The question economist Tyler Cowen poses is blunt: should you still go to college? The number he leads with is blunter. George Washington University, ranked 59th by U.S. News & World Report, now charges $95,000 a year, room and board included. Cowen calls that a sticker price — a starting point for negotiation, not a final bill — but he still calls it ridiculous.
The record on value is not encouraging. Cowen writes that the money premium from a college degree is falling, even as what he calls the friends-and-marriage premium is rising and probably will keep rising. In other words, the case for college is shifting from economic to social — from a wage bet to a matchmaking service.
Meanwhile the market colleges are supposed to prepare students for is moving fast in a direction many of them are refusing to follow. Cowen notes that more and more jobs will require AI skills, yet few major universities treat AI instruction as a general practice. Computer science departments, he says, have done real work here. Humanities departments, law schools, and other corners of the university are, in his words, working to ban or restrict AI instead.
Cowen thinks that effort is doomed. His diagnosis is uncomfortable for the faculty: in many cases, he writes, the students already know more about AI than the professors teaching them do. That leaves the professors nervous, and it leaves the institution's core product — instruction — increasingly behind the technology it is supposed to prepare students for.
Layered on top of the pricing and the AI standoff is a demographic and policy problem. Enrollments are declining, Cowen reports, and many schools are in financial trouble simply because there are not enough young people turning 18 to fill the seats. He adds that this cannot be fixed quickly — especially, he writes, with the Trump administration being much tougher on foreign students and their immigration and visa-renewal prospects, a pipeline many universities had come to depend on.
Put the pieces together and the picture Cowen sketches is of an industry charging more for a product that pays out less in wages, defended by departments resisting the single technology reshaping the labor market they claim to prepare students for, while the customer base itself shrinks and a key source of paying customers — foreign students — faces a tougher visa environment.
What is true here does not need an adjective. A university that spends its energy restricting the tool employers now expect graduates to use is not protecting learning; it is protecting itself from having to change. The market is already registering the verdict in the wage data Cowen cites — the money premium is falling — even as households keep paying $95,000 sticker prices on faith that the old bargain still holds.
The trade-off used to be simple: pay now, earn more later. Cowen's evidence suggests that trade-off is weakening on the earnings side, while the institutions collecting the tuition checks are, in his account, among the slowest to adapt to the technology their own graduates will be required to master. Follow the incentive, not the admissions brochure. Families footing six-figure bills deserve to know which premium they are actually buying — and increasingly, on Cowen's numbers, it may not be the one on the paycheck.
