IELTS Academic Reading — Practice Test 25

A university degree has long been sold as the surest route to prosperity, and for much of the past century the promise held. In many wealthy countries, however, the price of that route has climbed far faster than incomes. In the United States, the average published tuition at a private four-year college has more than doubled in real terms since the 1980s, and total student debt now exceeds 1.7 trillion dollars, a figure larger than the country's outstanding credit-card debt. As borrowing has swelled, a once-settled assumption, that higher education always pays for itself, has come under sustained scrutiny.

The case for going to university rests on what economists call human capital: the idea that education makes workers more productive and so commands higher wages. The evidence for a 'graduate premium' is substantial. Across most developed economies, those with a degree earn, on average, considerably more over a lifetime than those without one, and are less likely to be unemployed. Supporters argue that this gap justifies the cost, and that even a sizeable loan is worthwhile if it buys entry to a lifetime of higher earnings. On this view, tuition is not an expense but an investment, and one that yields a healthy return.

The trouble with an average is that it conceals enormous variation. The premium is generous for graduates in fields such as engineering, computing and medicine, but slender or even negative in some others once the cost of study and the years of foregone earnings are counted. It also assumes that the student in fact graduates. A significant share of those who enrol never complete their degree, yet they still carry the debt they took on, arguably the worst of both worlds, since they bear the cost of higher education without gaining the credential that delivers the premium. Nor is the field of study the only thing that matters: the reputation of the institution, the strength of the local job market and sheer luck all shape what a given graduate actually earns. The headline figure, in short, flatters an outcome that is far from guaranteed for any one person.

Why has the price risen so steeply? Several explanations compete. One points to the nature of teaching itself: it is labour-intensive and resists the productivity gains that have lowered prices elsewhere in the economy, a phenomenon known as cost disease. Another blames the growth of university administration, with layers of managers and services added far faster than teaching staff. A third, more provocative, argument holds that generous government-backed loans have themselves inflated prices: because students can borrow almost without limit, colleges feel little pressure to restrain fees and simply raise them to capture the money on offer. Each account has its defenders, and the true picture is probably a blend of all three.

Whatever the cause, the consequences fall unevenly. Graduates who enter well-paid professions typically repay their loans and move on; the burden weighs most heavily on those who borrowed to study but earn modestly, or who dropped out. For them, monthly repayments can delay home ownership, marriage and saving for years, and a debt taken on at eighteen can shadow decisions made well into middle age. There is evidence, too, that the mere prospect of debt deters some capable students from poorer backgrounds from applying at all, which would mean the system entrenches the very inequalities that education is supposed to reduce.

A more radical critique questions the premise that degrees make workers more productive in the first place. According to the 'signalling' theory, much of what a degree does is not to build skills but to advertise qualities the student already possessed: intelligence, diligence, the capacity to see a demanding task through. On this account, employers pay graduates more not because university taught them anything useful but because holding a degree signals that they are the kind of person worth hiring. If this is even partly correct, it is awkward news, for it implies that a good deal of the money spent on higher education produces no new skills at all, only an expensive badge that sorts people who might have been sorted far more cheaply.

These arguments have fed a noisy political debate. Some governments have moved to cancel portions of outstanding debt or to make tuition free, on the grounds that education is a public good whose benefits spread beyond the individual. Critics counter that blanket forgiveness is regressive, since it channels help towards graduates who tend to be comparatively well off, and does nothing to address the rising prices that created the debt in the first place. What few now dispute is that the simple story once told to teenagers, study hard, take out the loan, and the degree will pay for itself, no longer fits a world in which the return on a diploma depends so heavily on what, and whether, one studies.

Ask most people what is real, and they will gesture at the world around them as it is now. The past, they will say, has gone: it once existed but no longer does. The future has not yet arrived and so does not exist either. Only the present moment, this fleeting slice of time in which we live, act and decide, has genuine reality. This position, which philosophers call presentism, has one great attraction: it matches how time feels. We seem to be carried along on a moving 'now', with the past receding behind us and the future opening ahead, and any theory that denied this would appear to fly in the face of ordinary experience.

Yet ordinary experience is exactly what modern physics has taught us to distrust. The theory of relativity, confirmed in countless experiments, holds that there is no universal 'now' shared by every observer. Whether two distant events count as simultaneous depends on the observer's state of motion: what is present for one may lie in the past or the future for another moving relative to them. If no observer's present can claim priority over any other's, it becomes hard to maintain that only the present is real, for whose present would that be? Many physicists and philosophers have therefore concluded that the flow of time is a feature of how we experience the world, not of the world itself.

The rival view, known as eternalism, takes this conclusion to its natural end. On this account, all moments in time are equally real, whether we label them past, present or future. The universe is best pictured not as a fleeting present but as a vast, unchanging 'block' in which every event, the extinction of the dinosaurs, your reading of this sentence, the death of the last star, has a fixed location, much as every place has a location in space. From this vantage point, 'now' is no more objectively special than 'here'. Just as 'here' means simply wherever the speaker happens to stand, 'now' means whenever the speaker happens to speak; neither marks a boundary of what exists.

Eternalism strikes many as deeply counterintuitive, and its opponents press a forceful objection: it cannot account for the vivid sense that time passes. If all moments are equally real and permanently fixed, why do we experience one after another, and why does the present feel so distinctively alive? Defenders of the block universe reply that this feeling is precisely what their theory predicts we should have. Each momentary version of a person, located at its own point in the block, carries memories of earlier points and none of later ones; the impression of movement through time is simply how that fixed arrangement registers from the inside. The passage of time, on this reading, is a kind of persistent illusion, real as an experience but not a feature of reality beyond it.

One of the sharpest arguments in the dispute concerns truth. Consider a plain statement about the past: that a particular battle was fought, say, or that a certain person once lived. Such statements seem straightforwardly true. But what makes them true? For the eternalist the answer is easy, since the battle and the person are simply there, at their own locations in the block, available to make the statements true. The presentist, who holds that the past does not exist, must somehow explain how a statement can be true when there is nothing in existence for it to correspond to. Various ingenious replies have been offered, some appealing to properties the world once had, others to abstract facts that never change, but critics regard the difficulty as among the most serious facing presentism, and as one of the strongest indirect arguments for its rival.

Between these poles lie attempts to keep the best of both. One, the 'growing block' theory, proposes that the past and present are real but the future is not: reality accumulates, moment by moment, as fresh events come into being and are added permanently to the sum of what has happened. Another, sometimes called the 'moving spotlight', accepts the eternalist block yet insists that a single privileged present travels along it, illuminating one moment at a time as genuinely present while the others, though real, lie in darkness. Each tries to reconcile the physics, which seems to favour the block, with the intuition, which insists the present is special. Each, too, has been accused of combining the disadvantages of both parent theories rather than their merits, buying an accommodation with common sense only at the price of fresh technical trouble.

It might be tempting to dismiss all this as a quarrel about words, but something substantial is at stake. Our sense that the future is open and the past fixed underlies the way we deliberate, regret and hope; if eternalism is correct, that sense may rest on an illusion, and our confidence that we shape the future by our choices would need careful re-examination. The debate also marks a rare and revealing collision between two sources of knowledge we ordinarily trust: the deliverances of fundamental physics and the testimony of direct experience. When they point in opposite directions, as here they seem to, we are forced to ask which we are the more willing to surrender. That we find the question so hard to answer is itself a clue to how deeply the puzzle runs.