Obama:
by 2020, America will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world.
This is kinda bogus phrasing. I think most people upon hearing the speech thought he meant that the United States would begin graduating the highest percentage of the population from college of any nation on Earth. It actually shouldn't be that hard to become the nation with the highest percentage of living college graduates because we are only second now because the Baby Boomers and Greatest Generation were highly-educated. The concern is the current graduation rate, which is lower than many developed nations. (Sorry, I'm too lazy to look up the actual numbers right now but trust me on this one.)
Anyway, Obama and the Democrats primarily blame financial difficulty, which given the rising cost of higher ed I can understand. Sometimes, but not as often, they blame inadequate academic preparation, which I generally agree with as well since our public K-12 sucks. However, and I think this goes back to the long-term versus short-term focus thing, Democrats seem to miss the forest through the trees.
First, no serious person can argue that the suckiness of our K-12 system is at least partially due to the Democrats' beloved teachers unions. Throwing more money at the public schools has been tried, and has failed. Second, providing more and more affordable loans and funding to students seems to have only helped keep tuition rising at a rate higher than inflation. Schools raise tuition. Politicians fund new programs or raise the limits to meet the raised tuition. Schools raise tuition again. The fundamental issue is the demand for college seems to continually outstrip supply, but why is that?
Well, society says that everybody must have a college degree or they are considered a failure. That's not exactly true, but you know what I mean. But let's be honest. Not everybody is smart enough to get a college degree, and this is necessarily the case. If everybody was capable of getting a college degree, then it wouldn't be much of an accomplishment and it would have very little prestige and value. So, we get back to the equality versus excellence argument we had a bit ago.
Where is FLG going with all this? He's not sure anymore. However, his big problem with society's focus on college education is that everybody assumes it is an unmitigated good. Everybody wants to go. Government subsidizes the hell out of it. Schools keep raising prices. Grades keep inflating, which implies it's getting easier and therefore less valuable as an intellectual product. Yet, nobody stops to ask whether this is all worth it. Sure, you have your column here or there saying a college degree is overrated, but generally everybody plays along.
A quality four-year liberal arts education is an expensive product to produce. Furthermore, it can only be truly consumed and appreciated by a portion of the population. And the worst part is that so many for financial or academic reasons incur a huge cost attempting to achieve something they may never be able to achieve, and that ultimately may not even be in their long-run interest.
I still say a three-year degree with one year of liberal arts and two of vocational training would be the best thing for 80% of current college students. It would be cheaper on their part and easier for new for-profit institutions to start up programs, which would, one hopes, keep costs down.
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Nah. In practice, college does become 1 yr of liberal arts and 2 yrs of vocational training for many people, e.g., journalism, business, pre-med students. I think the ultimate problem here is that students aren't ready for vocational training at 18 (although somehow they manage it in Britain, but I think everyone doesn't go to college there? and they don't pile up tuition loans). So they faff around squeaking through a history major and come out in debt.
So my RX? Bring on the gap year so that students get more out of college when they get there. All you have to do to implement this is get current colleges to encourage and allow deferrals, not change the overall mindset about college or restructure an employer system that creates comments like the one Tim Burke dissects here. Facilitate the gap year through national service projects.
So you argue it's maturity thing only?
Not only....but I feel like the thing that has changed in the last 10 years to provoke the "college is a waste" attitude is not what college does, but the debt burden. So I'm inclined to aim for targeted reductions in the debt burden rather than attacking a system that I believe does have a lot of value. And I think maturity would help us reduce the debt burden by reducing the "I don't know what I want to major in" fifth year. And I think a gap year would be more feasible than your Rx.
And I can't see how we switch to vocational training without returning to the same problems of the days when your skin color or parents' job automatically tracked you into shop class instead of college prep classes, and that was a waste of a different type.
Strengthening the community colleges could attack this from both ends---reduce the debt burden of four years, and bring people failed by the K-12 system up to speed.
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