In Depth: An Education Roundtable - Do You Still Need a College Degree?

With the cost of college tuition skyrocketing, leaving most graduates with hefty educational loans to pay off once they leave school, is it still worth it to go to college?  There's a growing contingent of Americans who say you don't need a college degree to find success in today's world. But are they right?  

We go In Depth with the Presidents of Lebanon Valley College, Harrisburg Area Community College and the Superintendent of the Cornwall-Lebanon School District....... and their answers may surprise you!  

Transcript

Laura LeBeau 0:00

This is Radio Novo News in Depth, and it is our higher education roundtable, and we've got three of the leading uh academicians here in the central Pennsylvania area for our roundtable. I am delighted to welcome to the microphone Dr. James McLaren, the president of Lebanon Valley College.

James MacLaren 0:20

Good afternoon. I'm looking forward to it.

Laura LeBeau 0:22

Also joining us, Dr. Phil Demensic, superintendent, longtime superintendent of the Cornwall Lebanon School District.

Phil Domencic 0:29

Thanks for having me here. It's good to be here.

Laura LeBeau 0:31

And finally, we uh are welcoming Dr. Dan Lufkin, president of Harrisburg Area Community College. Welcome.

Dan Lufkin 0:38

Thank you. Glad to be here.

Laura LeBeau 0:39

Our conversation is about higher education. And uh at the very start of things, the the general question is do kids leaving high school still need to worry about going to college? I'd like to start with Dr. Domencic because you you're the one who uh sees these kids out of uh the 12th grade. At Cornwall Lebanon and and maybe just in general, what what is the sense among students?

Phil Domencic 1:05

So I think the question, do students need to go to college? I think it really it depends, I think is really the right answer to that. Interestingly enough, we still see about the same number of students pursuing post-secondary education as we did 10 years ago. Now, I will have to admit that we're a little bit of an anomaly at Cornwall- Lebanon, meaning that our enrollment is actually up over the last 10 years. And that is not the case everywhere. A lot of that's just the growth that we have in Lebanon County, which is particular to Cornwall- Lebanon School District. But I think that for some students, absolutely, they they can benefit if they're gonna pursue their career goals. Well, I think there's no There's no question.

Laura LeBeau 1:45

Yeah, I mean if somebody wants to be a doctor, there's no doubt you got you gotta go to college.

Phil Domencic 1:49

I think they need to have that. Is there is there other benefits that students can have by going and getting a four-year degree? Absolutely. I think they are in terms of you know demonstrating their work ethic, the experiences, uh, the well-roundedness that they can get from that. But we also know, too, that there are students that are going to benefit directly from going directly into the workforce. We have students that go into the military. Uh we have students that are going to go to career and technical schools. We have about 17% of our students go to technical schools. We have another 17% that go directly into the workforce. So I think what we try to do as a as a K-12 institution is prepare students for what path is going to work best for them. That's really the key. We want we want people to be able to make that choice individually and provide them with a variety of opportunities.

Laura LeBeau 2:36

Let's step up the line. So we'll go from high school, we'll go to community college, and then we'll get to the university level. But uh, Dr. Dan, uh, you know, you're seeing these kids coming, a lot of them right from 12th grade. You know, back in the day, using myself as the example here, community college was like, oh, that's the 13th grade, that's where you go when you can't go anywhere else. That is no longer the case. I'm I'm delighted to know that that is no longer the case. And a lot of these young people are doing their first two years of general ed for uh a bachelor's degree, doing it at the community college level for economic reasons, uh uh any number of reasons why. So it it it it's a much different environment today.

Dan Lufkin 3:22

Yeah, it really is, and it is starting uh as early as high school, uh, exposing students, providing access uh to for dual credit programs, college in the high school programs, and this is work that we do with all of our partners. Um I'd also say too though, as we look at the labor statistics, really by 2030, more than 72% of the jobs are gonna require some form of education beyond high school. So we like to say that high schools are no longer the finish line in many respects. If students, but they get those skills, they can get them in high school, but then also they can advance those skills through in-demand certifications and other certifications that they can build on throughout their life, right? So we know that there's gonna be a great need for these uh certifications in the new workforce because it's so technologically driven, um, that these students will need to be exposed to these skills. And we do that through these pathways, right? So they come to Hack, they earn a skill, they earn a certification, and then if they want to come back to get an advanced degree, they can, or that's when we look to our university partners.

