NPR Owns Up
NPR did a fun story on “All Things Considered” yesterday (audio here) riffing on the TNR piece I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the cicada-like reoccurrence of “Is College Still Worth It?!!!” scare stories. The best part is when they splice in audio from the bad stories in question and then later when they interview someone who was the subject of one of those stories 20 years ago. And while it’s not in the radio piece, the NPR web site has a quote from an “All Things Considered” story circa 1978:
“Lately there have been a lot of complaints from young persons, that the degree has not proved valuable at all, and that they are mired in jobs which could easily be done by someone who never had read a work of Kierkegaard or struggled through the close meshes of quadratic equations. And when one has paid $20,000 for a ticket to the good life, this seems a reasonable complaint.”
The ticket is more expensive now but otherwise this could be have been published yesterday.
In addition to the long-term trend of increasing returns to technology-enabled skills and so forth, there’s the sequential nature of education to consider. I, for example, graduated from college in 1992, which was a classic post-recessionary bad year to