As Covid casts doubts over higher education, is a college degree worth it?

 

"One of the things that people don't really pay enough attention to is the role of selectivity in the value of a degree," says David Andrews.

This is one of a series of interviews by Bloomberg Opinion columnists on how to solve today’s most pressing policy challenges. This conversation has been edited and condensed.

Romesh Ratnesar: You’re the president of National University, a non-profit private university based in San Diego with a student population of 25,000, many of them working adults. One question that a lot of students, families and workers have is whether a college degree is still worth it. How do we evaluate value in higher education? In your view, is a traditional college degree still worth the investment?

David Andrews: It really depends on the degree, the discipline and the institution itself. A highly-ranked degree from a highly-ranked institution probably has the right kind of return on the investment. But a degree from a lesser known institution in a discipline that historically has not led to a better job — I think we have to start questioning the value. Students should be wise consumers and institutions should be more sensitive to the return on the investment for the students that they recruit.

One of the things that people don’t really pay enough attention to is the role of selectivity in the value of a degree. The more selective a school is, the better you can assure a return on that investment because you get to pick your team — you pick people that have demonstrated a capacity to take advantage of their degree once they enter the workforce. In open-access institutions like mine, we end up with such heterogeneous students. Our student body is all over the place in terms of its racial backgrounds, economic backgrounds, military history. The majority of our students are under-represented minorities. Some come to us with as many as 100 credit hours earned from three to five other institutions. If we don’t think about each of those students as an individual and work to give them a personalized education to get the highest return on investment, then we’re not really doing our job.