Yesterday’s NYT Room for Debate feature addressed the question, “Do we spend too much on education?”

The short answer, in my view, is that we spend far more than we need to, and get lamentably poor results from start to finish.

Some of the responses by the debaters were predictably weak.

Cecilia Rouse, professor of the economics of education at Princeton, tossed out the usual stats about how more formal education means higher earnings: “A college graduate (with no further education) earns over 50 percent more than a high school graduate.” But that statistic tells us nothing about how marginal students today will fare if they spend the time and money to get college degrees. Is Rouse unaware that lots of college students today enter with pitiable basic skills and can obtain their degrees without doing much to improve them, then enter the labor force and wind up doing jobs that call for only on-the-job training?

She also advocates increasing teacher pay and reducing class sizes. Neither of those ideas does anything to solve the real problem, which is that education schools enroll mostly poor students, who come because teaching is an easy path to secure employment. Private schools, where administrators can hire people based on their knowledge and enthusiasm for teaching without regard to credentials, generally pay less than the public schools but get better results.

Judith Scott-Clayton, assistant professor of economics and education at Teachers College, thinks we are underinvesting in education, also pointing to that average earnings differential between high school grads and college grads. She too fails to look at the reality of today’s marginal student.

She also claims, as education insiders so often do, that “any cure for this anemic economy is going to involve a more educated and better-educated population, not less.” Nonsense. Less spending on education would not mean that the populace would be less well educated, but more to the point, she fails to understand that our anemic economy is anemic because of the prodigious burdens Washington is imposing on the private sector.

#more#Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, professor of psychology at Clark University, would discourage young people from “skipping college and going right to work” because “going to college is a great way to spend a few years of emerging adulthood.” That is when, he says, young people can take classes on the short story, astronomy, or 19th-century literature. That’s fine for those who really want to, but hordes of high-school graduates have no interest in such academic pursuits.

Pamela Burdman, an education-policy analyst, asks whether teaching the poor is a priority. She thinks it should be, writing that “if some degree of equality — economic and political — is important, we need more education, not less.” But the trouble with education for the poor is not that spending on them is insufficient, but instead that it’s done through a socialistic public-education system that is impervious to its failures. Some children of poor families do get very good educations, but only if they escape from the government’s schooling system and find places for their children in non-government schools.

I’ll give thumbs up, however, to Barbara Hofer, professor of psychology at Middlebury College, for observing that “we encourage students to go to college whether they are prepared or not, or have a clear sense of purpose or interest.” She recommends Harvard’s “Pathways to Prosperity” report, which advocated alternatives to college for the many students who are neither college-ready nor interested. She also advocates colleges’ devoting more effort with their students on learning to express ideas in writing and speech. That ability is very beneficial, but mostly overlooked.

Finally, Sandra Stotsky, professor of education at the University of Arkansas, nailed the problem as ineffective K–12 education. Just so.