What REALLY Happens When You Go to College
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Why should I question whether college is worth the cost?
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If you are one of those people, or if you're a parent preparing to send your kid to college, there's one question you ought to ask before virtually any other. Why are you doing this? Why? Today we're going to talk about what you'll actually find on a college campus today, should you even decide to go in the first place. The good, the bad, the ugly. Consider this my advice on getting everything you can out of college without college destroying you. So for decades, Americans were sold a pretty simple formula for success. You graduate high school, you go to college, you get a degree. And then you get a job and then you make money. And for a while, that formula seemed to kind of work. Today, it isn't remotely that simple because college got really expensive.
It turns out that when you send every single human to college, then the cost goes up because you have artificially spurred the demand without radically increasing the supply. And when you have the federal government subsidize all of that, the cost goes up even faster than that. The value of a degree goes down because more people have one. And, by the way, more degrees crop up that are crap because there's more of a market for the degrees. There are more alternatives to college out there that can be just as lucrative for some young people. People like Mike Rowe have spent years telling young Americans there are enormous opportunities in the skilled trades.
How do rising tuition and government subsidies affect the value of a degree?
At the opposite end of the occupational spectrum, companies like Palantir are looking for talented high school grads and saying, hey, maybe instead of doing the four years at university, spending a couple hundred thousand dollars to get yourself into debt, maybe you should just go do something useful. So at the end of the day, going to college is not the goal. College is not the American dream. College is a tool. And sometimes it's useful and sometimes it's not. Opportunity is the American dream. College is one possible way to gain that opportunity. Now, listen, I went to college. I went to UCLA. I studied political science. And that was a tool to get me to Harvard Law School, which was a tool to get me to work at a law firm and also a tool to teach me to think in a particular way.
Credentialing does matter in American life. I took on some private debt when I went to Harvard Law and I paid it off. I tightened my belt to pay off my college and my law school loans after I paid for my wife's. College loans, I paid for her medical school loans as well. Eventually, we paid all of those loans off. Those investments turned out to be worthwhile because it turns out that actually your income trajectory goes up pretty steeply if you go to a top-level law school. Of course, because again, much more selective. But, and not all degrees are the same. Not all majors are the same. Not all areas of study are the same. Again, my job was literally doing political theory and applying the law, and that went right into the job description.
I graduated college back in 2004. I graduated law school in 2007, so I'm old. Today, the price of higher education has gone way, way, way up. That is because of government subsidies. It is because of lack of supply. And it turns out when the government says that pretty much everybody should go to college, colleges discover they can charge enormous amounts of money.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
Why should I question whether college is worth the cost?
0:00–1:37
2
How do rising tuition and government subsidies affect the value of a degree?
1:37–4:26
3
What alternatives to a traditional four‑year degree can still lead to a lucrative career?
4:26–7:30
4
How did Ben Shapiro’s own college experience shape his view on credentialing?
7:30–10:44
5
What does recent data reveal about free‑speech climate on campuses?
10:44–13:48
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from The Ben Shapiro Show
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