Laura LeBeau 4:32

Sure. And as we move up to the university level, Dr. McLaren, in terms of the students that come to LVC, do you have a read as to how many come for the full four-year ride as opposed to maybe coming from HACC after two years?

James MacLaren 4:48

We probably bring about uh 10% of our students in who come in as a transfer student. And of that, I would say our largest group comes from HAC, and we've had strong partnerships with HAC over the years. But we've heard this conversation around percentage of jobs in the future, they're gonna need advanced degrees beyond high school. I would say a lot of our students come where there is an undergrad and graduate degree all blended into one. So I think about our physical therapy degree. In the same way you you gave the example of medicine. Many of our degree programs have been tailored to the needs of our community, um, and they require licensing or a graduate or master's level or doctorate level at the other end. And so we've packaged those so that students come in, they can transfer in if they come after a couple of years from an associate's degree, or they can start as first-year students, and they travel all the way through to getting the licensing degree and credentialing. So, for example, we we added nursing just four years ago. Our first cohort of nursing students graduated this May. Twenty-four students 100% passed rate on the NCLEX exam. They all had jobs in November. Many of them had multiple jobs they were choosing between. So I think when you think about higher ed and the kind of jobs the futures, it's behoven on colleges to have an array of academic programs that really provides those right pathways between the economy of tomorrow and the students of today.

Laura LeBeau 6:10

Well, that's interesting. Is the traditional liberal arts education going away to to accommodate more of these kind of vocational programs that are at the university level or at the at the community college level?

James MacLaren 6:26

. I would say no, but it's shaping and changing. So, for example, all of our degree programs, we want to expose our students to the breadth of knowledge in different disciplines. And the reason is quite simple that how many students today will s will take a job leaving as a graduate and stay in that career all the way to retirement? It's probably almost zero. I know my daughters changed their jobs very rapidly. I can't keep track of the places they've worked at. Um and so today's gr tomorrow's graduates need to have that versatility, versat versatility, they need to be nimble, and they need to be adaptable. And those are the kind of skills that come out of blending a professional degree with a liberal arts background and mixing the two together in that mix. I think it helps prepare students for the jobs of tomorrow. Uh in fact, to jobs that we don't probably aren't in existence today, so it's hard to train an individual with a specific skill to a career path that may not be a may not exist today but will maybe in a decade or less.

Laura LeBeau 7:26

Well, that's always, you know, when I was uh coming up, that's always was the mindset was that you went to college and and yes, you had a degree program and you had a certain number of requirements in that degree program, but you had to round it out with those electives so that you would be that universal student, have that universal education, have more exposure to things beyond just that one lane that you wanted to be in as a career. But it does seem like today's young people really just want that career-driven line of education.

James MacLaren 8:03

I believe they do from the student's perspective, but we also talk with our employers and our business and industry partners all the time. And they say while students have those skills, which is great to do well within the field, they also need things like rational reasoning, critical thinking skills, creative problem solving skills, the ability to work within a team and collaborate. And these are some of the skills that you get when you when you take those liberal arts classes. So I think that there's still a great need for the liberal arts as well as the vocational technical programs.

Laura LeBeau 8:39

Are there guidance counselors at LVC? Do they do you help students there, or or is it expected that they at that level they kind of know where they're going to go?

James MacLaren 8:47

No, absolutely. We have a whole team of folks who will work with students to uh listen to their interests, help guide them through academic options. We'll have students, for example, who might study one particular area and like it in high school and not like it in college, and vice versa, things that they didn't enjoy in high school. Perhaps they they find a new passion as they get older and and learn more. So we absolutely have a lot of support. And I think that's where a school like LVC stands apart from many of the larger schools, that large one up the road, Penn State. We are able to work with students as individuals and help um provide coaching and support for them. So we actually find we have great students coming out of 11 Cole School School District. A good number of our nursing students that I just alluded to came out of your school districts and they just aced the national exams and all got great job opportunities. So we feel that we get really well-prepared students on the whole, but we also make sure that we have the support structures in place, whether it's guidance on academic options or studying skills, etc., living away from home for the first time. Um we do know that students today face many more challenges around mental health, uh, which can have big impacts on their academic performance, or what might seem like struggling in the classroom might have its cause in a different area. And so we have a full service of counseling and health support for those students as well. So we try to really provide a you know fully comprehensive support structure for our students, and the results uh uh play out that our students have really good outcomes.

