When the diploma loses its worth, who really pays?

The Washington Examiner raises a question that a great many people discuss in the language of wages and returns on investment, but which I would press them to consider in a far older language — the language of republican self-government. The report notes that a significant portion of America's high school graduates are now enrolled in college, and asks, plainly, whether that is a good thing. It is the right question. It is, however, seldom asked in the right way.

I founded the University of Virginia on a conviction that has not aged a day: an educated citizenry is the only reliable guardian of its own liberty. I did not mean by that a citizenry that holds a certificate issued after four years of attendance. I meant a citizenry capable of reading a contract, weighing an argument, detecting a demagogue, and governing itself without dependence on a priestly class of experts. These are not the same thing as a diploma, and we should stop pretending they are.

When the credential is handed to nearly everyone, it ceases to signal what it once signaled — and this is the market correcting an inflation, as markets will. The Washington Examiner frames this as a collapse in value, and by one measure it is. But I would name a second, graver failure running alongside the economic one: if we have sent a generation of young people into institutions that issued credentials without conferring genuine learning, we have defrauded them twice — once of their tuition money, which I would note in many cases was borrowed against their future, and once of the education itself. The debt without the knowledge is cruelty dressed as opportunity.

The accumulation of credential-granting institutions that have grown fat on federal loan guarantees — here I move from the Examiner's lead into inference, though I hold the inference with confidence — bears the same scrutiny I would apply to any private body grown powerful on public subsidy. When an institution can collect its fee regardless of whether the student learns, because the federal government stands behind the loan, the incentive to educate evaporates. The alignment of interest between teacher and student — which is the moral engine of any honest school — is severed. This is a structural failure, not a personal one, and it will not be corrected by blaming the students who trusted the system.

I would counsel this: restore the connection between learning and the credential, between the debt and the accountability of the institution that incurred it. Let colleges share in the risk of the loans their students take. Let the states, which are closer to their citizens than the federal arm can ever be, experiment with pathways to productive citizenship that do not all run through the same four-year gate. And let us stop treating the agrarian worker, the skilled tradesperson, the small-scale entrepreneur who works with hands and mind together, as though they had failed some sorting mechanism by not attending college. The republic needs them at least as much as it needs another administrator.

The value of a degree collapses, the Examiner says, before our eyes. What I see collapsing is something more consequential: the idea that education and credentialing were ever the same enterprise. They are not. One produces citizens. The other produces paperwork. The republic can ill afford to keep subsidizing the confusion between them.