Let’s resume the debate over who should go to college. Some weeks ago, I wrote a column arguing that the “college for all” philosophy is a major blunder of educational policy.
Its defects, as I outlined them, include:
● The lowering of college entrance requirements, except at elite schools (in 2008, about 20 percent of four-year schools had “open admissions” policies, meaning that virtually anyone with a high-school diploma could get in).
● The dumbing down of college standards (one study I cited found that about a third of college seniors hadn’t improved their analytical skills).
● Much human and financial waste — the dropout rate at four-year schools is roughly 40 percent, and many of these students leave with large debts.
● A monolithic focus on the college track in high school that ignores the real-life needs of millions of students who either won’t start or won’t finish college and would benefit more from vocational programs.
Naturally, this critique didn’t please the barons of higher education. One of them — William Kirwan, chancellor of the University System of Maryland — penned a long rebuttal [“Not college for all, but college for more”], which ran in The Washington Post June 8.
Let me summarize Kirwan’s arguments and show why they’re wrong.
For starters, he says my premise is a straw man. “Those who are serious about education policy have never proposed anything remotely close to 100 percent college attendance or college completion,” he writes.
This is true — but also irrelevant and misleading. It’s correct that education experts have rarely, if ever, suggested that everyone would go to college. But they’ve created a climate in which going to college is the main or only standard of success in high school. If you don’t go to college, you’re judged second-rate and a failure. From students’ perspective, college-for-all is the reigning ethos. And it’s the students, not the experts, who matter most.
Here’s Kirwan’s own mushy standard of who should go: “All kids who want to go to college and are capable of handling college-level work (should) have the opportunity to do so.” The trouble is that many students incapable of doing college-level work — even with diluted standards — are already going. The proof of this lies not only in high dropout rates but also in remedial classes, mostly in English and math, required of many freshmen. For freshmen in 2007, 36 percent took at least one remedial class, reports the Department of Education.
Next, Kirwan asserts that a more technologically advanced society requires a more skilled workforce, and a more skilled workforce means more years of schooling. For Maryland, he says, “economists tell us that by 2020, 60 percent of jobs will require at least a two-year or four-year degree.” Well, maybe Maryland is dramatically different from the rest of the country or maybe this statistic is questionable. Whatever, it does not reflect the national situation.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that only 20 percent of U.S. jobs require a bachelor’s degree or more. About another 10 percent require some post-high school instruction, including an associate’s degree. Against this need, the United States is already producing a workforce with about 30 percent holding a bachelor’s degree and another 10 percent with an associate’s degree.
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