College sophomore Zac Bissonnette thinks college is a waste of money— for “students who have shown during high school that they’re clearly not equipped to make it”— therefore, they should be forced to go to community college, if any higher level education at all. Who are these probable dropouts? Bissonnette never elaborates much, though he does make vague mention of classmates “unlikely to make it through four years at the school they’d enrolled in… [that] lacked the focus, drive, and maturity they would need to graduate.”

The focused, driven, mature Bissonnette writes:

Government figures show that of students who entered four-year colleges in 1997, just 54% had earned a degree six years later. A professor wrote about this issue in The Atlantic earlier this year, arguing that it’s immoral to tell all students they can go to college, then crush their dreams by failing half of them. But the problem has deeper effects than hurt feelings: the 54% graduation rate means that around 46% of all money used to finance college tuition results in no degree.

 

Which means that financially speaking, the spectacularly high dropout rate boils down to a spectacularly bad investment. Though there’s no specific data, one can imagine the countless millions that are wasted financing educations that never come to fruition. We could try to predict which students would be part of the 46% who don’t finish, then encourage those students not to go to college. But to do this would mean a lot of students who might graduate never get to give it a shot. That wouldn’t be fair. So what we can do instead is identify the 5% or 10% of students who are the least likely to graduate, and not send them to college.

I’m not sure if Bissonnette is aware of this, but “we” do not send students to college. Students decide to attend college and finance it however they must, whether by spending mommy and daddy’s money, taking out loans, or working.

Furthermore, why does it bother Bissonnette so very much if people do not complete their degree? Many students attend college, glean what they can from it, and leave. Is their money any less well spent than students who receive a degree? Are they not perhaps better outfitted with knowledge that they might apply in a field not requiring a degree, such as opening their own business? And doesn’t it seem a bit rich that Bissonnette is making judgments about the probability of students graduating when he himself is only a sophomore in college?