Can the High Cost of College Education be Justified?

John Doris writes us:

The recent termination of Naomi Schaefer Riley by the Chronicle has drawn some attention to "critiques of higher education." Some of these, like Naomi Schaefer Riley's polemics, take the form of "cultural criticism" (some subset of which may be interesting), but there's also empirically-based critiques, like Arum and Roska's "Academically Adrift."

The animating provocation in this literature is that students learn relatively little in college; at any rate, not enough to justify the individual and societal cost. I don't have a considered view about this, but I've been teaching long enough to start wondering about what it is I'm doing, and I'd like to start poking around in the critiques (and defenses) of "higher ed."

We've decided to open a thread for folk to suggest readings as well as to offer substantive reflections on these matters.