Stop sending boys to college

The Trump admin is about to restart garnishing wages for some of the five million Americans currently defaulting on their student loans. This is happening at the same time that the value of going to college is going down.

Now I’m going to do that thing that everybody loves and say “I told you so.”

Well, what I actually said was that not everyone should go to college. That, and student loans should be dischargeable in bankruptcy. And that the federal government should get out of the student lending business.

What I’ve learned in the meantime is that boys, especially, may want to reconsider borrowing money (and devoting time) to get a four-year degree.

“College doesn’t confer the same labor advantages that it did 15 years ago,” Derek Thompson just wrote. He points to AI automating email jobs. I would also point to credentialism, or the reason that the whole idea that college-for-everyone could solve poverty or inequality or whatever was always extremely stupid on its face. A college degree is primarily a signaling mechanism. The more people who have one, the weaker the signal.

It’s always bad when something becomes both slightly less valuable and also much more expensive over the same period. That’s exactly what’s happened to a college education.

Once upon a time, student loans were hard to get. Banks didn’t like lending teenagers thousands of dollars to buy diplomas they couldn’t repossess. This wasn’t ideal, but it wasn’t an emergency. Few jobs required a diploma. Tuition and housing were cheap. Students either worked part-time while in school or traded off semesters working and saving.

Then, the federal government got involved. Suddenly college went from something every kid who was willing to work could afford to something only wealthy kids can obtain without crushing debt.

Federal student lending is not the only reason, but it is probably the main reason, tuition has skyrocketed far past inflation.

The federal government isn’t worried about students defaulting on their loans. First, because Congress made it impossible for borrowers to discharge student debt in bankruptcy.

Second, because it’s the federal government. They began handing literal teenagers hundreds of thousands of dollars to study film. Schools, in turn, hired thousands of highly paid administrators. Universities built new theaters and climbing gyms to compete for federal dollars students.

Unworried about defaults, the federal government lent to students who were never going to graduate. Now a large percentage of borrowers have the debt, but no degree.

As more students graduated, more employers started requiring degrees for jobs that previously didn’t need one. Other jobs started requiring advanced degrees where previously only a four-year degree sufficed. This motivated even more students to take out loans, creating a vicious cycle.

On average, it still pays to go to college.

But it doesn’t pay equally for everyone.

By 2021, students collectively owed the federal government $1.6 trillion, nearly equal to the entire GDP for Canada.

More than 90% of total student debt is owed to the federal government, with around 45 million Americans in student debt.

Five million of student borrowers are in default.

In 2021, 89% of fully employed borrowers said they couldn’t afford their student debt payments, which average out to around $300 per month. But these are minimum payments. They often don’t cover even the interest. More than one-fifth of borrowers say they’ll never get out of their student debt.

This is why not everyone should go to college. If you are prepared, know what degree you want, know that the jobs it will qualify you for require that degree and will pay enough to make it easy for you to quickly and easily repay your debt or have the means to avoid going into debt, then, great. Go to college.

Everyone should avail themselves of the myriad other, cheaper ways to find out what you want to do with your life and hang out with your friends. You really don’t want to have to pay hundreds of dollars every month that, unless you can pay well above the minimum payments, only grows larger over time, for an asset that is depreciating before you even begin your career and which you can never get out of but have to pay through periods of unemployment or underemployment or career change and which the government can and will garnish your wages or, if you lose your job, your tax refund, to repay if you can avoid it.

In addition to all that, women, specifically, should avoid wasting their most fertile, healthy, and sleep-deprivation tolerant years in school unless it’s absolutely necessary.

Women usually date, marry, and have kids with their contemporaries. Meaning boys should avoid unnecessary class time for the same reason.

But there’s an additional reason boys should be careful about when and whether to go to college.

Boys do worse than girls at every level of education, and have for decades. They’re less likely to graduate high school. When they do graduate, they’re less prepared for college than girls.

All else equal, a boy is more likely than a girl to end up with debt and no degree.

If you’re worried not going to college will make men less marriageable, last May I had good news. Marriages where the wife had a higher level of education than her partner used to have the same sort of negative outcomes as those where the wife out-earned her spouse. However, as those marriages have proliferated, the stigma has faded.

Since then, even better news has come out. Today, those marriages are more common than their opposite, and outcomes are better too.

What makes a man marriageable in 2025 is a steady, high income. Student debt isn’t necessary to get that.

The trades, for example, pay much better than many email jobs. Plus, there, boys actually have an advantage. Email jobs generally require sitting still and diligently concentrating on one cognitively demanding, but often boring, task at a time for hours on end. Boys are generally worse at this, hence the sucking at school. Many trades reward boys’ superior average physical strength and stamina.

More and more high schools are offering career and technical classes that not enough boys are taking. The WSJ just reported on Elijah Rios, the junior who got an offer for a $68,000 a year job while taking welding classes at his Catholic high school.

Every high school should offer a certification or license in every locally in-demand trade at no cost to the student. It’s simply unacceptable for schools to graduate students who are prepared for neither college nor a career.

We should also make apprenticeships available everywhere high schools are. High schools should also offer more chair-inclined kids free access to the boot camps and moocs that teach real-world, in-demand skills at a much lower cost, both in time and money, than college.

Look, man. I enjoyed college. I bet you did too. I also enjoyed cocaine and orgies in my twenties thirties. The moral of the story? Not everything is for everyone. That, and always listen to me. Okay, that, that, and absolutely do not, ever, let the federal government get involved in cocaine and/or orgy lending.