Is It Valid to Assess Higher Education Using the Concept of ROI?

The smorgasbord of post-secondary education in the United States includes public and private colleges and universities, community colleges, and a variety of types of technical training institutions. In addition, some businesses have begun issuing certificates confirming a student’s mastery of that business’s software; these certificates are sometimes held to be as valuable as a college degree.

There is a wide range of options for students who have successfully completed high school.

There are also a wide range of motives for seeking post-secondary education.

Students matriculate because they want:

• a good-paying job
• to master a field of knowledge and gain skills to explore it
• a certain social standing
• to find a future spouse
• to make friends and enjoy a vibrant social life
• to get away from their parents
• to please their parents
• to live in a place far from their hometown
• to gain the skills to be a good voting citizen

In addition, students choose many private colleges and universities because they seek spiritual guidance and the opportunity to research and explore questions of worldview.

Given that students are attending different types of educational institutions for different reasons, how can one evaluate this system — if indeed it can be called a ‘system’ at all?

Some researchers have hoped to use the concept of ‘return on investment’ (ROI) to assess institutions of higher education. Simply put, how much does it cost to get a diploma, and how much money can a graduate earn with that diploma?

The method of investigation has a strength: it involves unambiguous numbers. It also has two weaknesses: it applies only to those students who attend college in order to get a good-paying job, and leaves open the question of cost: If a certain diploma costs N dollars, to whom does it cost? To the student? To the parents? To society at large? To the government?

If a student, or the student’s parents, or the student and parents together, pay N dollars to get a diploma, then is the actual cost of that diploma greater than, or less than, N?

Government-owned and government-operated colleges and universities in the United States carry the label “public” and receive large amounts of taxpayer dollars from state and federal governments, as well as funding from private-sector foundations and corporations. Given this financing model, whatever amount students and parents pay for tuition, the total cost of the diploma is a much greater number.

On a case-by-case basis, numbers vary, but in general, it can be said that many diplomas issued by public colleges and universities do not deliver a good ROI. If a degree costs tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of dollars to the students and parents, and additionally costs many thousands to the government and to private-sector charitable foundations, then it will be found that over a forty-year working career, such a diploma offers a poor ROI: the student could have taken that amount of money, invested it, spent forty years working at a slightly less remunerative job, and finished with a larger net worth, ceteris paribus.

Again, this type of ROI analysis applies only if (1) the student attends college for purely financial reasons, and (2) a distinction is made between costs to students and parents in contrast to costs to government and society.

A less precise, but still perhaps meaningful, type of ROI analysis can be built around the question: “Was it worth it?”

While it is difficult — more probably, impossible — to place a dollar value on “finding a future spouse” or “becoming a good voting citizen,” one can still ask the graduate, perhaps decades after graduation, if there is an intuitive sense that the financial sacrifice was justified. The answer will be necessarily subjective, but subjective satisfaction is an important factor both in society and in the economy.

In this second type of ROI analysis, it is also important to ask society as a whole if “it was worth it.” Given the burden on taxpayers and private-sector foundations, is it worthwhile to fund students and universities, if the goal of that college experience is finding a spouse or being an informed voter?

Either, or both, of the two versions of ROI analysis presented above highlight the role of cost. In the first version, the question arises: Can a student find competing degree-granting institutions which have different prices on a degree which allow them to earn the same income? If so, then the lower priced degree gives a better ROI. In the second version, the question is: Are there competing institutions which offer the same amount of personal fulfillment at different prices?

ROI analysis of higher education should produce a downward pressure on tuition prices, but it seems to produce little or no such pressure. Why?

One reason is the inflationary effect of student loans. When loans are available to students, tuition prices go up. This is a recursive cycle: students take out loans to pay the higher tuition; once the university sees that the students can pay the tuition price, it raise the tuition still further, causing the students to take out more loans, and then the university again sees that the costs have been covered, so it feels free to raise the prices again, and so on.

The very existence of student loans makes college more expensive.

