December broke ground on an $87 million building for the college of business.

Concord, a midsize liberal-arts school, has seen its freshman enrollment fall 19% in five years. It has burned through all $12 million in its reserves and can’t afford to tear down two mostly empty dormitories.

Clemson—ranked 188 in the Journal list—is on the successful side of the fault line in the higher-education sector. Concord, ranked 1051, isn’t.

Clemson’s success is tied to its embrace of the labor market, said Chuck Knepfle, associate vice president of enrollment management. The school has several corporate partners and has tied curriculum to their needs.

“Our students get jobs, we put successful people out there and that is well known,” Mr. Knepfle said.

So Clemson grads are making the big bucks? Enough to justify spending four years out of the workforce and paying four years of tuition?

At Clemson University, the Journal found, graduates on average earn $50,000 a year 10 years after entering college and the default rate on student loans is 3%; the average Concord graduate earned $32,000 and the default rate is 15%.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics says that an HVAC technician earned a median wage of $46,000 per year in 2016. So the HVAC tech who fixes a cooling problem at Clemson and works a few overtime weekends per year will earn more than a Clemson grad and can start his or her career at age 19.

South Carolina offers unlimited child support revenue (the law explained by a local litigator), so an 18-year-old who has sex with a dentist instead of going to Clemson will save more than $100,000 in costs and have a higher after-tax spending power than the average Clemson grad, as reported by the WSJ. The 18-year-old Charleston resident who makes a trip to Boston or Manhattan and has sex with an upper-income partner may earn even more under the Massachusetts or New York child support guidelines.

“California Prison Academy: Better Than a Harvard Degree” (WSJ) suggests that many state and local government jobs, not requiring a college degree, will pay better than what a typical Clemson grad earns, at least early in his or her career, and these jobs come with a lot of protections against being fired (important in the #MeToo era where being denounced by a coworker can yield a ride on a greased slide to the front door).

On pure rational economic grounds, therefore, the U.S. college scam should have collapsed under its own weight a lot time ago. Americans would have done like the Chileans and said “Most of these degree programs are not a good return on private or public investment.” But I wonder if colleges hand on for a reason. Back in the depths of a miserable Boston January we taught a three-day class at MIT. Students could have hopped on a plane to Florida, learned the core material by reading PDFs and watching YouTube videos, and still had time to lounge by the pool. Yet 65 people showed up on Day 1 and, more remarkably, nearly all returned for Days 2 and 3. Even for people with superb reading and self-study skills, there was something about being together in a classroom that was motivating.

Readers: Is it time to say that, though it seems we aren’t very good at delivering higher education, as with health care, we’re going to have to keep doing it more or less the same way and at the same cost indefinitely?