Last week, parents nationwide received a jolt from front-page headlines that detailed the activities of college students and how it affects their studies. In their newly published work, Drs. Josipa Roksa and Richard Arum released standardized test results and statistics that showed 45 percent of sophomores had not advanced in their learning.

While that is understandable, this number drops to 36 percent at the time of that sample group’s graduation. Further findings showed that students spend a majority of their time in social activities while only spending a paltry 12-15 hours in study. There are 168 hours in your week.

Pundits all across the cable news programs and talk radio shows expressed their outrage over the report’s findings and wondered how colleges could possibly give parents exorbitant tuition bills with so little results.

But all of that anger was really just faux rage. It is well known that there has been a deterioration in the value of a college education over the past 20 years, as more dollars chase fewer returns. In fact, Forbes magazine showed that if a college education were a “stock,” today’s graduates would be paying approximately $50 per extra dollar in earnings when compared to a non-graduate’s income. To put this in comparison, a P/E of 30 for a growth stock—the class that a college degree would belong—normally signals investors to run fast. Extremely fast.

So this really brings up a question that many of us may not want to hear. Should everyone currently in college be in college? Sadly, probably not.

Having experienced the increased political pressure in the 1980s to boost the number of graduates, colleges started massive recruiting drives similar to the Capstone’s quest to increase its enrollment to 30,000. But not everyone in the new classes could afford college, so government and private student lending took off, as well as an expansion in Pell Grant and scholarship dollars.

While some of these students were of collegiate caliber, many of these new students would have never been admitted under previous academic standards, something that the University seems to have avoided by targeting top students from outside the state of Alabama. (As a note, this criticism applies to students of all socioeconomic backgrounds; many students who come here on Pell Grants and Perkins Loans have excelled academically, and affluent individuals do not always do as well as expected.)

This inevitably led to the reduction in degree requirements as well as course expectations. When talking with members of my engineering department’s advisory board, I found they were required to take 156 hours, including a full spread of chemistry and physics courses. Today, only 120 hours are required. Since a graduate degree in my field requires 24 hours, my master’s degree now has the “equivalency” of yesterday’s bachelor’s degree. This is reflected in the previously mentioned study, as even though the 2,300 students surveyed did not spend much time in study, their average GPA was 3.2. Is it any wonder that wages have risen slower than inflation in the past 30 years?

Indeed, the naysayers are probably already writing their counterpoints to the CW, saying that a degree is necessary to get a high skills job. On its face, this seems to be true. But let’s look a little bit deeper. It may be that a young person needs to go to a four-year school to be an electrical engineer, but what about the person who is not necessarily interested in complicated electromagnetics and power distribution systems, but rather in keeping a piece of machinery’s electrical components in mint condition? That person does not need to be an engineer; he or she needs to be an electrician, an occupation that only requires a two-year degree at a community college.

These are jobs we need desperately, and it is these men and women who make up the backbone of our economy. On the other hand, a supply glut of some degrees will render void any investment in their schooling. I have many acquaintances who could not get jobs in their field after college and had to boomerang back to their parents’ homes or take a position that required mostly on-the-job training because they did not learn any of that information in the classroom. To make things worse, these jobs were usually lower paying than their ideal, degreed vocation.

Then, of course, there will be the naive notion that success can only come through getting a thorough education by taking multiple classes to be “well-rounded.” This is, at best, a fallacy and, at worst, a lie. In Tom Stanley’s “The Millionaire Mind,” he found that only 22 percent rated their educational attainment as an important key to their success; on the other hand, these decamillionaires were able to communicate well with others, and had phenomenal levels of integrity.

In fact, the average GPA of those Stanley surveyed was 2.9, not the 4.0 that we all think, and a majority had SAT scores in the 900s or below. Using the detractor’s logic, Andrew Carnegie and Albert Einstein would have gotten nowhere in life because they didn’t attend an overhyped university.

I am not encouraging anyone to immediately run to the Student Services Center and sign their withdrawal papers. We, as Americans, though, do need to reevaluate our priorities when it comes to figuring out if a college degree for all is truly in our best interests.

Gregory Poole is a graduate student in metallurgical engineering. His column runs biweekly on Wednesdays.