There is double damage here: Tuition is driven up instead of down, and the bills are paid with money taken by force from taxpayers.

Because student loans are offered by governments, or guaranteed by governments, or coerced out of private lenders by governments, there is no ROI analysis conducted.

Normally, a lender examines a loan application to determine if there is a probability of a reasonable, i.e. market-level, ROI. If a person wants to borrow $500,000 to start a shoe store, there's a reasonable chance that it will yield an acceptable ROI. But if a person wants to borrow $10,000,000 to open a shoe store, a lender might well decide that an ROI at equilibrium rates is unlikely, and therefore refuse the loan.

Yet student loans are issued regularly to students whose chance of making a tolerable ROI is very small.

If a student wishes to pursue any particular course of study, then there is no problem with allowing that student to matriculate and graduate if the student and the parents are paying for the degree. The sense of personal fulfillment may perhaps constitute a good ROI in their view.

But if a student is receiving taxpayer dollars, then the question is put, not to the student and the parents, but to the taxpayers, whether it is “worth it” to fund such an education.

As seen, student loans are a cost to the taxpayer because they are either (a) issued by the government, (b) private loans guaranteed by the government, or (c) private sector loans issued under government coercion.

Now, to be clear, it is often an excellent ROI for a student to get a four-year degree, and additional graduate degrees, in disciplines like philosophy and literature. Students with above-average academic abilities should be encouraged to explore those fields. But it is quite a different question about whether the taxpayers should be compelled to pay for those degrees.

The damage caused by student loans can shackle graduates for decades, and economist Carol Roth notes that twenty-first century graduates burdened with student loans are suffering under a thinly-disguised version of “indentured” servitude as it was practiced in the early 1700s. She writes:

The opposite of creating wealth through the ownership of appreciating assets is the accumulation of liabilities and debts.

It is permissible, and sometimes even good, to take on personal liabilities and debts. But to impose those debts on society at large, i.e. on the taxpayers, amounts to abuse.

Rather than wonder how society can “free up more money for education,” it would be wise to ask whether the cost of tuition can be lowered. Ending student loans would give universities reasons to try to cut costs.

Fewer Men Enroll in Colleges and Universities: Why Our Educational Institutions Don’t Work for Boys

During the last decade or two, a troubling trend has manifested itself at American institutions of higher learning. Uniformly, more girls than boys matriculate and graduate. More girls are applying to college, more girls are being admitted to college, and among the students at college, more girls than boys succeed in reaching graduation, and girls have higher average grades than boys.

There is a serious gender gap here.

The generalizations above can be seen in, and confirmed by, reams of statistics. Not only does this gap exist, but it is also growing larger.

In September 2021, Douglas Belkin wrote an article titled “A Generation of American Men Give Up on College.” In that article, he concluded that “The number of men enrolled at two- and four-year colleges has fallen behind women by record levels, in a widening education gap across the U.S.”

The obvious questions are: What causes this pattern? What can be done to correct it?

It is likely that there is more than one cause for this gender gap: It is probably a multifactorial phenomenon. One of the causes may be societal and cultural attitudes about boys and masculinity. Another cause may be the structure and habits of the system of secondary education: high school.

In 2021, Belkin wrote:

At the close of the 2020-21 academic year, women made up 59.5% of college students, an all-time high, and men 40.5%, according to enrollment data from the National Student Clearinghouse, a nonprofit research group. U.S. colleges and universities had 1.5 million fewer students compared with five years ago, and men accounted for 71% of the decline. By 2024, those numbers had amplified the gap: women were more than 60%, and men were less than 40% of the incoming freshman class. During the years at college, more boys than girls dropped out, increasing the gap at commencement ceremonies even further.

This gap held consistently against other variables like race, income level, ethnicity, religion, etc.

This gap was a long time in the making, as Belkin’s 2021 article reported:

This education gap, which holds at both two- and four-year colleges, has been slowly widening for 40 years. The divergence increases at graduation: After six years of college, 65% of women in the U.S. who started a four-year university in 2012 received diplomas by 2018 compared with 59% of men during the same period, according to the U.S. Department of Education.

