First High School, Then College

There are a couple of interesting things going on with respect to politicians and colleges these days. Many politicians say everyone or almost everyone should go to college to be able to compete in the global, high tech world of the 21^st Century, or something like that.  They also say colleges should be judged and held accountable on the basis of their rates of graduation, the percentage of enrolling students who get degrees.  A great many people lack the ability or the commitment or both to do college level work, and no politician can change that fact by legislation, executive order or his supposed inspirational qualities.  So if governments get serious about almost everybody going to college and very high percentages of enrollees graduating, colleges will have only one way to meet their demands. They will have to lower their standards and requirements for a degree drastically .

This has already happened in the schools. Before World War II, many schools had serious graduation ceremonies for students completing the eighth grade. There were at least two good reasons for doing so. First, many people’s schooling ended after the eighth grade. Second finishing the eighth grade was an accomplishment and indicated a person doing so could read, write, and perform calculations and had been exposed to at least a little history, literature, and maybe science.  Students continuing to high school were expected to go beyond that -  becoming proficient or at least adequate in simple composition, learning something about American and perhaps world history, studying the forms of the American governments, learning at least a little algebra and/or geometry, reading some good books and poetry, and maybe studying Latin or a modern foreign language.

High school was supposed to be fairly rigorous and supposed to require a fair amount of intelligence, commitment, and work from students. (Years ago, a professor of mine showed me his mother’s high school transcript  from the country school far out in the sticks she attended in the early days of the 20^th Century.  It listed only real academic subjects, and quite a few of them, including, as best as I can remember, Latin.) Fewer people graduated from high school in those days, but a high school diploma gave evidence of some actual learning and accomplishment. In the decades after  World War II, people in authority decided that almost everyone should graduate from high school. Over time the curricula and expectations changed to accommodate that goal. Now many more people graduate from high school, but a high school diploma does not guarantee the level of accomplishment once required to graduate from the eighth grade, not even the ability to read a newspaper or do simple arithmetic. (Of course many people these days graduate from high school having learned lots of thing well and studied a variety of serious and important subjects. However doing so is not a requirement, and many students can and do graduate without learning much or working much.) A prospective employer cannot assume much of anything about the worth of a young person on the basis of a high school diploma alone, and hasn’t been able to do so for a good while.

If politicians succeed in arranging for almost everyone to attend college and for almost everyone who enrolls to graduate, it will not be too long before a critic will be able to say the same thing truthfully about the value of a bachelor’s degree. That would be a sad waste of time, money, and four years of young people’s lives. 

College

It is a widely held belief in our society and a major article of faith among our politicians that going to college is a very good thing and that more young people should be doing it. Most people seem to think that going to college pays off handsomely financially, and a good number believe that attending college is the best or even the only way to acquire what people used to call a liberal education.   This is completely understandable. The last time I looked, the mean income for college graduates was  higher than the mean income for high school graduates, with the mean income for people who attended college but did not graduate falling in between. It is also true that most students do wind up taking some courses in science, mathematics, and arts and  humanities and that most colleges try to give the impression of taking those things seriously.

However, there are reasons to question both assumptions. It is difficult to decide how much of the difference in average incomes is due to college and how much is due to the fact that the population attending college contains a higher percentage  of people who are more prone to success due to intelligence, attitude, determination, ability to make and follow long term plans to meet long range goals,  patience, ability to and learn the house rules and know the score, expectations, or other factors.  The problem is complicated further by the fact that some high paying professions such as law, engineering, and medicine require certifications based at least in part on having a college degree. Excluding that, it is possible that college  is responsible for far less of the differences in average incomes than is usually supposed.

Then there is the obvious fact that college is very expensive, far more expensive than it used to be. One can ask: would  a young person be better off to reach the age of twenty two with a fresh bachelors degree and the contacts and career-focused skills he acquired  on campus, having spent and/or borrowed sixty to two hundred thousand dollars to get them, or would the same person be better off with four years of experience on a job, the contacts he made there, and that same sixty to two hundred thousand dollars in his pocket and/or off the debt portion of his personal balance sheet?  It is clear that  the answer will vary with circumstances, but it is by no means clear that the first  option will be the right answer for most people.

There are also reasons to question the assumptions about a liberal education. Beyond the obvious fact that there are many educated, cultured, well read people who never attended college, there is the less obvious fact that what passes for a liberal education in colleges has changed. Many programs in many colleges require no more than a few perfunctory “general education” courses taught at not much if anything above what used to be a high school level and often blown off by students interested only in their career-focused major programs.  Also, political correctness had done its work on the curricula  at many colleges.  It is an exaggeration to say that race and gender studies, post-modernism, and tendentious and mediocre diversity-based subject matter have crowded out  Shakespeare,  Sophocles, and Mozart, but there is a trend. There are also lots of places, online and otherwise, for an interested young person to pursue (and find help and stimulation in pursuing) a liberal education these days.

I worked in colleges  for many years. I think they are good places for young people to learn, explore life, and have fun and are the best places for a lot of things.  But the vast majority of students do not become doctors, lawyers, scientists, professional scholars, or engineers.  Nor do they attend Ivy League or equivalent institutions and make contacts and get degrees that function as gilt edged union cards. For many of those students these days, the value proposition is very shaky.

Colleges and universities have been on the gravy train since the end of World War II. Their product has been in high demand. They have been able to raise prices pretty much at will, and governments have subsidized them lavishly.  People running and working at colleges have had few worries. Yet college is a product people choose to purchase.  If it becomes too expensive or the public’s perception of its value declines too much or if attractive competitors enter the market too successfully, the easy good times could end.