Rethinking Our Approach to College Education

By Sandra Kirschenmann and John Jackson

It’s easy to name what we believe is wrong with American higher education today – a bachelor’s degree costs too much, takes too long to complete, encourages students to take on too much debt and doesn't guarantee a job on completion.

John Jackson is president
of William Jessup
University in Rocklin

Concerns about cost, time to completion, debt, and usefulness are pretty powerful objections to a college education.

However, most of our society recognizes the virtually unassailable truth that a college education is the premier portal to career success and personal prosperity. Michael Greenstone and Adam Looney of the Brookings Institution estimate that “the return on a bachelor’s degree is equivalent to an investment that returns 15.2 percent per year – more than double the average return to stock market investments since 1950, and more than five times the returns to corporate bonds, gold, long-term government bonds, or home ownership. Over a lifetime, the average college graduate earns roughly $570,000 more than the average person with a high school diploma only.”

Sandra Kirschenmann
 is associate vice provost
of Drexel University Sacramento 

The return on this investment is clear. But the choice of how and where to invest in a college education is less clear.

Maybe it’s time for us to look at a college degree differently. Maybe it’s time to realize that as with all products and services, there is not a single version in the American marketplace that makes sense for all people.

What do we want from a college degree?

Without a doubt, Americans want college degrees linked to good jobs because good jobs lead to prosperity and self-sufficiency. According to a 2010 survey by Hart Research Associates, successful performance in good jobs requires the very things students should learn in bachelor’s degree programs: good thinking skills, the ability to write and speak clearly, to read critically and with comprehension, and to synthesize and analyze data from a variety of inputs.

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