Indeed, by 2024, the graduation rate for men was still lower, and falling.

Coherent efforts to rectify this trend are rare, but some reasonable attempts have been made to matriculate more boys than girls, as Douglas Belkin explains:

At Baylor University, where the undergraduate student body is 60% female, the admission rate for men last year was 7 percentage points higher than for women. Every student has to meet Baylor’s admission standards to earn admission, said Jessica King Gereghty, the school’s assistant vice president of enrollment strategy and innovation. Classes, however, are shaped to balance several variables, including gender, she said.

At Baylor, which was trying for some form of gender equity already in Belkin’s 2021 article, there was still a significant gender gap.

The experiences of the admissions officers at Baylor shed some light on data which would apply to nearly all colleges and universities. One factor was the application process itself.

College applications require attention to detail, and that is a skill which is less common among twenty-first century boys than among twentieth-century boys, as Belkin explains:

Ms. Gereghty said she found that girls more closely attended to their college applications than boys, for instance making sure transcripts are delivered. Baylor created a “males and moms communication campaign” a few years ago to keep high-school boys on track, she said.

Given the ubiquity of the problem and the various causes of it, what’s to be done?

Any effective solution would need to be thoroughly and consistently applied across the secondary educational system. High schools, which are four years in most places but three years in some, might reshape themselves along these lines:

• More structure
• More discipline
• More competition
• More rigor
• More physicality

Boys thrive in structure, even when — perhaps especially when — they bump up against the boundaries of that structure and find them intact. In a consistently structured environment, boys know the rules of the process, and know that there is a consequence to not following those rules. Boys are drawn to video games and computer games because the machine applies the rules with ruthless reliability. By contrast, many schools currently operate with “soft” rules, leaving boys to wonder which, if any, of the rules are real. One older high school student was kindly helping a new freshman to understand the school; he pointed to a list of rules in the student handbook, and said, “I can tell you which of these rules are actually enforced.”

Discipline has become a politically incorrect concept in many current American high schools, but this does a disservice to boys. Boys need to know what the boundaries are, and what the consequences for violating those boundaries are. Psychologist Carol Gilligan authored a book titled In a Different Voice in which she argued that boys conceptualize interaction in terms of systems and rules, whereas girls conceptualize interaction in terms of relationships and mutual care. One need not accept all of Gilligan’s hypotheses in order to see the relevance of her insights.

Competition is a key motivator for boys. Some high schools have stopped publishing a “rank in class” statistic for graduates. Some boys excel in competitions, e.g., for playing musical instruments or academic games, but fail to put forth effort in classroom situations which contain little competition.

Boys and girls are both aware if they are receiving meaningful academic content, or if they are receiving fluff. If an assignment is to write about how a poem might make the reader feel, and if it is therefore perceived as less rigorous, boys are inclined to devote less effort to it. Girls will also perceive the assignment as less rigorous, but are more likely to comply and give effort to it. By contrast, when the assignment for the same poem is to count the number of syllables per line, and see if there is a mathematical pattern present, boys are more likely to engage, seeing the assignment as a mental challenge. Rigor is a skill needed in order to successfully complete the college application process.

Boys and girls both benefit from physical fitness. At the secondary level, that can take different forms. Outside the United States, some high schools have a fifteen- or twenty-minute exercise program for all students every morning. Requiring more physical education (“gym”) classes is also an option. The solution could even be as simple as encouraging students who live near the school to walk instead of drive to school. The existence of high school athletic teams and programs muddies the perception on this question. Most students are never a part of a high school athletic team or program during their four years.

These are merely a few preliminary ideas which will require much more examination and refinement. But nothing will change if no action is taken. In Belkin’s 2021 article, he states:

​​Men are abandoning higher education in such numbers that they now trail female college students by record levels.

By 2024, things had only gotten worse.

