Posted on 10/22/2009 10:53:08 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
A dangerous idea has been gaining momentum within education-reform circles: Too many young people are going to college. Since Charles Murray took up this line in a series of Wall Street Journal op-eds and then in last year’s book Real Education, the idea has neared the mainstream. Though only directly addressed in a few words, this idea haunts nearly every page of Matthew B. Crawford’s otherwise excellent book Shop Class as Soulcraft, which made it up to number 17 and was listed as an editors’ choice on the New York Times Bestseller List. An article in National Review’s recent special issue on higher education argued that fewer students should go to college, and another argued that students who do go should spend less time there. I have repeatedly heard it ventured over the last year in conferences and in gatherings of policy wonks.
But while the idea that college should be only for the demonstrably qualified may look convincing at first glance, it turns out that the United States suffers from the opposite problem — too few college-educated workers to meet the challenges of our increasingly complicated society. The case that too many students are going to college comes through two arguments: that we have reached the zenith of our ability to produce students with the skills necessary to succeed in college, and that for marginal students, the economic returns from college are not as good as advertised. Neither of these critiques stand up to scrutiny.
The critique of a policy of higher education for almost everybody rests on the conviction that perhaps a majority of young people inherently lack the cognitive ability to master genuinely college-level material, and that therefore even the best school systems can’t ready them for postsecondary education.
To prove this point, Murray reprints in Real Education some questions missed by eighth-grade students who took a standardized test often referred to as the Nation’s Report Card. Their failure to answer such simple questions accurately is astounding. For example, 32 percent of students chose the wrong answer to this question (meaning that if you count the students who guessed right by chance, about 40 percent didn’t know the answer):
What is 4 hundredths written in decimal notation?
(A) 0.0004 (B) 0.04 (C) 0.400 (D) 4.00 (E) 400.0
When a child reaches the eighth grade and does not know how to interpret decimals or the verbal instructions accompanying them, it’s tempting to think that he lacks the cognitive ability to do so, and thus to master the material necessary to succeed in college. But when such a high proportion of American eighth-graders lack these skills, and a disproportionate number of them are concentrated in inner-city schools, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that a crucial part of the problem is the schools themselves, not genes or living conditions.
One piece of evidence is the success of schools like the Carl Icahn Charter School, which serves a population made up almost entirely of low-income minority students from its South Bronx neighborhood. To anyone walking around the school it is clear that these otherwise disadvantaged kids are thriving. On my visit there I witnessed fully engaged students who look you in the eye with rare confidence. Their writing samples tacked to the classroom walls suggest they are mastering the ability to think critically and convey their thoughts convincingly. The apparent excellence of this school was confirmed when the results of New York’s state assessments were released: 94 percent scored above the proficient level in English, and 99 percent of them met or exceeded this level in math. In contrast, about half of the students in the surrounding public school district, which most of these students would have attended had they not gained enrollment in this charter school, scored below the proficiency mark.
Even allowing for the fact that the poor families these kids come from are sufficiently motivated and informed to apply for admission, the evidence indicates that the key variable separating them from their public-school counterparts is the quality of schooling they receive: A recent study of charter schools in New York City (by a team led by Stanford economist Caroline Hoxby) found that kids who applied to charter schools and were admitted by lottery substantially outperformed those students who applied and were randomly denied seats. Putting their results in context, the researchers found that the average proficiency gains made by a student who attended a New York City charter school from kindergarten through the eighth grade are enough to close the gap between the average student in inner-city Harlem and the average student in Scarsdale (a wealthy New York suburb famous for the quality of its public schools) by about 86 percent in math and 66 percent in English. That is, when they attend high-quality schools, students who stand little chance of acquiring the proficiency necessary to attend college under the current system don’t look so different from upper-class suburban students for whom college attendance is a given.
The idea that the public school system’s ability to increase academic achievement has hit its peak is also inconsistent with other modern research, which has found that the particular teacher to whom a student is assigned can mean a difference of as much as a grade level’s worth of additional academic progress in a single year. This work implies that if we could improve the quality of our ineffective teachers or replace them with effective ones, we would dramatically improve educational outcomes. There is plenty of room for schools to get better, particularly those where low achievement is the norm.
The second form of attack on college enrollment focuses on a large class of students who may have the academic ability to go on to college but who supposedly should avoid it anyway, due to the slow debasement of the bachelor’s degree. Once strong proof of broad learning, it has become, in the eyes of these critics, a bogus credential reflecting collapsed academic standards and the curricular inroads of pseudo-disciplines. The democratization of higher education has produced not only vastly larger enrollments but, inevitably, unprecedented numbers of mediocre students. In addition, a higher proportion of higher education today is devoted to coursework in thrown-together fields — such as queer studies, ethnic studies, and peace studies — that are not exactly famous for being stringent, except in the ideological sense. And the fidelity of depictions of campus life such as Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons makes it difficult to believe that study occupies the center of students’ lives.
Anyway, some of the best jobs don’t require a degree. Instead of going on to college, compiling a mediocre record there, then taking an office job, a high-school graduate with good manual or practical skills could receive vocational training and become, say, an electrician, who in a few years could be earning more than a mediocre “knowledge worker,” as Shop Class as Soulcraft contends.
But if the foregoing makes sense, it should also be the case that the economic advantage that college graduates have traditionally possessed is eroding. Yet the wage premium a year of college coursework yields has been increasing at a rapid clip since about 1979. And the premium is responsible not only for wage differences between vocations in which college degrees are the norm and those in which they are not. The education wage premium also appears when economists control for the worker’s industry — that is, the wage premium is found both across and within professions.
This return in wages on a year of college was quite high in 1915, dropped dramatically in the middle part of the 20th century, turned upward in 1979, and is now back at its 1915 level. Employers not only still value the general knowledge and work ethic that their workers acquire in a college classroom, they value them more every day.
What then explains the recent rise in the college wage premium?
Some commentators have challenged the estimates directly. A popular contention is that the wage premium is largely explained by the fact that more-able people are more likely to go to college in the first place. Though statistical estimates are always imperfect, the research on the educational wage premium has made considerable efforts to control for differences between those who attend college and those who do not. In their recent review of this research, economists Donald Deere and Jelena Vesovic describe the model underlying the relationship between schooling and wages as “one of the most successful, and almost certainly the most estimated, relationships in economics.”
Given that the education wage premium exists, it is tempting to look outside of the education system to explain it. One explanation might be that the increase in the return on education has been caused by improvements in technology — computers, etc. — which increased the demand for a more able workforce. But technological improvements are nothing new. The mid-20th century brought dramatic improvements in technology, and yet the wage premium paid for each year of additional schooling declined rapidly in that period.
In last year’s book The Race Between Education and Technology, Harvard economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz show convincingly that the difference today is that while technological improvements have continuously increased the demand for highly skilled workers, we have not similarly increased the supply of educated graduates. That is, the income disparity between those who have attended college and those who have not has been widening precisely because not enough students are going to college.
In the past, technological growth was matched by an even more impressive increase in educational attainment, as Americans, in the republic’s earliest days, pushed children into elementary school, and then high school, and more recently college. In the mid-20th century, educational improvements raced ahead of technological improvements, producing an influx of highly skilled workers who competed with each other for jobs, keeping wages down. The wage gap consistently decreased.
However, in the middle-to-late 1970s, educational attainment stalled, though technology continued progressing. Since 1977, high-school-graduation rates, college-attendance rates, and standardized-test scores have all plateaued. Now too few educated workers chase after a growing number of skilled jobs, allowing them to command ever-higher wage premiums. In their empirical work, Goldin and Katz show that changes in the supply of college-educated workers nearly entirely explains the peaks and valleys of the education wage premium in the 20th century.
The size of the wage premium and its degree of variation strongly suggest that it reflects real differences in worker productivity. Though sensitive to the supply of educated workers, the wage premium is always substantial — at its lowest point, in 1979, the wage premium for a year of college was still about 8.4 percent of an individual’s weekly wage. Employers wouldn’t continue to pay this premium, and they certainly wouldn’t rapidly increase it, if they failed to observe that more-educated workers were also more productive. Though today’s colleges can be made better than they are, undergraduates are nonetheless acquiring knowledge and skills that employers prize. Colleges also impart social and other non-academic skills that can benefit both white- and blue-collar workers, who often must interact with customers and clients who are themselves college-educated.
Reducing income inequality, then, means preparing and sending more students to college, not fewer. Enticing able students away from college, as some would have us do, would only increase the premium firms would have to pay for the dwindling supply of young people committed to higher education.
College may not be right or obtainable for every individual. However, it is clear that American schools’ ability to teach and American students’ ability to learn have not reached their limit, and that those pursuing just about any vocation still benefit from a college education. Pushing schools to prepare more students for college is not only good for them and the students they teach, it is vital for our economy as well. The alternative is an America of fewer haves and many more have-nots.
marking...
A college degree won’t keep you from getting screwed, but it will help you understand why you got screwed.
A good place to start might be making a high school diploma worth something again. It’s not even a badge for a reasonably good attendance record now.
When the govt purports to make everyone special, then no one will be special.
I would be curious as to what highly technical jobs we intend to create...to give jobs to this college graduates? Are we going to drop $45k jobs down to $35k to hand over to these new college graduates?
After teaching in public school for years, I am now in a private college-prep school.
The only students in public schools who will have ANY chance of getting a college degree are the pre-AP/honors kids. (30-50% depending on the school)
At my school ALL the kids are pre-AP/honors and 98% complete a college degree within 6 years.
That’s my take after 30+ years of teaching.
but us RICH WHITE FOLK must pay more for our kids to go to college cause the functional illiterates MUST go to college. (I’m really getting angry with what I see on the horizon for my son who will graduate high school next summer.)
“A good place to start might be making a high school diploma worth something again.”
Bingo!
Lots of kids are entering college who shouldn’t be there yet - because they have to take remedial classes to get up to speed. These are high school grads who should be qualified to enter college as a performing freshman. So - we’re all paying for their education twice - once at the high school level, then again at the college remedial level. Our state reps don’t seem too concerned about it, either, so change isn’t coming any time soon. The whole education system needs to be overhauled, IMO.
Credit school counselors and inattentive parents.
“You must have a great GPA, so don’t take any high school courses that might be challenging...”
So Dick and Jane graduate college with degree’s in psychology, sports medicine, women’s studies, art, poli-sci,...that’s nice...but good luck finding a job!
We graduate about 10 times more of these “skills” than there are available jobs.
Any reasonably ambitious youngster with a meaningful high school diploma can find a job in the trades making good $ without taking on the debt of a college education. Jobs in the shipyard here go begging, even with a robust apprentice program.
There are an enormous number of kids that would be much better served through an apprenticeship/mentorship opportunity.
Most kids use college as a means of exercising irresponsibility at tremendous cost - all the while never using the degree that they obtained.
I can honestly say that college simply helped to get me my first job - that's it. It was a worthless experience otherwise.
A good mentor would have accomplished the same goal at much less cost to me.
That’s my point - we’re in violent agreement.
Yup...that's why we need to make sure that ‘civil rights’ - ‘women's issues’ - ‘minority issues’ remain a booming'INDUSTRY’ in America.
I work at a university. You ought to see the ‘students’ walking around here who are studying these things. But, don't ask them about cold hard facts, how to read their own schedules or even how to find their own classrooms. They're just imbibing the ‘INDUSTRY’ hype like little sponges.
In today’s economic downturn it takes a HS graduate to assist a graduate engineer in stacking cans at a grocery store.
I have owned my own company for many years. I can tell how good somebody is within ten minutes in an interview.
I don't really care who taught them - as long as they have good character, are a hard worker, possess the necessary skills, and have a deep desire to make my company a profit.
A mentor is someone who is a professional in their field and brings apprentice(s) alongside to teach under their watchful eye.
I'm currently mentoring three young men myself.
My son is in high school. My husband and I both have degrees in computer science. Our son is smart, but he does not like science & math like my husband and I did. (He’s good at them, but doesn’t love them.)
He’s loves English, drama, history, and latin. The theater department is one of the best in the country.
He would love to get a degree in theater, but I just keep on telling him that it is hard to make money in that area. I’ve told him to get a minor in theater.
I know he wants to be able to get married and be able to provide for a family, so I’m sure he’ll end up being wise about college.
However, it is very hard to advise him on college.
An interesting article of occasional insightful nuggets mixed in with unsupported anecdotes, such as the story of the Carl Icahn school. I question the assertion related to the electrician’s wage eventually falling behind the college-education wage premium. I would contend that an electrician with a modicum of moxie that went beyond conduit and wires could establish an electrical contracting business that would continually outpace his college-educated peer that just worked at some corporate drone job that required a sheepskin. This would apply especially to the growth in the value of the business when considering net worth between the electrician and the corporate drone.
“The only students in public schools who will have ANY chance of getting a college degree are the pre-AP/honors kids. (30-50% depending on the school”
I disagree. There are some very good public school systems, some of which have very high graduation rates and from which many students go on to achieve college degrees. Many of these happen to be in communities in which the parents are actively involved in the schools, and teach appropriate values at home.
“In today’s economic downturn it takes a HS graduate to assist a graduate engineer in stacking cans at a grocery store”
and the HS graduate is debt-free.
I look at a degree as not proof of intelligence, but that you were good at following directions and jumping through hoops in a prescribed manner.
Do both. I have a history degree, but a science background. It also depends on just how good he is in theatre.
This author is inadvertently demonstrating that college did little more for him than improve his ability to string correctly formed sentences together. The analysis is childish.
Why does anyone bother with National Review anymore?
I would suggest that he double major. It’s ok to get the theater degree (assuming he can tolerate the homosexuals that every theater department are full of), but could get a more practical degree along with it. With college curriculum as watered down as it is, the dbl major isn’t that hard any more for a bright kid. Just a thought!
Yeah, but how many people can get work with a degree in Womyn’s studies?
Too many people graduate from college with no real skills. I’ve edited documents written by people with masters degrees in communication. They can’t write, they can’t spell and they have no hint of proper grammar.
My grandfather, a factory worker with an eighth grade education, had better written and spoken english skills. He also had much greater math skills.
Our educational system needs reform from the first grade. We need a strong focus on basic math, reading and writing skills. Without those, higher learning is pointless.
We have schools bragging about primary students working with computers. They should be learning how to read and write. They should be learning the basics of math without the aid of computers or calculators.
What is the point of a third grader learning how to make a powerpoint presentation if he can’t do simple math?
Here is a suggestion. Assuming that your son will pursue something serious, e.g. computer science, natural science, mathematics, engineering, or accounting, you might look at programs like “College Plus!”. The program provides mentors and materials to guide students through CLEP, DANTES, and similar tests to accumulate general education credits quickly and inexpensively. Laboratory courses and similar serious subjects can be taken in a dual credit program or parttime in a community college.
It actually takes relatively little time to get rid of the the first four or five semesters of college this way, and it is inexpensive. Then the student can transfer to a four year college to take the courses for his major. A friend’s 18- year-old daughter is doing this, and it took her about 9 months to accumulate the credits to enter college as a junior.
Assuming the student works hard and does well finishing his degree, he should be able to get into a first-rate masters program and walk out with an M.S., M.B.A., or M.A. at an age when others are still finishing college and for a total cost that is less than the conventional route. I plan to do something like this with our sons.
Advising him is easy - getting him to take the advice is poobably the hard part. You are giving him good advice.
A lot of the jobs that now require college degrees did not require those 20 years ago and do not require college level skills. We waste a ton of money in training people for those. I’d rather see a much stronger vocational and community college system than an increase in people spending four years to (supposedly) gain skills that they do not use.
BTTT
Can we convert a batch of a couple hundred lawyers into a single good plumber?
Good point.
“To prove this point, Murray reprints in Real Education some questions missed by eighth-grade students who took a standardized test often referred to as the Nation’s Report Card. Their failure to answer such simple questions accurately is astounding. For example, 32 percent of students chose the wrong answer to this question (meaning that if you count the students who guessed right by chance, about 40 percent didn’t know the answer):
What is 4 hundredths written in decimal notation?
(A) 0.0004 (B) 0.04 (C) 0.400 (D) 4.00 (E) 400.0 “
This is 4th-5th grade math. We are not teaching basic math skills well. We know this. Blame John Dewey and progressive education....
http://travismonitor.blogspot.com/2009/10/what-dewey-wrought.html
http://travismonitor.blogspot.com/2009/10/correcting-john-deweys-errors.html
The right purpose of education is learning and training the mind, but our education system, hobbled by the flawed theories of progressive influence in education, sought to undermine real content in education and replace it with socialization (read: preparing them for the Ideal Socialist World by keeping everyone equally dumb), so it doesnt do this job ...
http://travismonitor.blogspot.com/2009/10/focus-of-education-should-be-learning.html
The pleas that we should send more kids to college because K-12 education is failing to have kids learn is a flawed prescription. The proper corrective is to fix K-12 education. Then we would see a huge shift upwards in the capability of students at every level.
In reality, College is a HUGE WASTE OF MONEY for many kids. an educational revolution is about to hit ...
http://travismonitor.blogspot.com/2009/10/education-revolution-about-to-hit.html
Mrs Z,
“At my school ALL the kids are pre-AP/honors and 98% complete a college degree within 6 years.”
As a fellow Texan, may I ask where you teach? And what curriculum it is based on?
I think the key question is: What percentage of students are capable for pre-AP/honors level work, and would it be greater if K-12 schools were better. Your take?
“The problem is too many of our High School diplomas are meaningless. “
So they go to College to prove they are not idiots.
Taxpayers should be outraged that $100,000 in schooling is spent per K-12 student, with so little to show for it.
“The only students in public schools who will have ANY chance of getting a college degree are the pre-AP/honors kids. (30-50% depending on the school”
“I disagree. There are some very good public school systems, some of which have very high graduation rates and from which many students go on to achieve college degrees. Many of these happen to be in communities in which the parents are actively involved in the schools, and teach appropriate values at home.”
... and those parents push their kids onto the pre-AP/honors track. I know. My wife and I are such parents. The *Parents* are the key ingredient to such education. We pick the best schools by where we choose to live, then push the children to excel. schools are little more than holding pens for juvenile barbarians without parental involvement.
“Yeah, but how many people can get work with a degree in Womyn’s studies?
Too many people graduate from college with no real skills. I’ve edited documents written by people with masters degrees in communication. They can’t write, they can’t spell and they have no hint of proper grammar.”
Pity them. They are victims of progressive education.
Degrees like Womyn’s Studies are markers for the types. AN employer should probably consider such a degree a detriment not an asset ... “hmmm, illiterate and with and attitude. why would I hire *that*?”
What do you call a Liberal Arts major after they graduate?
Waiter!
Interesting idea.
In big city districts the 30-50% is being generous.
As long as the family is willing to put in the effort to make something unconventional work, this is a great path. My friend’s daughter will probably get her B.A. in less than 2 years having spent about $11k. There is a cost/time benefit even over going to a commuter school because of the time and gas savings from testing out of so many courses. As I recall, one homeschooler did this program and started taking his CPA exams while he was still 19.
There we go — the keyword is “meaningful”. The problem is too many of our High School diplomas are meaningless.
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Conversations with recent college graduates reveal that a “four year degree” which often takes five or six years to obtain is at best a completion of what used to be a high school education for many. An engineering degree is different but those who have degrees in history etc. often lack the knowledge to pass high school final exams from fifty years ago. Jobs that are actually no more difficult than some that used to require at MAXIMUM a high school diploma now require a four year college degree. What point is there in having these students spend four or more years and huge sums of money (don’t forget to include income lost while attending school) trying to get the education they used to get before they reached eighteen, especially when the vast majority will still lack the writing skills and the knowledge of history that a 1959 high school graduate acquired in the first ten years of school? The whole system is screwed up beyond belief.
If you want a degree go to a university, if you want an education, get a library card, a good reading lamp and a high speed internet connection.
I would take the opinion of Charles Murray (whom I greatly admire) any day over the bloviations of Marcus Winters.
Mr. Winters seems to be your standard-issue apologist for students who cannot hack scholastic achievement; instead, he foists the blame for their failures on the schools and the teaching staff. If it were indeed a function of teaching then you could jerk anyone off the street and make him a nuclear physicist.
Clark Kerr pushed the same BS on the people of California in the 1950s, and they fell for it. At the time, the university system in California did not charge tuition, and was open to “anyone who wanted to attend.” As a result, Cali STILL has the largest higher education bureaucracy in the nation, although Ronaldus Magnus put a stop to the no tuition nonsense.
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