The College-Attendance Fallacy

I’ m not a manual-labor guy. I know that from experience — around the time I turned 13, my parents insisted that if I wanted to have money during the school year, I had damn well better find a summer job. With no marketable skills to speak of, my options were slim; between sixth and eighth grades, I spent the summer months on a farm near my grandparents’ house in New Hampshire, making the federal minimum wage of $7.25. In high school, I found a far more lucrative $15-per-hour summer gig working construction in my hometown of Portland, Ore.

I was bad at construction. Like, really bad. I was bad at farmwork too, but you can really be only so inadequate at picking beans and corn. In construction, on the other hand, it’s impossible to hide your incompetence. When the site manager showed up at the end of the day to find that, for all my genuine, increasingly desperate efforts, I had finished only half of the work he expected, there was no excuse. It was the hardest job I’ve ever had — back-breaking work that began at the crack of dawn, often on exposed, shade-less roofs under the beating 90-plus-degree heat of the midday sun. A soft, private-school kid like me wasn’t cut out for it — as my colleagues often made sure to remind me.

I hated that job. But the guys I worked with loved it. Green Gables was a small, boutique construction firm, which mostly worked on mansions and vanity projects for Portland’s well-heeled elite, up in the sprawling hills above the city or out on the Oregon coast. We built genuinely beautiful houses, designed by the best architects in the Pacific Northwest, and the career construction guys took real, tangible pride in their work. These were men — and it was almost exclusively men — who loved to build things with their hands. They lived and breathed it. Many of them would go home after a long day and help one another with various projects on their own houses — new dog sheds, kitchen remodels, basement dude-dens for weekend football-watching, you name it. And they were good at it. The best in the business. That’s why the wealthiest Portlandians came to Green Gables.

It was good money, too. Most of the older guys at Green Gables hadn’t gone to college, but they made enough to send their kids to the University of Oregon (or Oregon State — a rivalry that cleaved the company in two). Their families could take vacations once or twice a year out at the beach or down at the lakes in northern California. Most of them were white — Portland is one of the whitest cities in America — but many of the contractors we worked with were South American immigrants, having worked their way up from basic manual labor to start their own companies. Real, story-book American-dream stuff; the kind of stories you don’t hear amid all the gloomy talk of national decline.

Lives like theirs don’t fit into the technocratic education-policy narrative. The Biden administration’s recent flirtations with sweeping debt forgiveness of student loans is a reflection of the broader educrat consensus — particularly potent on the progressive end of the spectrum but present across ideological lines in the Beltway policy-wonk arena — that the goal of U.S. education policy should be to dump as many Americans as possible into four-year college programs. “It is absolutely unacceptable that hundreds of thousands of bright young Americans do not get a higher education each year, not because they are unqualified, but because their family does not have enough money,” Senator Bernie Sanders (D., Vt.) remarked last year when unveiling the College for All Act, summing up the conventional wisdom among education-policy pundits. “Successful transition into adulthood is an essential measure of well-being for children and youth,” Children’s Defense Fund President and CEO Starsky Wilson agreed.

The haphazard, short-term thinking that underpins this project is breathtaking. After a decades-long college-for-all push resulted in some $1.6 trillion of federal student-loan debt, the original initiative’s advocates did not even pause for a moment for self-critical introspection; they simply responded by offering to cancel the debt altogether. Among many other things, the current effort to encourage the White House to do so via executive order would be unconstitutional, as none other than Nancy Pelosi herself has noted in the past. (In a moment of uncharacteristic sanity, Pelosi told reporters in July 2021 that debt forgiveness could be accomplished only through “an act of Congress.”) It would also be profoundly unfair to Americans who have made difficult sacrifices to actually pay off their student debt. And as Michael Brendan Dougherty noted today, it would be a payout to the wealthy on the backs of the poor — in other words, socialism for the rich:

The plan being mulled by the Biden administration to cancel and forgive up to $1.6 trillion of federal student-loan debt is a brazen act of class warfare by the affluent against everyone else…The overwhelming majority of student debt is held by the affluent; less than 10 percent of it is held by the bottom third of earners. Nearly 40 percent of it is held by students who earned advanced degrees — many of them now doctors and lawyers. Unemployment for the college-educated is less than 2 percent.

But on a deeper systemic level, student-loan debt forgiveness is wrong because it perpetuates the failed, destructive idea that government policy should be ordered toward maximized college-attendance rates. This idea has led to substantial harms for working Americans. Andrew Breitbart famously said that “politics is downstream from culture.” But that is not always the case: When government policy is built around the idea that every young American should aspire to a four-year degree, that idea is advanced in the broader society, and young people who would be better suited for other pursuits feel pressured to abide by the new norm.

The result is the predicament that faced a number of the younger workers at Green Gables, many of whom had attended local liberal-arts colleges in the region. Most of them held degrees in subjects such as history and philosophy, which they had no intention of ever putting to practical use. And all of them were saddled with student-loan debt, which they were spending the first years of their career struggling to pay off. Rather than four years of work experience, which probably would have led to promotions and raises, they were beginning their adult lives in the red, with little to nothing to show for it.

The conviction that America trails the world in college-attendance rates, and that government policy must step in to remedy it, is simply false. Ironically, many of the social democracies that American progressives idolize trail the U.S. in the rates of post-secondary education. As of 2018, the U.S. was the sixth-most-educated country in the world, behind Canada, Japan, Israel, South Korea, and the United Kingdom. Among 25- to 34-year-olds, 2021 data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) places the U.S. at 13th, but still above much of the rest of the West — Belgium, France, Sweden, Denmark, New Zealand, Austria, Finland, and so on.

So student-loan debt forgiveness is wrong on the merits, but it’s also based on fundamentally faulty rationale. Technocrats in the education bureaucracy have already made people’s lives more difficult. Let’s not make the problem worse.