I agree with you, Michael. Americans currently have over a trillion dollars’ worth of college debt. They’ve managed to spend half an entire G7 economy (Britain’s or France’s) not on debt in general but merely on one bizarrely fetishized niche market of debt. For what? Passing a leisurely half-decade toying with a mélange of pseudo-disciplines is a very expensive way to acquire a piece of paper assuring U.S. businesses you’re safe for white-collar employment.
The “education” system is one of the biggest structural deformities in America today. It leads to later workforce participation and later family formation, both of which factor into our existentially catastrophic entitlement liabilities. And yet Obama wants every American child to go to college. What sort of “education” do you think they’ll be getting once that happens? And what value do you think that sheepskin will hold in the wider world?
The justification for this absurd prolongation of adolescence is that it opens up opportunities for the disadvantaged. But credential-fetishization has the opposite effect. Remember Ronald Reagan, alumnus of Eureka College, Illinois? Since then, for the first time in its history, America has lived under continuous rule by Ivy League — Yale (Bush I), Yale Law (Clinton), Harvard Business (Bush II), Harvard Law (Obama). In 2009, over a quarter of Obama’s political appointees had ties to Harvard; over 90 percent had “advanced degrees.” How’s that working out for you? In my soon to be imminently forthcomingly imminent book, I point out that once upon a time America was the land where guys without degrees (Truman) or only 18 months of formal education (Lincoln) or no schooling at all (Zachary Taylor) could become president. Credentialization is shrinking what was America’s advantage — a far greater social mobility than Europe. We’re decaying into a society where 40 percent of the population do minimal-skill service jobs and the rest run up a trillion dollars of debt in order to avoid that fate, and ne’er the twain shall meet, except for perfunctory social pleasantries in the drive-thru lane.
We’re looking at education upside down: We should be telescoping it, not extending it.
Full disclosure: I am myself an “uneducated former disc-jockey,” in the words of (drumroll, please) Johann Hari.
Education itself is good. It's the way we're doing it that is wrong.
We need education to be lifelong - not something you do once and then "finish".
That means we need to reverse our current attitude toward self-education, or individual initiative.
Under the current system, the piece of paper that says 'educated' does not necessarily guarantee that a worker will have the desired skills - but it does guarantee that a worker with no education will not get the job, even if he does have the desired skills.
We need to recognize that the same educational system is serving different, sometimes contradictory goals. We should be more clear on which types of education are being required, when, and for what purpose. When are we teaching job skills? When are we teaching civic values? And when is education about personal enrichment?
We need to figure out how to deal with issues such as education-as-social gatekeeper, or education-as-political propaganda machine. These things are hindering our ability to get people trained for the work we need them to be doing.
It is to our advantage to see that talented people get into the jobs they are best suited for, even if they will never get into the right club (or might not even want to). Not that social filtering does not have its place - but the college system might not be the most appropriate place to do it (given how we seem to be lacking an appropriately trained workforce).
Outside of that, we need ways for people who have the skills - but not the formal education - to demonstrate, document, and "credential" their abilities.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseTell you what: YOU go ahead and figure out all those things. Then you go ahead and pony up however much money you want to to get whatever educational job done for whomever you want. In the meantime, stop unConstitutionally having the Feds take money from me and mine at gunpoint to fund certain forms of education. If a state wants to be so idiotic as to claim to be competent to determine what education she wants to take money at gunpoint from her citizens to pay for, let them. Then let the citizens vote with their feet.
Me, I'd prefer to let individual students, and whomever they can get to help fund their education, decide what type of education they want to get and pay for. Leave gov't out of it completely. 'We' don't need to do anything as a 'we', except to quit hiring legislators who impose unConstitutional educational programs on us.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseIf America is not a meritocracy, then it has no legitimacy.
The idea that it can be fair for the wealthy to have opportunities that the poor do not have access to is directly linked to the idea that the reason the wealthy are wealthy, and the poor are poor, is because of life choices - that is, the entire thing is based on the assumption that we are a meritocracy.
When the rich man is rich, not because he earned it, but because seven generations ago someone earned it and now you're just born rich or poor, then the system has failed, and we're no better than any other aristocracy.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseNo matter how high the tuition, you can get a loan for the amount (or daddy will pony it up), so the upper price limit that the buyer usually sets no longer has a "too high" limit.
