Let us imagine that, following an outcry among leftists over hunger and malnutrition among the public, the government decided to run its own grocery stores and operated them in the same fashion as government-run schools. It might look something like this:
Members of the public would only be allowed to patronize one such store, with the store assigned based on where they lived.
If the public found out about another government-run store that had better offerings, was better staffed, cleaner, etc. they would have to move to a new neighborhood in order to patronize it.
Workers at the store would almost never be fired.
There would be no prices listed and food would be nominally "free." Instead patrons would pay indirectly through increased taxes. Most would have little idea how much they were actually spending for their food.
The decision over which products to offer (think milk brand instead of textbooks) would be made by an elected Grocery Store Board. This would be the one brand offered at all government-run grocery stores in the state.
The grocery stores would face directives not only from state and local government, but a federal Department of Food.
Attempts to offer vouchers, perhaps known as "food stamps," for citizens in neighborhoods with sub-standard government grocery stores so they could instead shop at privately-run facilities such as Whole Foods, Safeway, Harris Teeter etc. would be fought tooth and nail by leftist politicians.
Would such a scenario represent an improvement or deterioration from the status quo?
Last night I watched the highly acclaimed documentary Waiting for Superman. The movie is a punch to the gut, serving as a much-needed reality check on education in this country. Watching children being denied the opportunity to attend a good school is enough to make you reach for the Kleenex (literally -- a number of people in the theater were dabbing their eyes at various parts), and ultimately some pitchforks and torches as part of a march towards the nearest city hall/congressman/governor's office.
Directed by Davis Guggenheim, who directed and produced An Inconvenient Truth and Barack Obama's biographical film shown during the 2008 National Democratic Convention, the film's opening minutes feature a stark admission on the director's part: every day during his drive to drop off his children at a private school, Guggenheim drives past three public schools, which represent the kind of ideals he thought he held so dear (the confession reminded me of Irving Kristol's quip about a neoconservative simply being a liberal who had been mugged by reality -- in some ways the movie is about Guggenheim's own mugging). How had our schools deteriorated to such a point that even a good liberal like Guggenheim was unwilling to trust his children to the government?
In seeking to explain the shortcomings of the country's education system, Guggenheim profiles five children, four of which attend failing inner city schools in Washington DC, New York and Los Angeles while the fifth attends a leafy suburban school in Silicon Valley (her inclusion is particularly valuable, as it demonstrates the problem is not simply a lack of money). In each instance the parents seek to move their child to a better school (invariably a charter). In each instance the parent must submit their child to a lottery process to determine whether they can be admitted. Such is the farcical state of education in one of the richest countries in the world, where a child's future literally depends on the luck of the draw.
The cast of characters should be familiar to anyone with even a passing familiarity of the education debate. The heroes are the rebel educators such as Geoffrey Canada and DC's own Michelle Rhee attempting to fight the system, the villains are the teacher's unions who fight tooth and nail to preserve the status quo and the victims are, of course, the children -- the ultimate pawns. Indeed, the movie's key message was a point that was I believe raised by Canada, who said that the battle over education isn't about the children, but rather the adults.
Although the movie shows glimpses of the ingredients used by the successful schools -- the firing of bad teachers, longer hours, etc. -- the emphasis is clearly on the system's failings. We are introduced to New York City's "rubber rooms", teacher tenure that goes into effect after two years and teachers unions that dispense hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign contributions (95 percent of which goes to Democrats), including $1 million in a successful bid to undo reforms led by Michelle Rhee.
While the emphasis is not on solutions, with the director hesitating to call for any specific action to correct the problem, some conclusions are inescapable. Quite simply, the government needs to be removed from the business of operating schools, a mission it has performed abysmally for decades. Whenever politicians are placed in charge, political considerations will predominate.
Rather than a system of top-down direction, educational entrepreneurs such as Rhee and Canada must be empowered to innovate. Competition must be unleashed, with each school fighting to win the business of students and parents. This competition will allow for competing philosophies in education to play out, with the best schools succeeding and the worst failing and being driven out of business. As the famous Chinese saying goes, "Let a hundred flowers bloom; let a hundred schools of thought contend."
Government-run schools have been failing students literally for generations. Tinkering at the margins will not suffice. It's time to smash the entire system and start over.
Related: Also see this great speech from a British educator speaking at a Conservative party gathering. It shouldn't sound altogether unfamiliar to American ears.
