There are segments of our society where college has become “a rite of passage,” a societal norm. I saw a two question survey for parents a few weeks ago:

Q1 Do you think college is for everyone?

A1 Oh, no. Absolutely not! 80%

Q2 Should your student go to college?

A2 Yes, certainly! 80%

Way too many kids are going to college. Most of them are not going to graduate and get a good job. Some of these students, graduates or not, are going to end up buried in student loan debt.

The subject of making college “free” pops up periodically, often prompted by politicians running for office. The argument is that many European countries provide a college education for their youth for little, or no, tuition, and, if that’s the case, why can’t we?

Take Switzerland for example. For the record, college in Switzerland isn’t free, but it is highly subsidized, and it is affordable. Tuition runs around $2000 annually. (We can compare that to the current tuition at my alma mater, The Ohio State University—$10,600.)

There has to be a “catch” right? Yeah, only twenty percent of Swiss high school grads—the really good students—pass the screening criteria. (If Switzerland used the SAT, that would be a score of 1180 or better.)

We send, on average, forty-five percent of our high school graduates on to four-year institutions. How is that working out?

Last week I visited my local high school.

The school was holding a “college fair.” The gym was filled with tables, each table displaying folders describing the wonders of attending a particular college. (There were thirty–forty colleges participating—some as far as fifteen hundred miles away.)

I chatted with members of the high school faculty. This high school sends eighty percent of their graduates to college. (Now this isn’t some fancy, exclusive prep school like Phillips Exeter Academy. This is just a run-of-the-mill public high school in middle-class, Midwest America.) The idea that most of these students are going to graduate with a marketable major (these tend to be tough), and get a professional job is absurd.

Two of the teachers told me, separately, that it was very common for their graduates to reconsider their four-year institution decision after their college freshman year, to drop out, and reenroll at a community college.

Best case, this high school is loathed to tell a parent, “No, Mrs. Moneypacker, Little Janey is not “college material.”

Worst case, they are hustling as many guileless teenagers as possible into expensive, four-year institutions to inflate their ratings. You get what you measure; I doubt that many on the faculty worry much about gainful outcomes.

Probably more than half of these teenagers should have been redirected to an alternative post-secondary education option.

There are many other, more cost-effective ways to gain the training your student needs to get a well-paying job:

• Technical certifications at a local community college.
• An inexpensive, government subsidized technical career center program.
• Apprenticeships.
• On-the-job training opportunities, where you get paid to learn.
• Joining the military.

At that college fair, there must have been a room—off to the side somewhere—where those choices were represented. I just must have missed it.

When “college for everyone” is the policy in your student’s high school, you shouldn’t be surprised when your college graduate can’t get a real job. Almost half of our graduates end up under-employed, while great manufacturing jobs and well-paying openings in the trades go unfilled. (Blue-collar Baby Boomers are retiring in droves with no one to fill their shoes.)

The next time you read about the student loan crisis, remember this post.