Laura LeBeau 10:19

And at HACC I know that there is guidance and and all sorts of career uh preparation and help.

Dan Lufkin 10:26

Yeah, we have all those services as well. We take a holistic approach as well from trying to eliminate barriers, uh housing, food insecurities, mental health. You know, we know that our students struggle at varying levels with that. But it is really trying to get a student on a career pathway that they can identify with, where they can see the potential for earnings uh for family sustaining wages down the road, a career path to where if they want to go back to college to earn that advanced degree. But again, going back to my own experience too, you know, when I went to college, I think I had five different disciplines before I finally landed on what I wanted to do.

Laura LeBeau 11:07

What's wrong with me? I went for one thing and I'm doing it.

Dan Lufkin 11:12

That's great. And some people do, they know they come in and they like you, they have the plan and they say, I'm starting at A and tell me how to get to B and it's gonna and it's gonna be a career. But others, you know, and that's another going back to the liberal arts uh experience is sometimes you're exposed to new disciplines where you find a new passion. Yeah, and that's okay too, but it's almost starting over sometimes because you're going in one direction and now you found a new passion, so you have to, you know, get on that track.

Laura LeBeau 11:43

Do you, gentlemen, like online learning? Do you do you like all that cyber education?

Phil Domencic 11:49

I think there can be a value to it, I think, but I also think that it works for really certain people and not others. Certain there are certain types of learners that are going to do well in an online environment. And I think there are a lot of people that are going to struggle in that environment. And I would say that about uh students that are in public education, and I think even we see this too with students that go into uh post-secondary education and adults that can struggle with online learning. You know, people talk about how they can they can multitask, right? They can do multiple things at once when they're doing this. Well, can they really? Yeah. I mean, I mean, you're either you're either paying attention or you're not. I think what's also lost sometimes in there too are all the other interactions that happen that are beneficial, whether between the teacher, between students, that are part of the learning experience. That can be very much lost within there. Now, there are some people that can be very successful at this, and so I I can't dispute that, but I think for a lot of people, we certainly learn this through uh the experience of the shutdowns of COVID, right? That uh, you know, we when we opened in the fall of 2020, we had 80 percent of our students and families who returned for in-person learning.

Laura LeBeau 13:02

My daughter was in the seventh grade when the school shut, and then eighth grade we did online. She says it was a lost year. And she was there. My husband is retired, so he made sure she was up, she was in her room, she was at her desk, she was attending the the classes online.

Phil Domencic 13:20

Just a lost year. And I think that's what we learned at least within our space about that was about the value of in-person learning.

James MacLaren 13:26

You have a number of graduate programs, right? So for working adults in a part-time program, the online space is really convenient, right? You've got your busy life with job, family, etc. It works well. And those students are a little bit more mature. But I think to the point that Dan was making, for the for the undergraduate student, there's so much development that comes about through the personal interactions with their peers, uh, with their faculty. Uh, and we saw that through COVID, and um, the students did not do as well. Uh, we've seen that too, that it's taken a year or two for students to rebound out of the high school years where they where they had that online time through the through the pandemic. So I I think I I give this other example too. If you want to be a doctor, you say, well, you've got to go into that. Well, actually, to go to medical school, you just have to pass an MCAT and have done some chemistry, physics, and biology classes. Well, all of those textbooks are available. You can go and buy them at a bookstore, but very few people could get into medical school without the guidance of faculty and with with class structures. So I think at that age, students learn better interacting with faculty in an in-person classroom and with their peers and all the social aspects that come about with four-year residential college learning.

Dan Lufkin 14:42

I would agree with everything that my colleagues just stated that really it is it's the learner and what their preferences and how well they can do in that online environment, right? If they're a highly motivated, again, a lot of the graduate programs, they've already completed successfully an undergraduate program. They have the skills, the aptitude, the ability to excel as an independent learner online, um, getting feedback from faculty. But that that engagement, I just don't think there's a substitute for to engage with a faculty member in a classroom and conversations with their peers. It's just more dynamic.

Laura LeBeau 15:27

So if you could turn the hands of time back or if you could wave a magic wand, would you get rid of online learning?

