Reader responds to letter on college debt

Joe Sinagra’s recent letter [“Is a college education worth a debt incurred,” Edison/Metuchen Sentinel, May 18] to your paper brings up the more general questions of whether one should go to school for an education or a certificate, what either of those are worth, and whether long-term debts should be incurred to pay for schools. Mr. Sinagra presents the conventional wisdom very well in answering “certificate,” “a certificate is worth the increase in salary from the jobs without it and the jobs with it” and “yes if, and only if, the individual borrower can reasonably expect to profit from school.” The conventional wisdom is wrong on the first and third questions and incomplete on the second.

On the first question, the certificate, be it diploma or undergraduate or post-graduate degree, is only a generic recommendation to a future employer that you understand the academic subject in which you earned it. It does not give you magical powers of understanding and is only as good as whatever test or evaluation was used as criteria for granting it. Thus, as I have suggested for decades, the certificates should be given by the courts enforcing uniform and objective standards rather than the subjective criteria of schools, which often bows to institutional pressures. This leaves education as the only reason for going to school, although the courses taken might still be those tested in required course exams for a professional exam.

On the second question, the worth of receiving a certificate is only a small part of the worth of going to a school, if that school provides an education rather than obstructing it. The benefits of an education are wide-ranging and include being able to continue one’s studies without having to attend classes and having more areas of knowledge from which to draw creative connections. Economically, this produces a more flexible labor force and more entrepreneurs to introduce new inventions into the marketplace and into industrial processes. The best judge of the value of a course, however, remains the individual student who is willing to pay for that course, since only they know if it will enlighten them enough to merit the expense.

On the third question, the extension of loans except for short-term cash flow, is always a bad idea. The money extended in the near-term toward a specific product, such as college, inflates the price of that product. Any countervailing deflation occurs, in this case, about four years after the original loan with repayments which reduce the money demand for a more diffuse array of products which excludes, in this case, college expenses. Systematically, then, long-term debts incurred to pay for schools increase the price of college beyond what the market would efficiently determine for college level schooling as presently constituted, let alone schooling restricted to education alone. The borrowers of student loans may be able to pay back their loans with their first job out of college, but they put a college education out of the reach of students who have a little bit of money but no access to credit, while requiring similar students with such access to take out loans that may prove beyond their future capacity to pay.

Given that these are general questions, they apply to public schools as well, which I demonstrate with three corresponding reforms. High school diplomas should be granted by the state or federal courts based on passing scores on the court-administered exams for a set of courses meeting the legislated requirements of a high school diploma. Public schools should teach only those courses for which the students or, if minors, their parents, or any benefactors are willing to pay; public funds should not be wasted on classes that teach students what they either already know or do not care to know. Public school districts should not issue bonds for any reason whatsoever, and the state should not facilitate such borrowing or undertake any borrowing on their behalf. Such reforms would go a long way toward making diplomas and degrees more accessible to the people and education more affordable.

Carl Peter Klapper
Edison