Expensive, Second Rate, Irrelevant, but Necessary?

 

Expensive, Second Rate, Irrelevant, but Necessary?

An Average American College Education

Decades ago and during my college spring break, I was visiting my father, a Wilmington, Delaware journalist. Since the University of Delaware was in nearby Newark, and since their spring break was at a different time, my father suggested that I drop into several of their classes, with their consent, of course. I selected two classes, in science and math, at a sophomore (which I was) and junior level. I was stunned at the level of instruction. What I had taken as a high school sophomore were considered mid-level requirements for UoD’s engineering students. I realized that these students would soon be engineers, designing and build complex structures, chemical processes (DuPont was a big employer), electrical systems and intricate machines. At least the tuition was very low at this large, land grant university. But could they? I wondered.

In recent years, the number of Americans with college degrees at some level has skyrocketed. According to BestColleges.com (2021), “Nearly 94 million Americans ages 25 and over, which is about 42% of the total U.S. population in that age demographic, had an associate, bachelor's, graduate, or professional degree, according to U.S. Census Bureau's most recent data.

“In 1940, when the census first asked questions about education attainment, less than 5% of adults 25 and over reported they'd earned a bachelor's degree or higher. In 2011, adults with college degrees of all types accounted for 36% of the population. This group has increased by more than five percentage points over the last decade.” With staggeringly high levels of student debt (today averaging around $40 thousand for a bachelor's), there has been some moderation in college attendance, and we are still dealing with the effects from the pandemic.

The numbers tell us that a college degree today is very much like the high school diploma from 50 years ago. It is a screening metric that faded during the job shortage, but the collapse of our well-paid working class, the contraction of union employment, and the exorbitant cost of higher education has led some leaders to question the true cost/benefit of having a college degree, particularly degrees that are not targeted at the real job demand marketplace: STEM, where we are woefully short of graduates. The low value of such degrees is becoming obvious to some. Newly elected Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro took a bold step on his first full day in office: he announced that effective immediately, 92% of state government jobs – about 65,000 positions – will not require a four-year college degree.

Recent federal programs and policies have been heavily focused on helping students with very high levels of student debt cope with that burden, an economic weight resulting in postponed marriages, delayed purchases of major life acquisitions (cars, homes, etc.) and a contraction of stepping into the same level of consumption that their parents enjoyed. Bad for the economy at all levels. But there is a pushback here; Republicans do not want taxpayer money to be used this way. Their immutable but failed mantra – a rising tide will float all boats – resulted in decades of austerity that have continue to drop the comparative global value of American public secondary school education ever lower, from first to below 30th in key subjects. Cutbacks in state funding for their public colleges and universities over the past decades have pushed tuition and classroom size higher but quality all too often significantly lower as well. As we have seen in recent University of California strikes from lecturers, research assistants and graduate students as teaching assistants, quality has been slipping for years.

NYU Professor Jodie Adams Kirshner, writing a OpEd for the January 29th Los Angeles Times, explains how those families at the top of the food chain continue to extract the major blessings of a solid college education, while those at the other end of the economic ladder face educational value betrayal: “Historically America has relied on higher education as an engine of opportunity, and it has been an important driver of social progress and wealth creation. While equal outcomes have never been guaranteed, equal opportunity has been a crucial underpinning of the American dream.

“Our policies, however, have too often diverged from these aims. An early law that provided subsidized higher education was the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, commonly known as the GI Bill. The people it helped were primarily white, male veterans being rewarded for their service to the country. After the U.S.S.R.’s launch of Sputnik in 1957, a worrying move in the developing Cold War, the U.S. broadened educational aid specifically for the purposes of national competitiveness and defense, through the National Defense Education Act.

“During the civil rights movement, new attention was paid to equity concerns around aid and opportunity in higher education, culminating in the establishment of the federal Pell grant program in 1972. Its purpose was to alleviate the need to borrow among poor students, so as not to discourage them from investing in a college education. But as legislative efforts turned to maintaining college affordability for the middle class in 1978, and Pell grants not increasing with the cost of living, federal policymakers began putting an emphasis on loans instead of grant aid as a method of boosting college enrollment and graduation.

“Subsequent administrations, beginning with President Clinton, established tax credits for tuition savings. This disproportionately benefited families with the highest incomes and tax rates… Higher education’s promised ladder of economic mobility has become a downward slide for most without wealth. As it becomes even more unaffordable and unattainable, it can reinforce class divisions and reproduce existing inequality trends.

“Most low-income students who enroll in college avoid taking out loans by attending community and for-profit colleges, which have much lower completion rates than nonprofit colleges and universities… Community colleges earn two-fifths the revenue compared with public four-year colleges that bring in higher tuition, fees and receive more from state appropriations. From there, though more than 80% of incoming students state an intention to achieve a bachelor’s degree, only 15% ultimately do. At for-profit colleges, an even larger proportion of disadvantaged students attend, paying more to become less likely to graduate, earning credits that do not transfer, using up limited federal financial aid and growing more likely to default on debt.

“Meanwhile, wealthier students who graduate from high schools with better means feel more comfortable on college campuses and attend well-resourced institutions where more students graduate within four years.

“Only students who finish degrees realize income gains from attending college. However, only about half the students who enter college graduate within six years, a particularly low figure when one considers the weight our society extends to education as a panacea for social and economic ills.” Irrelevant, substandard but expensive post-secondary education… and getting worse. And then there’s this from BestColleges.com: “In the 2021 #RealCollege report, 38% of students attending two-year colleges reported experiencing food insecurity in the 30 days prior to a 2020 survey, compared to 29% of students at four-year colleges.” And homelessness. Poverty kills! Equality is more than a subsidy.

I’m Peter Dekom, and without a massive state and federal repositioning of a failed policy that takes public and college educational quality for granted, seeming concerned more with culture wars and student debt than real life value, that unsettled vector of angry populism will only grow more divisive and increasingly irreconcilably vituperative.