I don't disagree with the premise in theory, but I'm also not fully on board. (I'm sure the authors would attribute this disagreement to the fact that I'm an academic.)

The US is a neoliberal post-capitalist society. If we were able to magically get every person in the country to graduate with a degree, that degree would be useless if we only cared about the economic impact. Because this country doesn't have a social safety net, and the job market is only as good as the profits the oligarchs can make, if everybody has a college degree, from an economic standpoint, that will no longer be a valuable item to have. (Although you'll definitely need one to keep up with everyone else, it'll just be the new minimum.)

So clearly we either need to fix larger structural issues, or realize that there are extreme limitations to considering the economic impact of college degrees. So please stop complaining about academics who point out that we should not be making policy decisions that have a laser focus on economics and obtaining a monetary "return on investment" for going to college.

I'm also completely over the relentless focus on completion. I see how students actually perform in classrooms, and I know for a fact that if we want completion to be in the high 80%-90% range (even sometimes over 50% is hard!), then we are going to have to inflate grades. Then college degrees become meaningless for another reason. I obviously don't have easy solutions to this problem, but many of the solutions are structural (lack of access to mental health care, lack of access to child care, the need to work full-time to afford college, etc.) and cannot be meaningfully addressed by colleges.

And I'll give the authors a _little_ bit of leeway here, because this book was published in 2018, but I think we've gotten very clear evidence that online learning does not benefit most students. I almost fell out of my chair laughing when the authors took MOOC's seriously. There are even recent studies calling into question the "wisdom" that lectures are worse than flipped classrooms. It really depends on the instructor, and as the authors point out, academic freedom means that nobody but the faculty member gets to decide the best way to teach their students. So let's stop complaining about old fart tenured faculty members who lecture. They're not the ones destroying education. ( )