Dan Lufkin 15:34

Oh no, I don't think I would do that because there is a place for it. Um you know, as been said, uh, there is a place for it. It does have flexibility. It's access for individuals that may not have the ability to go to uh a physical location. So again, there's I think there's there's there's room for different modalities of pedagogy within higher education and K-12. It's just really incumbent on the learner to know what's best for them.

Laura LeBeau 16:02

And do you feel that the uh the the quality of the instruction is as good as an in-person class?

James MacLaren 16:10

I think on the instructional side, yes. I mean it takes it's actually more complicated to set up an online class often than an in-person class. Typically you've got a team of instructional designers with you and you've got a refresh material, and you don't just want to be standing in front of a s a screen having a student listen to you.

Laura LeBeau 16:26

Do they do it live or do they record them?

James MacLaren 16:28

Um it's a mix of both. So uh a lot of them are asynchronous, particularly for working adults, and so uh there'll be pieces where there's video recorded, there'll be exercises, there'll be group things that are managed through our online learning systems, etc. So it's most of them are asynchronous, but there are some synchronous uh online classes as well.

Laura LeBeau 16:46

And Dr. McLaren, do you think that uh collegiate education is going to continue to soar in price to where these young people are getting out of school hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt?

James MacLaren 16:59

So I think we have to look carefully about two costs there. So the the the the price that's put on the college's website has grown at a fairly uh heavy clip right over the last decade. But I looked at our data, and so we discount heavily, which means that the college invests significantly in financial aid to make the college affordable. But that the net average price for incoming students has not changed in over a decade at LVC. And that does not account for any inflation over that period of time. So I think there's this misconception about the the price of college looking at the sticker price versus the actual price. And one of the reasons that that model works well is that it allows you to redistribute financial aid in a need-based manner to help. 30% of our students are PEL recipients, which means that their families' income sort of shuts off around 90,000, is where the Pell threshold is. So we've we've got a lot of students who are low middle income, um, and we're changing lives through the education that they get at LVC. And we want to make sure that we can make that affordable and accessible to students, and that means that the college puts a lot of money down in terms of financial aid, whether it's through institutional dollars or whether it's through uh philanthropy, et cetera, we get a lot of scholarship support from our alums that then goes back. They were helped when they were students and they want to give back and help the next generation of students.

Laura LeBeau 18:21

So if one of Elon Musk's many kids comes and wants to go to LVC, he's not going to have any problem, he or she is not gonna have any problem paying the sticker price. Correct. And so they pay the sticker price.

James MacLaren 18:35

Well, uh uh everybody gets some financial assistance in terms of a merit scholarship at LVC. So um even though the sticker price might say 50, um we've got only a handful of students who pay more than 20,000 in tuition. Uh the average on the incoming class is just a shade under 15,000.

Laura LeBeau 18:55

Is HACC still affordable in in your view?

Dan Lufkin 18:58

Yeah, I believe so. Yeah. We're about a third of the cost of uh most of our university partners.

Laura LeBeau 19:04

Do you like the idea that that you know the students come for the two years of Gen Ed and then move on? And do you feel that you really do prepare them well enough to go on?

Dan Lufkin 19:16

Yes, and I'd say that um we I know that because when I talk to our university partners, they love having the hack students. Um just when a student completes an associate degree, they're gonna go on and be successful at the bachelor's level because they've had that experience, they know what it takes to be successful in the classroom. Just like an individual, I think many times who earns that bachelor's degree and then goes on to the master's level, they're gonna do very well because they have the skill and ability to and they're prepared to do well.

Laura LeBeau 19:47

So is do you think that's what truly community college was always meant to be?

Dan Lufkin 19:54

No, no, I think community colleges started over 60 years ago, really, and you know, we say that to do the work that many people didn't want to do. You know, we started with vocational education, a lot of the trades were done at the community college level, um, from your your pipe fitters to your welders to HVAC, and we still do that work very well. We didn't come, we didn't really become comprehensive until maybe 30, 35 years ago, and that's when we started to develop these articulation agreements with our university partners, but we still do very well the vocational education or you know, career and technical education is what we call it. So that's why sometimes you know we're very diverse in our offerings, so we work very closely with our K-12 to offer some of those career and technical education programs so students can earn college credits while they're learn earning that certificate as well. So that's why I always say, you know, it's about the education more than it is whether it's college or not college in a student in a young student's eyes, right? They want to know that they have the skills, and those skills align with the job when they're completed, right? So when they complete at the high school level, they complete at HAC, they know that they're going to have a job at the end of that training.