Check out the country's most expensive public school, built for an eye-popping $578 million:
Auditorium
Faculty dining area
Opening paragraph:
At $578 million—or about $140,000 per student—the 24-acre Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools complex in mid-Wilshire is the most expensive school ever constructed in U.S. history. To put the price in context, this city's Staples sports and entertainment center cost $375 million. To put it in a more important context, the school district is currently running a $640 million deficit and has had to lay off 3,000 teachers in the last two years. It also has one of the lowest graduation rates in the country and some of the worst test scores.
Remind me again why government should be operating schools?
In The Beautiful Tree, author James Tooley conducted a study which sought to examine the differences in quality between private and government-run schools in a number of developing countries. He found that "after testing many thousands of children, and observing a few thousand schools, these private schools seemed superior to government schools with regards to inputs and pupil achievement. And they were doing it all for a fraction of the cost."
He then presented his findings at an education and development conference in Oxford. This excerpt describes the reaction:
As I finished my PowerPoint presentation and the chair invited questions, one professor, metaphorically flinging down my notebook onto the table in front of me, dismissed what I'd said, "Tooley is plowing a lonely furrow, long may it remain that way." Another stood up to condemn my approach. "Tooley's work is dangerous, in the wrong hands it could lead to the demise of state education." "You've painted a glowing picture of markets in education," said another, "but have you never heard of market failure?" Sighing deeply, another said: "It doesn't matter what your evidence shows. Statistics, statistics, statistics, who cares about your statistics? Private education can never be pro-poor."
Development experts are all pro-poor. I, by celebrating poor families' decision to use private education, was not. "The poor must have state education because they mustn't pay fees." A young woman near the front was equally as dismissive: "You obviously know nothing about human rights. Free and compulsory education is enshrined in the Universal Declaration [on Human Rights]!" An elderly Indian professor, more kindly than the others, nevertheless had disagreed with all I'd said: "You're trying to pull the ladder up behind you," he smiled, "the only way your country developed was through free government schools. Why are you trying to deny it to the rest of us?"
They were all united in dismissing my findings. Why was I ignoring the many good reasons that we all know why private education cannot be part of any solution to "education for all"? Why was I ignoring the many good reasons why markets are inappropriate for education -- that the short route to accountability I explored in the last chapter had to be abandoned in favor of the political long road? Why was I being so perverse as to ignore the years of accumulated wisdom to this effect?
After I'd given my paper, the conference chair, a professor at one of England's top education departments, took me aside. He was trying to be helpful: "You're silly, very silly, saying all of that. You'll never get another job. Be sensible, old chap."
If a genuine debate is to take place about education reform, all options must be on the table and sacred cows sent to the slaughter house. Instead we are given a discussion highly ideological in nature, where all reform must begin with the premise that the state is given a central role. Thus, the maneuvering space for genuine reform -- and prospects for significant improvement -- are greatly limited.
But the role of the state must be scrutinized if comprehensive reform is to be achieved, as anything less is mere tinkering at the margins. We need to examine the logic behind charging the state with the direct provision of education, for there is no obvious reason why this is the case. Parents do not provide sustenance for their children from government-run grocery stores, clothe their children with purchases at a government-run department store, and -- for the most part -- do not house their children in buildings operated by the government.
Why is education different? What reason is there to think the government has any special competency at education? What unique advantages does it enjoy over the private sector? Until we are willing to entertain and grapple with such questions, notable improvements are likely to remain an elusive goal.
I started reading The Beautiful Tree (click the link for Google Books, where it seems the book can be read in its entirety) today and so far it is absolutely fantastic. Traveling throughout the developing world, author James Tooley encounters private schools flourishing even in the most desperate conditions imaginable. Inevitably the private schools demonstrate a commitment to education excellence while their government-run counterparts feature incompetence, absentee teachers and even the beating of students.
But how could it be any other way? In private schools the students and parents are the customers, while in public schools they are perceived as an annoyance. While terrible government-run schools are perhaps par for the course, adding insult to injury is that the tool of regulation is then wielded to demand bribes from the private schools through frequent inspections (India) or even shut them down completely to eliminate competition to more established private schools (Nigeria).
Equally outrageous is that when Tooley presents his findings to members of the Western education establishment they are either dismissed or the private schools -- with tuition typically in the neighborhood of $2-$5 per month -- criticized as greedy predators stalking the urban poor. For many, it seems, the subject of education is plainly an ideological exercise where the first priority is the continued dominance of government-run schools, with actual education and learning by students a distant secondary consideration.
I'm only three chapters in and already the book has proved itself to be vastly compelling.
