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This article demonstrates that the terms of the debate over whether college is "worth it" undermine composition's mainstay arguments for relevance. In light of students' market-driven motivations, the article posits a citizen-worker perspective in composition that refuses the compartmentalization of economic, cultural, and civic functions of college.
Recent CCC round-robin reviews of books such as Academically Adrift, Inside the College Gates, and College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be have invited compositionists to participate in academic and public debates about the function and efficacy of higher education. Dominic DelliCarpini, reviewing College and We're Losing Our Minds, argues that "current perceptions of higher education present serious challenges to our work," and that "if we are to act as literacy advocates, it would be shortsighted of us to ignore the chance to analyze the rhetorical appeals" employed by these critiques (546). With this in mind, I turn to the recurring debate over whether college is "worth it" and consider how composition as a field can speak back to this debate and why it must.
The 2008 financial crisis and Great Recession caused a crisis of confidence for Americans, reopening old debates over the value of higher education. While prominent public figures such as President Obama advocated for college as a gateway to the "knowledge economy" of the future, the higher education and popular media commentariat stoked debates over whether college is "worth it" if graduating high school seniors and college students faced dramatic unemployment figures and skyrocketing tuition.1 These debates gained traction and appeared in a range of forums from the Chronicle of Higher Education to the New York Times to Fox Business News. The debate has even been featured as subject for the 2014 Advanced Placement in English Language and Composition Examination (College Board, "AP"). Moreover, as NPR reports, it is a perennial question in periods of economic downturn since the 1970s. As such, we ought to recognize that this debate is not only about the efficacy of college education (as Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa's Academically Adrift purports to be) but also is a response to precarious labor markets and economic uncertainty facing prospective college students.2
The terms of the "worth it" debates, which privilege return on investment over learning outcomes favored by...