Laura LeBeau 21:18

Well, your predecessor, Dr. Sigilski, he was always fond of saying that HACC was responding to the community's needs in terms of the development of programs.

Dan Lufkin 21:29

Absolutely. Yeah, and we work very closely with our advisory board. So we know that our curriculum is built, um, it's relevant to the job skills and the demands of the workforce. And that's how we evaluate our own programs. Our students, I always say, leave our programs and they're job ready on day one.

Laura LeBeau 21:51

And it sounds like Dr. McLaren, you do the same.

James MacLaren 21:54

Yes, and I would I would just argue that that for the students coming out of uh a HACC, we've had amazing experience with great. Students. It's not just Gen Ed that they've done there, though. I mean they've come in with an associate's degree which has got content related to the major along with the breadth of coursework. And so they are slotting into a major in the college where they've been prepared both in Gen Ed but also in their major of study. I think that's really important to note that it's a pipeline from two to four where we leverage all the great work that's been done in the community college, preparing that student for, as you pointed out, for success because they've navigated college already and known how to be successful in college. But we've had students who've come on come to LVC from the Harrisburg Area Community College who have gone on and had amazing careers at the other end.

Laura LeBeau 22:43

So bottom line, college education, good still needed, still good thing? People should try to aspire to that.

James MacLaren 22:52

Absolutely. Now uh you know I I brought some data along, which I thought you might be interested in. This comes from the Georgetown Center on Education and Workforce, where um if we just look at lifetime earnings from someone with a high school degree at one and a half million, by the time you get to a bachelor's degree, you're at at 2.6 million. So the one of the things that's interesting is that's a life that's a compounded ROI of 12 percent per annum, which beats the stock market, beats the SP 500 over time. Now, I I I think when we started this conversation, Frank, you were talking about uh Phil, you were talking about um it depends. And that's an average, so it's not true for every program. And I think what used to be said was it didn't matter what your degree was in, there was value to it. And I would take that back and say, I think you have to think about what's right for you and what makes sense for your aspirations career-wise uh through a college degree. So I would not say it's a universal uh, but for most of the degree degree paths, and certainly I think the portfolio degrees we offer at LVC, because we've been thoughtful about that, they are a good investment.

Laura LeBeau 23:58

So the degrees that LVC, all the degree courses that LVC teaches, there's none that you think are, oh, okay, if you want to have that, so be it. But you know, good luck finding a job.

James MacLaren 24:10

No, we work really hard with all of our students. We don't we have good placement at the other end of our degree, so I don't have any worries that we're asking we're we're putting students in a degree where they're investing their time, their money, um, and their loan debt, right, and not getting a good return on that.

Laura LeBeau 24:26

How about at the HACC level?

Dan Lufkin 24:28

Yeah, absolutely. Um I also uh Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, that's where I got that statistic about by 2031, approximately 72% of the jobs will require some form of post-secondary education. But I also use the example all the time. If you look at the most prosperous communities across the nation, right, and you look at the Census Bureau and the labor statistics, the most prosperous communities have a bachelor's degree or above uh in all of those communities. And it it really can't even be contested when you look at the level of education in prosperous community compared to those communities that aren't as prosperous, right? So your lower SES, right? They just don't have the the degree attainment. Socioeconomic status, yeah. Thank you. They just don't have the the um the ability, right? Because every degree I've ever earned in my own life, more opportunities became available.

Laura LeBeau 25:31

But by the same token, though, you know, we we have a we have a shortage of plumbers, we have a shortage of welders, we have a shortage of masonry workers, and and this these are some of the the programs that the CTC is training folks in.

Phil Domencic 25:46

And absolutely, and that's why my answer is do students need to go to college? And it it does depend because we have students that can go and pursue you know electromechanical, they can pursue plumbing, uh you know, diesel mechanics, I mean welding. We have students that can go to the CTC and they're going to be very successful in their careers and they're pursuing exactly what it is that they want to do. And that's exactly as it should be. And that's why I think it's not a one size fit all to say that all students should go to college. And that doesn't mean that one is lesser than, it's just different. And we need to have a recognition for all those different pathways that that young people can take.

Laura LeBeau 26:23

Thank you very much, Dr. MacLaren, Dr. Domencic, Doctor Lufkin. Thank you so much for your time today.

James MacLaren 26:29

Thank you. Thank you.