On the Sustainability of Conventional Post-Secondary Education

The long-term viability of the current higher-education model is uncertain. Indebted, unemployed, and unmarketable are adjectives that, sadly, apply to far too many recent college grads.

Part of the problem, according to Reid Hoffman, author of “College Diplomas Are Meaningless. This Is How to Fix Them” (2016), is that companies view college diplomas as decreasingly less valuable, considering internships as more accurate indicators of a prospective employee’s ability to contribute.

Despite this apparently decreasing value of a traditional diploma, costs of acquiring a four-year college degree continue to rise, increasing students’ utilization of credit to purchase a college education. Indeed, college grads now often take on decades of debt to attain their degree, as described by Robert Reich in his 2014 commentary “A Four-Year College Degree Is Not Preparing People for Today’s Jobs.”

Sadly, graduates’ prospects for paying back these loans appear bleak. Diana G. Carew, in her 2014 essay “There Should Be Alternatives to the Four-Year College Degree,” points out that recent grads are now often forced to settle for lower-earning jobs that were once reserved for their less-educated counterparts. These harrowing facts point to bleak prospects for the long-term sustainability of our current educational model.

One aspect of the conundrum is that market forces of supply and demand have driven up the price of entry into many careers…