The College Fix

As an undergrad, he saw ‘armies of administrators’ and ‘professors who seemed to be on leave for years at a time’

“We saw a lot of heartbreak and financial distress,” economist Preston Cooper told The College Fix.

Cooper, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, recently spoke to The Fix via a phone interview about his background and what inspired him to get into higher education economics.

He started by looking back to the “surge” in college enrollment more than decade ago when he was in college. Some enrollees “were not necessarily prepared for college,” went to schools that “weren’t worth the money” and this led to “heartbreak and financial distress.”

For a long time, college was seen as the only path for an average student and something which is a given for any high-paying career, Cooper told The Fix during the interview.

Over 13 years, Cooper has seen a big shift in how people think about colleges. There has been more enrollment in trade colleges and less in the lower end of liberal arts schools.

Cooper calls himself a very “market-friendly guy” and says he is very happy to see normal people making more informed choices, which is where the most important changes come from.

He works to provide both policymakers and families an accurate analysis of the benefits of college. Cooper grew up in Washington, D.C. and went to Swarthmore College for his bachelor’s in economics. He now has a doctorate in the field from George Mason University. He regularly provides commentary on higher education costs and benefits and has done so since getting his start at the Manhattan Institute.

He saw that there was a lack of intellectual diversity to the detriment of the political right and those who were more market friendly.

In other respects, there seemed to be a lot of agreement on the value of college, and Cooper saw that the winds had changed, and people had started to agree higher education isn’t always worth it.

While at Swarthmore, Cooper found his college seemed not to be using its endowments wisely and participating in activities like fossil fuel divestment. He thought divestment was financially unwise and unlikely to achieve the climate protesters’ goals.

Cooper also noticed “significant waste” at Swarthmore. Specifically, he criticized “armies of administrators that didn’t seem like they were really doing anything” and “professors who seemed to be on leave for years at a time.”

He found that when he tried speaking up at a forum against this, the school presented an “illiberal” attitude. He says that “[w]e were basically shouted down.” Since then, Cooper believes this has gotten worse and cited the Israel-Palestine protests as an example, including multiple occasions Jewish students were blocked from accessing their classes.

Many college administrators don’t “necessarily have a great understanding of the principles of free expression.”

Helping parents is a reward of his job

When deciding what to research, Cooper says that one thing generally leads to another, but that he got his start on the federal student loan program which led him “around the highly differential value of college.”

He said the most gratifying impact has been hearing from parents who said they used his research to help their kids pick a college. It really pops the “D.C. bubble,” he said.

Cooper offered that to make college worth it, there needs to be a path to the workforce. Some majors are better or worse at this than others. Some, like political science, can be useful, but others like English literature are less so. These degrees don’t teach tangible skills which makes it hard for students to pay back their loans.

Cooper did say that there are other reasons to take these majors with a lower return on investment, but he tends to focus on the economic side.

Another aspect is completion rates: “The overall college graduation rate is just 62%, so 38% of students are not getting a degree within six years,” Cooper said during his interview. So even those colleges that offer worthwhile degrees simply charge too much for them.

Cooper says that while his audience is both policymakers and normal people, change tends to come more from consumers.

Other times change does come from the top, like when Cooper’s mom led Washington College. There, she tried new ways to make college affordable through income-share agreements. Bair, a former Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation chairwoman and assistant Treasury Department secretary, also, like her son, comments on higher education affordability.

While Cooper is an economist, he also wants people to consider more than the numbers.

“It’s also important to consider the joy factor, how much you’re going to enjoy studying a certain subject,” he said. “But I think you can’t just consider the joy factor to the exclusion of the financial factor, because obviously money matters a lot too.”

“And having a solid stable career path is going to matter a lot for your future success and for your future happiness.”

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IMAGE: CSPAN

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