Hope is to be found: increasingly, high school administrators, college administrators, and parents are seeing the systematic disadvantages confronting boys. A century or two ago, Americans worked to make education available to women. Now they work to make it available to men.

Education: Vertical or Horizontal

Microeconomists work with two concepts of integration: vertical and horizontal. Can these apply also to education?

In the business world, an example of vertical integration could be a manufacturing company which expands by purchasing the company which provides raw materials and by purchasing the company which distributes and retails its finished products.

An example of horizontal integration might be a regional supplier of one product purchasing the suppliers of the same product in neighboring regions, or even by acquiring other suppliers of the product in its own region.

Applying these principles to education, one might conclude that, in many cases, American education is vertically integrated. Many public schools systems, and quite a few private ones, cover the supply chain from Kindergarten through 12th grade. Some even include pre-K.

On the other hand, there seems to be a lack of horizontal integration. Although the nationwide impact of federal policies is growing, it remains a small influence on the day-to-day operations of most public schools. The impact of state governments varies somewhat among the fifty states, from those states which allow local school boards to have the majority of the decision-making power to those state governments which make significant educational policy decisions and leave it to the local boards to implement the statewide policies.

In any case, it is plausible to hypothesize that public education systems in the United States are more vertically integrated than horizontally integrated.

What would be the effect of reversing this situation? How would it be if education were more horizontally integrated, and less vertically integrated?

This might happen if, e.g., the K through 12 system were broken into three units: the K through 5 primary school, the 6 through 8 middle school, and the 9 through 12 high school. Of course, these divisions are somewhat arbitrary.

Having divided the system into three segments, each of the segments could merge with neighboring regional segments at the same level. The K through 5 segment in one town or county could merge with the K through 5 segment in a neighboring town or county.

The total number of educational systems would at first be increased, as each system is divided into three systems, but then the number of systems would decrease, as the systems which serve the same levels merge with each other.

A K-12 system serves 13 levels. A school district with 20,000 pupils serves approximately 1,500 pupils at each level.

A system with more horizontal and less vertical integration would serve 20,000 pupils — for example, in grades 9 through 12 — by serving 4 levels with 5,000 pupils at each level.

By breaking the K-12 range into three units, more focus and specialization could bring expertise to each level.

It seems odd that the currently widespread K-12 model addresses the education of five-year-old Kindergarten pupils in the same breath with which it addresses the education of eighteen-year-old 12th-grade students. Is it efficient to place such disparate enterprises into the same administration?

If this project were carried out, then eventually one might see utterly separate teacher training programs at the university level: Why would a Kindergarten teacher and a twelfth-grade calculus teacher attend the same “school of education” at the university? Eventually, they might have utterly separate professional associations and collective bargaining units. There would be separate boards of education at the state and local levels.

These suggestions are not purely hypothetical. In several countries around the world, variations of these ideas have been implemented.

With a decrease in vertical integration, more proficiency in teaching could be developed for each level. Pedagogical methodologies would be more finely-tuned.

Different Ways of Measuring School Safety

Evaluating any aspect of education in the United States is a complex task. There are geographic variables: from city to city, from county to county, and from state to state. There are various types of schools: public, private, and charter — and within those three categories, numerous subcategories. There are various levels: some localities operate a K through 6 elementary school, while others opt for K through 5; similar choices exist for ways to figure secondary education up through grade 12.

The generalizations which human thought naturally seeks are therefore difficult to produce accurately. It is more informative to ask about schools within one of the fifty states than to ask about national statistics. It is more productive to ask about a county’s or a city’s schools than to ask about statewide averages. It is most significant to learn about one specific school.

While people often investigate national trends in education, they usually also have in mind one particular school. Yet one must inspect national statistics, if for no other reason than it is the mode of the current time to discuss education in this way.

This includes the grim and troubling topic of school shootings.

According to a September 2023 report from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), there were 108 deaths in active shooter incidents at elementary and secondary schools in the years from 2000 to 2021. Confusingly, the same source gives an average annual of between 40 and 60 violent deaths at American schools. The discrepancy may arise from including non-firearm deaths.

