I won’t rehash what I wrote about over the weekend on West Virginia University’s financial issues. Needless to say, fixing WVU’s issues by restoring its state funding to fiscal year 2013 levels doesn’t appear to be the solution.

Declining student enrollment for more than a decade, a growing budget, near-annual raises of tuition for in-state and out-of-state students and a severely bloated bureaucracy have all created a perfect storm. State funding is one factor, but I’ve yet to see any evidence-based studies about how restoring state funding to pre-Earl Ray Tomblin levels would do anything more than just postpone what is currently happening.

Is WVU doing the right thing now by cutting positions, slashing programs, raising tuition, and raiding its foundation money? That remains to be seen, but it is more than apparent that WVU wasn’t thinking three moves ahead of the higher education chess board.

Some of this, of course, isn’t exactly WVU’s fault. The COVID-19 pandemic pushed an issue that was already happening into warp speed: the value of a four-year degree just isn’t what it used to be and young adults are realizing this.

I like to consider myself a young Generation X member, but in reality I’m an old millennial. I turn 41 on July 18. But probably from my generation at the turn of Y2K up until the middle of last decade, the message from teachers, counselors, and just about everyone was “you must go to college.”

Many of us did. Some of us, like me, dropped out. Others completed their programs, double-majored, went on to get a master’s and maybe a doctorate. And then we went out into the workforce. But with the more of us that went out into the workforce, the more the market became saturated with degrees. Young adults were either competing with others for similar positions, or the value of the position we were seeking dropped.

“That’s all the salary you’re offering? But I have a four-year degree.”

“Either accept the job or I’ll find another with a similar degree. You’re a dime a dozen.”

Outside my nearly six-year period working in state government communications, I’ve been in the news business. I started off by catching newspapers off the press at the St. Marys Oracle; doing a work-study running the school newspaper at Ohio Valley University before dropping out; various print, radio, new media, and TV news jobs in between, and now covering state government for multiple newspapers for the last five years in my dream job.

I’m not discounting the experiences of college and those who went that route. And no doubt, I had to work much harder to get where I am today because I didn’t have a college degree. But I also learned far more from these experiences over a 20-year period than I would have learned from four years in a journalism school.

Even today, I tell students you’re better off taking some basic journalism writing courses and instead getting a degree in another field, such as business, education, history, the sciences, because you’ll be far more valuable to a newspaper or TV news outfit bringing to them experience in a specialized field.

College can be valuable, but higher education definitely has to change if it wants its end product, the diploma, to be more valuable again. One of the first steps starts with K-12 education, in making sure the students we’re graduating are actually ready for college or the workplace.

West Virginia loves to brag about its high school graduation rate, but so many students go right from the graduation stage to the college remedial class. Those are the students most likely to drop out with nothing to show for their time but student loan debt. I know, as I still have my student loan debt.

Speaking of student loans, colleges need to have advocates for students, people who can look out for their best interests, including telling them they probably shouldn’t take out that student loan. Too many colleges and universities are happy to get students to sign on the dotted line even if their grades are already showing signs of slipping. It is highly unethical for students to be pressured to stay in college and go further in debt when it is more than apparent they can’t cut it.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Friday against President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan, which was no surprise to me. I wish student loan debt could be waved away by a magic wand. No doubt had it been allowed to stand, it would have benefited more affluent students with means to pay. But it also would have benefited people who simply made poor decisions in their youth who were taken advantage of by higher education. I get annoyed with conservative pundits who see one category but not the other.

Not everyone should go to college. For some, a two-year community and technical college degree is fine, or even simply a certification or apprenticeship. But if colleges and universities want to reverse the trend of young adults not going to college, they need to find ways to make the degree valuable again and ensure the students they do have, and those they recruit in the future, can successfully complete their programs.