The College ROI Problem

🚀 What’s happening: The concept of return on investment (ROI for short) measures how well an investment performs.

Most people think about this concept when it comes to money (i.e. I used $100 to buy this stock and now it’s worth $150), but ROI actually applies to everything we do in life.

There is a return on investment in how we use our time, what we eat, or how closely we pay attention to what our kids are learning in school.

Today, it seems like no matter how you look at the ROI on higher education for our kids, the downsides and risks just keep piling up.

Explain.

Let’s start with the financial ROI on higher education which has been going the wrong way for a long time now. Over the past 20 years, college tuition costs have risen about 10x faster than wages (adjusted for inflation) putting families everywhere in a bind. To make matters worse, given the extraordinary costs of tuition (especially at “elite” universities), most fields of study simply aren’t worth the cost of tuition today.

But now, we parents also have to worry about the ROI on time our kids are spending at some of these universities. Who is teaching them? And what are they learning? Their mindset and their ability to think critically (or not) about the world around them when they get out is the personal return they get on the investment of four years of their time.

What opened our eyes?

We listened to the testimonies of the presidents of MIT, Penn, and Harvard this past week before Congress where they did, in our personal opinion, mental gymnastics as they explained away the rise in on campus antisemitism since October 7th. More specifically testifying that it depends on the “context” to determine whether calls for genocide violated codes of conduct.

For starters, we are generally skeptical of most politicians, and particularly loathe when snippets of clips are pushed without providing the full video, but even when we watched the full hearing here, it only made their statements look worse.

To any parent who has paid attention to the news over the last few years, these “elite” universities didn’t need “context” for countless other causes they deemed worthy, and we all know that calls for genocide of any other minority group would not be tolerated.

Whether you agree or not, the point now is that at some of the “best” universities we have to offer, these are the people teaching our kids. As parents, that made us sit up and think about the concept of ROI on higher education a little harder.

👪 Closer to home: We don’t want to paint all higher education with the same brush, as there are so many dedicated professors and universities out there.

However, the point is that (now more than ever) we really have to pay attention to who will be teaching our kids. Demonstrating how to think critically about the world around them and to always be open minded is perhaps the greatest possible “return” we can get on our time investment.