Maggie's Farm

Over the past decade or two, the marketing of higher ed has been to sell it as a financial investment. Of course, financial investments are about supply and demand, and when the supply goes up and demand goes down, the proud grads with their marketing-inflated grades are SOL.

What is the economic value of a college degree today?

If they want to market higher ed to the masses, they need to either market as adolescent sex resorts as Club Ed, or as an opportunity be become a citizen who is more deeply rooted in their culture. I suspect the former, "the college experience", sells better to the youth.

As I think about it, there's also the social angle (non-college grads like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and Bob Dylan have trouble getting invitations to the nice parties and clubs) -  and also the networking angle, but that mainly works well for high-prestige and high-visibility schools: Ivy League, Little Ivies, Big Ten, UT, MIT, Va. Tech, and so forth but many other colleges have established very tight networking for their grads. I'm thinking of USC, Connecticut College, Georgetown, Kenyon, and there are plenty of others where loyal alumni will do anything to help grads find a career track they want.