This morning I read an opinion piece by a professor pushing back on the trend of evaluating higher education purely through the lens of earning potential. His argument: college is about more than money. It's about developing whole people - curious, engaged, capable of living meaningful, healthy, and fulfilling lives. Education has intrinsic value that can't be reduced to a salary calculator.

He's not wrong. That's a genuinely important point, and I don't want to dismiss it.

But.

I've spent my career supporting education in various ways, and I have a kid still in college. So this isn't abstract for me. And the more I watch what higher ed actually puts students through, the harder it is to side with the professor here.

You don't get to charge people a small fortune, watch the price double over a generation, leave graduates with decades of debt, and then object when they start asking hard questions about the return on that investment. The "is it worth it" debate didn't emerge from nowhere. It was created by the people now complaining about it.

Here's what the numbers look like. In-state tuition at a public four-year university now runs around $12,000 a year, a number that has increased by more than 100% over the past 20 years. Private nonprofit schools average $45,000. At the Ivies and other elite schools, total cost of attendance — tuition, room, board, fees - runs $90,000 to $96,000 per year. Four years at Harvard or Yale at sticker price is pushing $370,000. The average federal student loan balance is now $39,633 - a record high - held by 42.5 million Americans. The average borrower takes 20 years to pay it off.

Twenty years.

When something costs that much and takes that long to pay back, asking "is this worth it" isn't cynicism. It's basic math. It's what any reasonable person does before making one of the biggest financial decisions of their life. You can still believe, sincerely and correctly, that education enriches the human experience. And you can also ask whether a specific institution at a specific price is the right choice. These things are not in conflict.

You don't get to keep raising prices and then declare the price debate off-limits.

Now here's where I want to go further - and I suspect this part will be a tad controversial.

Even if we set aside the cost entirely, students are rightfully asking why they're being required to pay for courses they don't want, don't need, and often don't care about.

Most U.S. undergraduate degrees are four years. That's treated as a fixed law of nature, but it isn't. It's a structural choice - and increasingly, it looks like the wrong one.

Most of Europe gets it done in three. England, Germany, France, the Netherlands - three-year bachelor's degrees are the norm. Students arrive having completed 13 years of primary and secondary education (versus 12 in the U.S.), and they go straight into focused study in their field. No distribution requirements. No mandatory courses outside their subject just to hit an arbitrary credit count. You pick what you want to study, you study it, and three years later you have a degree.

In the U.S., we do it differently. We require undergraduates to take courses across multiple disciplines - usually called general education or distribution requirements - before they can get to the work they actually came to do. There's a version of this that makes sense in theory. In practice, students learn to game it. They hunt for easy-A courses in whatever distribution bucket they still need to fill. The History of Rock and Roll. Intro to Wine. Whatever checks the box. They sit in classes they resent, learning things they'll forget by the following semester. Let's be honest about what's really going on. Departments need butts in seats to justify headcount. Students pay the price - literally.

I know this because I watch it happen. My kid is navigating it right now.

We tell ourselves this creates well-rounded graduates. Sometimes it does. Often it creates frustrated ones who are savvy enough to take the path of least resistance through requirements they never asked for.

What if we just asked students what they wanted to learn - and then let them learn it?

A focused degree in the subject a student actually chose would cost at least 25% less than the current four-year model. One fewer year of tuition, maybe more. Less time for loans to accumulate interest. Fewer years of opportunity cost. And if a student genuinely wants to explore broadly - great. Make it an option, not a mandate.

The professor is right that education is about more than money. I believe that. But the path to restoring that ideal isn't to wave away the cost. It's to actually reduce it - and that means questioning the structures we've built around the four-year degree like it's sacred.

Of course, there are other ways to reduce costs. Bloated middle management and institutions with more staff than students is a topic for another post.

But start here. Put students, their time, and their money first. Make the degree mean what they need it to mean. Do that, and the "is it worth it" question mostly answers itself.