The Center for Homeland Defense and Security (CHDS) lists 573 shooting fatalities from 1970 to 2022 in schools, a rate nearly double the NCES figures.

The contrast between the NCES numbers and the CHDS numbers highlight the need to pay attention to statistical methodologies.

By contrast, Statista reports that there were 21,156 homicides in the United States in 2021. That is part of a long-term downward trend in the annual number of homicides which began in 1991, when there were 24,700 deaths by homicide.

This would yield a general result of roughly five to eleven deaths per year in school shootings, with perhaps approximately 21,000 homicides per year outside of schools.

One might conclude that schools are not such terribly dangerous places after all.

Yet the number of shooting deaths, or even the larger number of violent deaths, is only one way to measure the safety, or lack of safety, in schools.

Significant other forms of harm can, and sadly do, happen to students, like graduating without the ability to accurately manipulate the quadratic formula, or to present well interpersonally in job interviews. It is a tangible harm for students to complete a K-12 program without being able to conceptualize abstractly the grammar of their native language or of a second language which they have studied.

In sum, it is harmful to students not to receive the full content of a legitimate curriculum. Their lives are diminished if they cannot find Paraguay on a map, or explain General Pershing’s significance in WW1. They have lost something if they have not read the works of Raymond Chandler, Arthur Conan Doyle, John Locke, P.G. Wodehouse, or H.P. Lovecraft.

To keep students safe is first to reduce even further the small number of deaths which do occur in schools, but also to ensure that the lives thus saved are enriched and enlivened by significant learning.

What’s the Difference Between Homework and Studying? And Why Does It Matter?

At some point during the K-12 years, students should — but sometimes don’t — conceptualize the distinction between “doing homework” and “studying.” Until these two activities are understood as separate, a student’s progress remains suboptimal.

As long as studying remains a mysterious activity, often indistinguishable from doing homework, teachers often remedy the situation by assigning more homework to make up for the lack of studying. A concrete example:

A teacher might assign the students to “study pages 50 to 100” with the goal of being prepared for a classroom discussion of those pages three days from now and a written examination about those pages four days from now. This assignment will be productive if the students understand what it means to study and if they know how to study.

If the teacher suspects that the students do not know what studying is, and do not know how to study, then the teacher may well create homework to substitute for the studying that can’t or won’t happen. Such homework might be in the form of, e.g., a series of questions about the assigned pages: questions which the students must answer in written form, bringing those written answers to class after completing the homework outside of class time.

In response to those who argue that “teachers assign too much homework” or that “teachers give too great a weight to homework in the grading process,” one might answer that if more time, energy, and attention were devoted by teachers to explaining study skills; if more time, energy, and attention were devoted by students to learning study skills and to studying; and if both parents and society expected students to study; then less homework would be needed and less homework would be assigned.

There is a reciprocity: where there is more studying, there is less homework; where there is less studying, there is more homework.

Surveying school systems around the globe, one can find various configurations: some schools assign little homework, but students are expected to be able to study a text and prepare for discussions and examinations by studying the text. Other schools expect little studying, and students prepare for discussions and prepare for examinations by completing many homework assignments.

Studying is a skill which is part of the move toward independent learning. Homework is an activity which is part of dependent learning. The K-12 journey is, one hopes, a move from dependent to independent learning.

Hiring an Expert Speaker to Present to Your Faculty? Do Your Homework: Examine the Public Record

During the 2021-2022 academic year, the Ann Arbor Public Schools (AAPS) hired Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz to give a series of presentations to teachers. Thousands of dollars were paid to Dr. Sealey-Ruiz for a series of Zoom tele-presentations or webinars.

These events proved initially to be relatively unremarkable. This, however, changed abruptly.

