The Cost of College – Intangibles

A couple of weeks back, I calculated that if the price of college had risen as fast as housing (another market that has significantly outpaced inflation over the last 40-50 years), the cost for a year at even the best school should be no more than $15,000. I also used Harvard Extension’s degree program to show that one can actually “buy” the courses leading to a degree for less than this sum.

The thesis that the course-based learning component of higher education easily falls within the range of “normal” housing-based inflationary pricing jibs with my Degree of Freedom experience where I paid nothing to take a BA’s worth of courses using only MOOCs and other forms of free learning. For whether you disagree or agree that my One Year MOOC BA is the equivalent of a four-year residential one, if I had spread my studies out over four years (taking 70-100 courses, paced so I could get the most out of each one) and had $60K to spend over that four years on things like books, tutors, paper graders and field trips, there’s little doubt that I would learn as much or more than I would by sitting through 32 semester-long classroom-based courses.

But since the best colleges cost 3-4 times what both these thought experiments say is the cost of classes alone, then the remaining $30-50,000 one pays each year to attend an Ivy League school must be paying for something else.

Some of that other stuff is concrete (housing, food, facilities), but I would posit that the bulk of this differential goes to intangibles, things that even college administrators describe in vague terms such as “community,” “collaboration,” or (my favorite) “the [plug your favorite college name in here] experience.”

Now having had an extremely positive residential college experience myself, I don’t want to poo-poo these intangibles in any way. In fact, my favorite part of Rebekah Nathan’s anthropological study of her own school’s freshman class was her analysis of the undergraduate years as a vital period of transition:

It is in the middle or “liminal” state – the ambiguous place of being neither here nor there – that anthropologists see profoundly creative and transformative possibilities. “Liminal” states throughout the world, as the anthropologist Victor Turner has pointed out, lift the normal constraints on behavior and bring participants into new relationships with one another.

Thinking back to those years between turning 18 when I left home and 22 when I left school, there is no doubt that being in a new (yet safe) place where exploration was not just encouraged but indulged gave me the chance to experiment not just with academic interests but with who I wanted to be. And I suspect that students would not be lining up to pay the kind of sums schools are asking if this liminal experience didn’t carry a high value.

But how high can the price of this liminal experience go before people start looking for alternatives? An article I read recently said that if present trends continue, a child born today who wants to attend an Ivy League school will need upwards of three-quarter of a million dollars to do so. And if current costs (combined with technological innovation) got people thinking (at least briefly) of MOOCs as a potential replacement for institution-based higher education, what happens when those costs go from outrageous to absurdly unaffordable?

But perhaps there are other intangibles that can continue to justify prices rising even to these unimaginable levels. I just spoke positively about one such intangible (the chance to partake in a safe, constructive “liminal” experience) which can help justify paying the difference between the cost of education (i.e., courses) and the cost of college. But there is something else you buy when you go through the entire process of obtaining a degree, an intangible with a slightly darker tinge: discrimination.

What I mean by that term is a subject I’ll be exploring in that newsletter I meant to get out last Friday, but which will instead appear this Friday in the Inboxes of subscribers (including anyone who signs up using that box to your right between now and then).