I have more or less sworn off political topics, as there is
already a surfeit of opinionated grumpiness available on other blogs. I may have views on the candidates to
head the FED, or suspicions
concerning the probable economic results of Obamacare; but I don’t flatter
myself that they have authority, much less general interest. Just now, however, the President in his
recent remarks concerning the daunting cost of higher education has taken up
subjects to which I have given a certain amount of serious thought over many
decades of my professional life as a college professor. Putting it rather bluntly I don’t think
the President sees the fundamental problems facing American higher education
very clearly. Furthermore the
steps he proposes do not seem to me very promising in addressing even the secondary
problems he does see.
The
President correctly notes that (1) college costs, already high, are rising; (2)
many students can attend college only by incurring crippling debt; (3) college admission does not
necessarily mean college completion; and (4) a college degree does not
necessarily guarantee a job. He
then proposes that the Department of Education should start evaluating colleges
in terms of their cost containment, retention rates, and vocational
effectiveness. Only students
matriculating in high scoring institutions would be eligible for
government-backed student loans.
I
tremble at the prospect of being dependent upon the evaluation of the
Department of Education for almost anything, but never mind. The President is trying to address real
problems, but is he really doing that?
For instance, how good an indication of institutional quality is
“graduation rate”? Less good than
you might think, and certainly less good than President Obama implies.
The
highest tier of selective colleges and universities is so high that some
institutions could fill the freshman class with valedictorians. The second tier might have to stoop to
the occasional salutatorian. I
spent most of my career in the top tier, but it is largely irrelevant to the
current discussion. My first
academic job was relevant. It was
at the huge University of Wisconsin in Madison. The great state universities are one of the glories of our
unique American democracy, and the University of Wisconsin was, and still is,
among the great ones. I was very
impressed by the institution’s admissions policy at that time, which in a
nutshell was this. Any certified
graduate of a Wisconsin high school was guaranteed admission to one of the
campuses of the University; but applicants were encouraged to evaluate their
preparation and motivation realistically, since they were not guaranteed to succeed at course work or to graduate. They were offered an opportunity, not a
meal ticket. Flunking out was an
actual possibility. The world is
full of people who had “a year or two” at such institutions. They are witnesses to educational
integrity, however, not institutional failure.
The
continuing rise in college tuition has many causes, but one of them
is undoubtedly the easy availability of cheap government money. Institutions of higher education long
ago became past masters of the “government grant”. So have professors.
This is especially true of scientists and engineers, but I myself have
more than once enjoyed largesse distributed by the National Endowment of the
Humanities. Getting the government
to pay undergraduate tuition fees, if only by proxy, is already keeping more
than one marginal institution in business. Encouraging institutions to “teach to the test”—that is, to define
their educational mission as the eligibility to be supported by
government-backed tuition loans—strikes me as bad policy.
A
large, stable, and financially viable middle class is an indispensable rather
than a merely desirable condition of American democracy. And home ownership is certainly a
laudable and realistic middle class aspiration. It is not,
however, an inalienable right. A
few years ago a lot of greedy bankers, egged on by governmental cheerleaders,
decided they could make a ton of money by pretending that it was. The devastating result was the mortgage
crisis. Already some voices are proclaiming—one hopes in ignorance rather than in demagoguery--that college
tuition should be free for all.
We
do have free education in this country.
The trouble is that quite of bit of it is appallingly inferior in
quality. We are shocked, rightly,
at the huge disparities of wealth we see around us. We should be no less shocked at the huge disparities (eventually
related) in the quality of public education. A high school graduate of the class of 1913 knew how to read
and write. Basic literacy—on which
all learning depends--was not the
province of “higher education,” as it increasingly is in America in 2013. It should not be necessary to incur
crippling debt to learn the multiplication tables to eight or ten, or how to
write a simple declarative sentence, or how to distinguish between its and it’s. A high school
diploma was once a serious credential in this country. It still is for some, but for far too
many it is a mere calendrical marker and a license to apply for “higher”—and
very costly—education.