Kinda like healthcare. And gubmint-sector union pensions. And I suspect that for some it's a feature not a bug.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI've seen one study after another indicating that anywhere from one in five to one in four Americans is functionally illiterate. What I would like Obama and the other college fetishists who think that "everyone should go to college" to explain to me is, how are people who in many cases literally cannot comprehend the instructions on a box of cake mix supposed to function at a college level?
Or how much more dumbed-down are our colleges going to have to become to accomodate the products of our public school bureaucracy?
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseWhen I think back
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseOn all the cr*p I learned in high school
It's a wonder
I can think at all
And though my lack of education
Hasn't hurt me none
I can read the writing on the wall
Wow, I have been reading the ranting ravings of a knuckle dragging, uneducated disk-jokey! I really thought you were somebody? No diploma even from a little bitty college like say Boise State? I want my money back for all the time I spent reading and enjoying your writings. You are a fraud. Good riddance to you.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI continue to believe in an educational system similar to the one in France. The students are divided at somewhere around the end of what we call grammer school. Those who do not show a propensity to scholastic excellence are trained to do so many of the jobs which keep a nation moving and they earn a darn good living while doing it..
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseYour education approach is tantamount to a caste system. Personally had I been subject to this system I probably would have been deemed a ditch digger for life.
I've also seen educationally talented young people waste their lives muttering to themselves in later years as they never had any initiative to do anything with their education other than to be educated.
I started out as a boy who wanted only to farm. Sixty years ago it wasn't essential to be educated to be a farmer. However, in need for more income than the farm would provide I started work off the farm and secured a job that let me pursue a course that has resulted in 4 patents that have kept many in our community working for almost 40 years.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI became the plant manager and later a part owner of that business.
Early in my career a teacher friend of my wife came to visit us from her native England. She didn't understand how I acquired the job I had based on my educational background. I realized then that England's and now you present France's educational system is helpful to only the elite.
By the way, I farm today and am, or have served on a variety of local and national organizations in Economic Development, International Agriculture and Education.
I'm glad I was not shunted to a career deemed for my perceived abilities at age 12.
Sounds like you're a hard-working, self-made man. I fail to see how a tiered education system like in France would have prevented you from achieving what you did.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abusegrammar school is way to early to start segregating kids into career tracks.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseMr. Meyer, no one would have required you to become a ditch-digger. You simply would not have been placed on the college track (if your assessment of your young self is accurate), and you would not have gone to college. As you did not do. Then you would instead have taken a job. As you did.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseIt should be noted that, by definition, 50% of people are below average.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseNo, by definition 50% of people are below median value for whatever. It is quite possible for more or less than 50% to be below average.
Which is one reason averages, especially in sets that are bounded in one direction but not the other (like income) are better discussed in terms of median than average.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseWay to ruin the joke, man.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseIt a joke that needs ruining.
Next time liberals are using the difference between average incomes in the quintiles to justify tax increases when looking at medians show the problem is an outliers issue because the top quintile is unbounded above remember it's just a joke.
We use statistics in arguments all the time. That means we need to be cognizant about how they work.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseA couple of points:
I see this as being more of a social problem than an educational issue. It seems to me that we've basically done to university education what we've done to high school education - made it all about the social scene and not about learning.
I'm pretty sure that American high schools are the only ones in the world that a. make people stay in school until age 18 to earn a diploma, and b. put so much emphasis on their sports programs and social scene. I've traveled extensively and spent a year in an Australian high school as an exchange student in the late 90's - I have never encountered a high school culture like what is found in the U.S. I guess it all has to do with our ridiculous American notion that teenagers are "children" who "deserve" an adolescence. Up until the post-WWII era there was no such thing as "teen culture," there was childhood and then the responsibilities of adulthood. For example, my grandfather lost his father to a heart attack during the Depression when he was 16 and immediately took over responsibilities as head of the house. You can't tell me that because he was under 18 at the time, he was a "child."
In my view, since the advent of "teen culture," we've been going downhill as a society.
Overall, I see our "education" system (universities included) as something that serves to infantilize us, not something that teaches us to become self-reliant, productive, adults. Small wonder that so many Americans out there are increasingly receptive to socialist policies here in the U.S.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseTelescoping, not extending: YES. The 'universal' part should stop around age 14. After that, work or apprenticeship or technical training. University only for the handful of disciplines (medicine, engineering) that really need long and detailed training.
To be fair, Obama is the first recent President who has changed the emphasis slightly. He pushes tech schools, often says that not everyone needs university.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseWPA? Initials or the FDR government program?
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseSo, does this mean NRO's internships are open to high school grads with no interest in wasting time/money in college?
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse