Anthony R. Carnevale and Stephen J. Rose of Georgetown University’s Center for Education and the Workforce recently published a report entitled “The Undereducated American,” which, I have to say, I find extraordinarily misleading.
Their recommendation is simple—they call for in increase of 20 million American college students by the year 2025: “15 million would hold Bachelor’s degrees; 1 million would hold Associates degrees; 4 million would have attended some college but earned no degree.” They claim that if this goal were achieved, U.S. GDP would be boosted by $500-billion dollars, and our country would once again be on top of both the educational and economic worlds. In my opinion, even if this goal could be achieved, we’d be “on top of the world” much as Cody Jarrett found himself at the end of White Heat than in any sense we’d want to be.
I scarcely know where to begin critiquing this report. A useful start might be a comment posted on my last blog by “dvacchi.” While he or she claims that “there’s nothing new” in my post (right about that—I often feel that I’m simply restating what should be obvious), s/he restates it far more succinctly than I do. What’s wrong?
1. College costs too much
2. There are people who can/should be going to college but are not for a whole host of reasons.
3. There are people who can/are getting into college who should not.
“dvacchi” is right on all counts. Bizarrely, though, “The Undereducated American” barely touches on these obvious problems about which all parents and students are keenly aware. Instead, the report’s centerpiece is an odd extrapolation of the supply-and-demand theory to college education. Here’s the essence: “If qualified workers are in short supply relative to employer demand for them, the rational response on the part of employers is to bid up wages for the workers they want—in this case, college educated workers.” I’ll leave it to my fellow blogger, economist Rich Vedder, to tackle that claim.
To be fair, the report acknowledges a political dimension to the relationship between college education and employment. The authors admit, for example, that “the labor market is not a perfect market. It is based on personal decisions, not easily produced products. Furthermore, in the real world, politics often intrude on the labor market. State and federal governments, for example, set minimum wages, and workers can organize into unions to engage in collective bargaining relationships. Government trade policies can affect the labor market, too, through the importation of goods from abroad produced by workers who are paid lower wages.”
But they never follow up on these factors, even though they override all others. Employers don’t have to “bid up wages for workers they want;” they can in many cases simply “bid out” those wages, paying workers in India, China, the Philippines a fraction of what they would have to pay American college graduates.
Another factor in the success or failure of American higher education is buried deep within the recesses of the report. Not until p. 34 of a 48-page report do the authors admit the following: “Any strategy to increase the number of college graduates must be based on improving the quality of graduating high school seniors; otherwise, we cannot produce the additional college graduates needed to meet the desired goal.” This corresponds exactly to “dvacchi’s” third point and it’s a monumental problem. America’s public K through 12 education system has been disintegrating for generations.
That’s fodder for another post to be sure, but the system is unethically funded, based on property taxes, so wealthy children are guaranteed a much better primary and secondary education than are poor children. In my early years at Ohio State I taught a very bright student from a very poor town in the state. She graduated from high school in 1988, and the science textbook she used that year actually said, “Some day, man will walk on the moon.” How she made it to Ohio State with such a grossly deficient high school education is a miracle, but her situation is thoroughly representative of Appalachia and inner-city America. And it’s a problem that would take generations to remedy—even if enough people cared.
Finally, there’s the “college costs too much” component. Tucked away in the final appendix of the report are the following jaw-dropping claims. First, “The National Center for Education Statistics reports that in the academic year ending in June 2008, the average out-of-pocket expenses for a ‘lower middle-class’ family was $10,000 while the comparable figure was $17,300 for a family in the highest income group. All of these figures include room and board, expenses that a young adult might face regardless of whether they are enrolled in school or not (if they are not living at home).”
I don’t know how much money Carnevale and Katz make or how many children they have, but for a lower middle-class family, one in which (in the present economy) the jobs of both parents are in constant jeopardy, $10,000 per year/per child is a devastating economic burden. What if a hypothetical couple, say making a combined total of $55,000 a year, wants to send all three of their children to college? The answer: they can’t—they can’t be expected to give up more than half of their income to educate their kids. The implication that $10,000 a year in tuition, room, and board for a lower-middle-class family is somehow a trifling and easily affordable amount is not only wrong but deeply condescending.
The second claim: “Finally, the numbers on total debt of graduating seniors are not as dire as some make them out to be. Fully 34 percent of young bachelor’s degree holders have no debt at all, while the median debt value of all graduating students is about $12,000. Heavier debt loads apply to progressively smaller shares of student: only one in four have debts over $30,000 and only ten percent have debts over $40,000.”
Two points, and then I’m out of space for today. First, if student-loan debts are so manageable, then why are default rates constantly on the rise? Why do students feel that it’s impossible for them to pay back their loans? From the Huffington Post: “According to a new study by the Higher Education Policy, in Washington DC, an astounding 41% of recent borrowers face delinquency or default on their federal student loans. That makes the mortgage default and foreclosure rate, even at the height of the housing crisis, look like child’s play. In fact, student loan default rates have been rising over the last few years, according to a September 2010 report from the Department of Education. And it’s no wonder, since tuition has been rising above the rate of inflation for decades now.”
I hope this triggers a debate. The Georgetown report echoes the exhortations of the Obama administration, and the whole, the uncritical notion that everyone should go to college deserves serious scrutiny.
