Beth Akers - Making College Pay: An Economist Explains How to Make a Smart Bet on Higher Education

When I finished my college degree, a bachelors in math and economics from the state university nearest to where I grew up, I headed straight to graduate school to start a PhD. Finishing a PhD and becoming a professor had been my dream since a few weeks into my first semester of an economics course as a freshman, when I fell in love with the discipline. Id tailored almost every course and experience Id had during those four years to making this goal come to fruition. I switched my first major from economics to math, which, illogically, provides the clearest pathway to a PhD in economics, and I picked my classes on the basis of the sole criterion of how well they would prepare me for graduate school in economics, which meant more math and less everything else. (This will come as no surprise to anyone who has had the distinct misfortune of having me on their team for any sort of trivia game.)

But once I got to graduate school, I quickly realized that I was woefully unprepared. My singular focus on preparing for graduate school admissions had left me relatively well equipped to solve math proofs and calculate a 15 percent tip in my head but it left me lacking the contextual knowledgein history, humanities, current affairsthat would make a deep understanding of economics worthwhile. I was about two years into my PhD program when I decided I needed to step back and take some time to remind myself why economics mattered.

Then, in some bizarre and strange twist of fate, the opportunity of a lifetime fell into my lap. I was invited to spend a year at the White House working in the Presidents Council of Economic Advisers, the group of academic economists working within the Executive Office of the President to advise senior policy makers on all matters of economics. I joined the team in the summer of 2007. The George W. Bush administration was nearing the end of its term, so I expected that Id have a pretty uneventful tenure. But then, out of nowhere, the mortgage crisis struck the US economyand it struck hard. Needless to say, it was suddenly a very exciting time to be a young economist in the nations capital.

Unbeknownst to most people, another crisis was looming that coincided with the one in the mortgage market. The tumult in the credit markets combined with a design flaw in the federal student loan program made it such that lenders wouldnt have been able or willing to make loans to students that fall. Credit had dried up, and without action, college students across the country would have been locked out of college for that fall semester, since lenders werent going to be willing to make any loans to help students pay their tuition bills. I worked on a small team that implemented a policy patch, made possible by emergency legislation, to address the immediate problem. My understanding about public policy and real-world economics jumped from nil to firsthand experience in an absurdly short period of time. And I suddenly had the motivation, and knowledge, to be able to return to my PhD program and complete a dissertation on student debt.

After finishing my PhD, I failed to land the academic job of my dreams and instead was hired as a researcher at a think tank, the Brookings Institution. (This turned out to be my actual dream job, but I didnt know it at the time.) One of my responsibilities in that job was to answer the phone when reporters called and share my insights on the issue du jour. Oddly enough, precious few of these reporters were seeking comments for a big, splashy cover story on the economics of higher education. But after asking about whatever issue was making headlines that day, nearly every reporter, without fail, would end the call with the same curiosity: So, is there a student loan crisis on the horizon?

It was a question I didnt know how to answer. It wasnt that I couldnt answer, but rather that my understanding of the issue seemed at odds with the way that the general public and mainstream media were discussing it.

This was in 2012. At that point we were just three years removed from the peak of the financial crisis, which was widely understood to have been caused by irresponsible mortgage lending. It seemed to me that people were now looking askance at the student loan market, wondering whether the rise in student debt would drive us into the second wave of the Great Recession. On the surface, it was easy to see parallels between what had happened in the housing market and what had been happening in student lending. Wed seen a dramatic rise both in the amount students were borrowing and in the number of students who were borrowing.

But the defining characteristics of the student loan market were (and are) actually quite different from those of the mortgage market. Unlike with houses, most people arent overpaying for college. Thats because, despite the high price tags, the extra earnings afforded by a college degree tend to far outweigh the up-front cost.

In 2016, I had the opportunity to publish a book about my findings, Game of Loans, coauthored with Matthew Chingos. The book was warmly received by many but criticized by some: namely those who were unable or unwilling to relinquish the trusted narratives about college loans as an impediment to economic and social advancement for both individuals and the nation. The book aimed to lay out evidence that would allow policy makers to see the economics of higher education in a new light.

In effect, the book didnt go much beyond refuting the popular but incorrect narratives about student debt. Once that project was in the rearview mirror, I felt compelled to write another book: one that could help policy makers and academics understand the real problems in how higher education is financed in Americaand in turn help them craft policy that would actually help those who need it the most. But in the process of writing that book, I realized that policy makers and academics werent the ones who needed to hear what I had to say. They already had access to my work and to the work of many talented researchers and analysts who came before me. Instead, I realized, it was actually students and their familiesthose of you grappling with the tough decisions about how to pay for collegewho could benefit most from my approach.

As a graduate student, I had needed to step away from the process of earning a degree in order to truly appreciate why economics mattered. Over a decade later, it was only in the process of trying to write a different book, one that you surely wouldnt have wanted to read, that I realized a new way in which economics matters. Economics is simply a lensa way of looking at a problem. And I believe that examining the problem of how to pay for collegeand how to make college pay for youthrough that lens will empower you to make the best decisions possible.