Negative Utility in American Postsecondary Education
I am about to make a radical proposal. I propose that postsecondary education in the United States can currently be assigned to the Negative Utility category. It is the broccoli stem for which we pay yet find little value. At the present time, we are paying more for an education that produces less value than an education for which we are paying less. Specifically, we can determine the real benefit of receiving a postsecondary education in terms of increased prospects of a good job and higher income after graduation when compared to the prospects prior to entering college. We can also determine if there is a better chance than before entering college of being accepted into and completing a graduation degree program.
This type of analysis is called Value-Added. When an assessment of the value added by attending college is engaged, then the “best” colleges and universities are often not those which are most prestigious and most expensive. Many years ago, Alexander Astin (1987), a prominent postsecondary education researcher, determined that a value-added mode of assessment was preferable to either an assessment of a postsecondary education’s resources (number of buildings, size of endowment, number of books in the library, etc.) or outcomes (income after graduation, admission to graduate school, etc.). It seems that those admitted to a highly prestigious college or university (with a large endowment, etc.) are likely also to get a good job after graduation or admission to graduate school—and they would have succeeded after graduation even if they went to a less prestigious school.
It is the student who is not expected to do well after college, but actually succeeds after graduation, who is “value-added.” And these are often the students who attend a community college or lower-status four-year college or university who is value-added; whereas the student attending Harvard, Yale or Stanford does not improve their post-graduate chances just because they attended one of these high prestige schools. They would have done well regardless of the postsecondary education institution they attended. In fact, value-added assessments show that those attending prestigious schools are actually going to be less successful than they were predicted to be upon graduating from high school.
The high price they are paying for attending a prestigious postsecondary institution produces no increased value and may actually produce a relatively lower level of postgraduation success. Broad, diverse access to postsecondary education (as found in community colleges and many low prestige colleges and universities) tends to increase the quality of education one receives (Bergquist, 1995). There is substantial evidence that suggests we tend to learn more in diversified settings, just as we find creativity in these settings (Page, 2011). Many of us (with some money in our pocket) have chosen to purchase the broccoli stems . . . high cost/low value education.
