I suppose it was to be expected that President Biden’s initiative on some debt forgiveness of educational loans would stimulate superficial and partisan reactions, but I am nonetheless disappointed by the response. Depending on which superficial view one favors, the proposed loan cancellations are either a boondoggle give-away half-way to being a bribe for potential Democratic voters or a significant progressive step toward social and racial justice and the razing of at least one small mole hill on the famously uneven playing-field. The nation is already at political war, and if truth is the proverbial first casualty of war, subtlety and nuance follow very closely in its wake.
The student debt crisis is a national emergency. Admittedly it is not the only national emergency, or even the most threatening. But it does in my opinion need to be addressed. The fashion in which the Biden administration is addressing it not surprisingly has some good aspects and some bad aspects. The muddle is not uncharacteristic of most of the generally meager results achieved in a government so narrowly divided and so ferociously animated by partisan spirit. In my opinion the package is not one deserving more of either praise or blame than at about the sixty percent level, but of course we live in a world of hundred-percenters. Hundred percentism is seldom nuanced. The issues involved here are many and complex. And since President Biden’s action is easy to praise and easy to attack if one seeks to make selective partisan and polemical points, I suppose the discussion is likely to remain at that level. The cost is the loss of an opportunity for a thoughtful discussion in which any just observer is likely to be of at least two minds. In this brief blog essay, I can touch upon only one or two of many thoughts that come to mind.
One of the first points to make, because it is so often denied or doubted, is that the costs of higher education are real costs. Not that skepticism is entirely unwarranted. Like other real costs, some of them can also be inflated. But almost everything about higher education, and certainly everything about residential institutions with serious scientific ambitions, has become increasingly expensive. The principal ongoing task of administrative officers in all but a fairly small segment of American colleges is constricting often good educational ideas to the constraints of limited and unpredictable budgets. Perhaps paradoxically, one of the most obviously inflated costs of higher education is bloated administration itself. In many places there are whole offices devoted to helping students negotiate and navigate government loans! Because if you build it, they will come. The vigorous encouragement to borrow educational funds, especially under the Obama presidency, not surprisingly found takers, both among prospective students and start up educational ventures. Even in the shadow of the crisis, the “demand” side—high school graduates assuming they will go to college almost as a matter of course—remains very strong.
Public subsidization of expansive higher education, one awkward means of which is student debt cancellation, is one solution, but hardly the most efficient. Somehow, it seems to me, the college problem has been separated in the public mind from the high school problem. There are numerous facets of the high school problem, one of them being the dramatic discrepancies among high schools in terms of what they teach and how effectively they teach it. This is one of several serious social issues apparently unapproachable with a liberating honesty and freshness. Is there anyone in America who does not know what a “good school” is? There certainly cannot be a real estate agent in the country who doesn’t. The lives of millions of parents are organized around a belief in and search for a “good school”. And if you know what a good school is, you perforce know what a not so good one is. I will not say a bad school, though the laws of thought do make one think there must be such things. One rough-and-ready parental definition of a good school is a school that gets your kid into college.
I graduated from high school in 1954. I was a good student, supported by good teachers and encouraged by my parents, and I did take applying for college more or less for granted. But this was far from a universal expectation among my classmates, of whom I would guess about half planned to go immediately into the work force. Already the percentage of college applicants was a large increment from prewar years. My parents did not go to college, and very few people in their extensive social circles had gone to college. But my parents, though not highly educated, were well educated in useful fundamentals. They were high-school graduates, a term they rightly claimed with pride. That is because an American high school diploma in 1920 was considered a reliable warrant that its possessor was adequately prepared for civic engagement and a sound candidate for meaningful employment in the industrial, commercial, or artisanal worlds. That is, they had skills of literacy and numeracy at a significant level, some fundamental scientific knowledge and a familiarity with “civics” that were a foundation for intelligent social and political engagement.
We no longer live in the world of 1920. In today’s plugged-in, frothy post-manufacturing America our high schools produce only a limited number of graduates capable of doing jobs for which employers are willing to pay decently and which offer actual “career” opportunities. This is a problem certainly destined to get worse, and certainly destined to widen yet further the very troublesome “wealth gap,” which is not unrelated to a “skills gap.” Right now the first two years of “college”—and especially many of the colleges most subsidized by borrowed money—often deal with materials that rightly belong in well-funded public high schools. Surely today’s students should have the opportunities, and the challenges, W. T. Sherman had in his backwoods Ohio school in the 1830s? Is there a reason that American high-school graduate should not be able to read and write the English language competently, or have a grasp of mathematics to the threshold of pre-calculus, or have had a course in a laboratory science (including computer science), or make real progress in acquiring a foreign language, and enjoy some exposure to the serious study of history, social science, and the arts? That is not too much to ask for four years of study, and no student would have to spend a dime to achieve it. But it would require a lot of what my grandmother used to call “elbow grease”—both on the part of our students and that of our educational authorities.
NEXT WEEK
We are very much hoping that next week we shall be relaxing with old and dear friends in a Provençal farmhouse. Travel arrangements are a little complicated, and I am not entirely sure that I shall have access to the means of mounting a post on Wednesday, September 7; but even if not, if all goes well, regular postings should resume no later than the following week.
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