One presentation was scheduled the day after a separate presentation had been scheduled, not primarily for the AAPS teaching faculty, but rather for the Ann Arbor community at large. Someone had envisioned that parents and other residents of the city would want to attend this online event. The event was quite poorly attended. Among the several causes leading to the minimal participation was a lack of publicity about the event. It is not clear whether this was due to poor planning or an internal communications glitch inside the AAPS. It was, in any case, probably an innocent mistake or miscalculation; it does not seem that anyone intended to deliberately torpedo the event.

It certainly would have been disappointing to the administration of the AAPS that so few people logged on to see and hear the presentation by Dr. Sealey-Ruiz. It certainly was also a disappointment to Sealey-Ruiz herself, although her rate of pay for the work was not affected by the attendance numbers.

What was, however, noteworthy was anger and invective which Dr. Sealey-Ruiz aimed at the teachers at the next day’s meeting. Fresh off the disappointment of the previous day’s low attendance, and apparently unaware that teachers had not been asked to attend the poorly-attended session, but rather merely informed about it, she accused teachers of a long list of failings. More precisely, the meeting had barely been mentioned to the teachers at all, buried in a multi-page administrative email, so that a few teachers were barely aware of its existence, and many other teachers not aware at all.

It seemed not to have occurred to Dr. Sealey-Ruiz, or not to matter to her, that this was simply to be explained as a communications glitch, and not as some grand statement of intent.

Instead, she continued with her embarrassing and shocking tirade, hurling reproaches in a painful tongue-lashing. It is not surprising that she would be angry or disappointed. It is surprising that she leveled a significant degree of animosity toward the faculty and that she failed to understand that it was probably innocent miscommunication which led to insufficient publicity and the subsequent low levels of attendance.

Yet the surprise might have been predicted. A survey of Dr. Sealey-Ruiz’s published works reveals hints about her temperament. She has a rather high opinion of herself. In one passage from her book Love from the Vortex, she writes:

I have come to the realization that no man on earth will ever be able to comprehend the depths of love I have to offer.

Her work is largely affective. She refers repeatedly to a concept which she calls “critical love.” Her writing makes it clear that her concept of education is driven by emotion.

In another passage from that book, she writes:

I am truly happy that you are happy. Yet, I am also sad about your happiness; for, if you were experiencing just a little unhappiness, then it could open up an opportunity for me to experience total bliss.

Given the two quotes above, and other similar texts which could be cited, the bitter outburst, captured on Zoom and witnessed live by almost 2,000 participants, might not have been a surprise.

The lesson: It might be good to screen or otherwise look into speakers before hiring them for a series of presentations.

The Omnibus Grade: A Systemic Weakness in Measuring and Evaluating Students

Educators who otherwise disagree on nearly every topic can unite around the position that the current system for measurement and evaluation, as it is found in most U.S. public school systems, is suboptimal. A semester’s worth of work in a high school class is allegedly captured in a single letter.

More detailed and nuanced grading systems are desirable, and will give more information about the student. Many such systems are possible: the readers, upon reflection, can envision their own.

Imagine that, at the end of the semester, a student were to receive four grades: a numerical or letter grade in each of three categories — mastery of content and curriculum, work habits and completion, and ranking relative to peers — the fourth grade would consist of a narrative or commentary on the student and the student’s work.

This system would much more powerfully describe the student’s experience and achievements during the semester. Again, this is simply one of many hypothetically possible systems which would be superior to current practice.

Yet the reader is ill-advised to invest much energy into the task of imagining a better grading system, or how the current system could be improved. Change is unlikely.

In order to implement any significantly preferable grading system, agreement or consent would be required from: parents, teachers, administrators, local school boards, state-level education bureaucrats, admissions officers at colleges and universities, local voters, labor union leaders, national-level education bureaucrats, and others.

The likelihood of finding a new grading system which is both significantly better and capable of obtaining approval from the above-listed stakeholders is near zero. America is stuck with a suboptimal grading system.

In the absence of a newer and better system, admissions officers at colleges and universities develop workarounds: increased reliance on standardized testing, face-to-face interviews, each institution’s own admissions test, etc.

The current high school grading system is bad, and not likely to get better.