Colleges Can’t Have Their Cake and Eat it Too

James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal ^ | June 11, 2026 | Peter Simonson

[karpov]

George Leef recently used National Review to highlight Adam Ellwanger’s Martin Center essay on students who treat education as an afterthought. They are describing a real problem. I share their frustration.

But frustration is not the same as explanation.

Ellwanger asks: “If you’re a serious student, it ought to be a priority. And if it isn’t a priority (or if you’re not a serious student), then why do it?”

They do it because they have to. Many students are not seeking intellectual transformation. They are seeking a credential because the labor market told them they need one—told them brutally.

That is not merely anecdotal: Strada and Gallup found that many Americans pursue higher education chiefly for work-related reasons, and Harvard Business School’s research on degree inflation shows that employers often require bachelor’s degrees for jobs that previously did not require them.

For such students, college is less a calling than a requirement: a way to keep a promotion path open, qualify for higher pay, survive HR filters where a real person may never see their résumé, or be considered for jobs that should not even require advanced academic preparation.

To tell such students that they should not be in college unless they can put education first is not rigor. It is tone-deafness dressed up as seriousness. It asks ordinary people to honor an idealized vision of college while living inside an economy that has turned college into a practical necessity.

If a working adult needs a degree to move into a better job, what exactly are we asking when we say education must come first? Is he, in effect, supposed to tell his spouse or children, “Sorry, I cannot pursue the credential this economy requires because I cannot put college ahead of work, rent, caregiving, and family obligations”?

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TOPICS: Business/Economy; Education
KEYWORDS: college

[E. Pluribus Unum]

Corollary: Not everybody should go to college.

[packagingguy]

People have posted insane job descriptions on LinkedIn showing some jobs that pay $15/hr require a Master’s degree.

I’ve seen others that want a Bachelor’s degree and 5 years of experience for $20/hr.

But a cart attendant at WalMart starts at $23/hr.

[Magnum44]

[Dr. Sivana]

Corollary: Not everybody should go to college.

His point was that as long as employers require a college degree, many are obliged to go in order to work in jobs that had not formerly required one. The credential requirements must go away first, THEN more students who are not interested in what college offers will skip using their time and money for it.

[dfwgator]

Knowledge Is Good.

[E. Pluribus Unum]

That's called "credentialism."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credentialism_and_degree_inflation

The solution is that the 18-year old marks the educational-industrial complex targets be required to do cost/benefit analysis on their prospective college "education" before being granted a student loan.

The universities would never allow this, of course.

[Dr. Sivana]

Students change majors all the time. At U of Chicago, many a would be pre-med student failed Dr. Light’s Organic Chemistry class, and wound up aiming lower.

If the student is an under-achiever academically, that is often not determined until AFTER he gets his loan.