“Anybody who was for Brown v. Board of Education — it baffles me that they would be against vouchers. Brown condemned schools that were separate and unequal. Well, that’s exactly what we’re back to now — schools that are segregated by income, by ZIP code, by race.’’ -- Pennsylvania State Senator Anthony Williams
I've been watching the new season of Friday Night Lights, which largely focuses on the opening of a new high school in the fictional town of Dillon, Texas. Rather than one Dillon High School, the community is now split into West Dillon High (the former Dillon High School) and East Dillon High, a formerly shuttered school which has now been re-opened. With attendance determined by geographic boundaries, the process of carving up the town's school district predictably becomes a horribly contentious process as parents lobby to avoid having their children sent to the far less prestigious East Dillon High, a far more ramshackle facility. Coincidentally, the lines happen to be drawn so that children of top school administrators end up at West Dillon High.
In the latest episode, one of West Dillon's top football players is discovered to actually be residing in an area zoned for East Dillon, with his stated address revealed to be a mailbox on an empty lot. When confronted about this, he breaks down and admits to the deception, pleading to remain at West Dillon and asks if there is anything he can do to stay at the school. He is informed that he only has one option to continue as a West Dillon student: have his parents move.
Anyone who thinks that these kinds of situations are simply products of television writers' fevered minds are kidding themselves. I recall during my high school days some grumbling about the relationship between district school lines and where top education officials happened to live. I've seen news programs where school officials actually go to residences to ensure that children indeed live at their stated addresses to avoid going to a less prestigious public school.
It's an insane system which caters to education bureaucrats and almost nobody else. If we had a system where the education dollars were tied to the students and the schools they chose, and then attempted to switch to the current system based on geography (which almost invariably reflects divisions based on income and demographics) people would justifiably scream bloody murder. Instead we perpetuate such a system because, well, that's the way it's always been done and we wouldn't want to upset the teacher's unions. Simply mind-boggling.
After three days of turbulent meetings, the Texas Board of Education on Friday approved a social studies curriculum that will put a conservative stamp on history and economics textbooks, stressing the superiority of American capitalism, questioning the Founding Fathers’ commitment to a purely secular government and presenting Republican political philosophies in a more positive light.
...In economics, the revisions add Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek, two champions of free-market economic theory, among the usual list of economists to be studied, like Adam Smith, Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes. They also replaced the word “capitalism” throughout their texts with the “free-enterprise system.”
On the one hand I can sympathize with those, typically Democrats and those on the political left, who disagree with such teachings, and see this as a heavy-handed attempt to shove ideology down the throats of the state's children. On the other hand, this is a pretty classic case of being hoisted by one's own petard. Advocating for expanded government is perhaps all well and good when you're at the helm, but perhaps less so when the other guy is steering the ship of state.
I think an overwhelming number of people are in agreement on the poor quality of education in this country. Almost no one is willing to step up and defend the status quo. While consensus exists on the need for change, at least two competing schools of thought have emerged on what this should mean.
Some, such as myself, believe public education to be fundamentally flawed and that a radical overhaul is needed. In place of the current system should be a new structure based on charter schools, vouchers and tuition tax credits to promote competition and empower students and parents. Others, including those in the current administration, are firm believers in the primacy of government-run schools and advocate for change within the existing framework. In place of massive change they argue for various initiatives aimed at improving current schools.
One idea which has attracted considerable attention is the use of financial incentives for teachers which reward superior performance. Via the Free Exchange blog, however, I discovered a new research paper which casts doubt on the effectiveness of such reforms:
There is great interest in understanding the potential of teacher incentives to improve student achievement. This paper sheds light into this question by examining the recent introduction of performance-related pay in all public schools in Portugal. Our approach is based on a difference-in-differences analysis drawing on two complementary control groups. These control groups either were exposed to a lighter version of the intervention (the case of public schools in the Azores and Madeira) or were not exposed at all (the case of private schools). All students in all schools were administered the same national exams.
Our results consistently indicate that the increased focus on individual teacher performance caused a signicant and sizable relative decline in student achievement, as measured by national exams. However, the decline in achievement is smaller or virtually zero when considering those marks set by teachers, suggesting an increasing importance of grade inflation.
This view is supported by our triple-diff erence evidence and is consistent with the emphasis placed by the new promotion criteria on student results. Furthermore, we need additional support for a causal interpretation of our results from our analysis of common trends, robustness to di fferent control variables, di fferent data subsets and diff erent aggregation levels. Finally, the analysis of teacher early retirement across public schools supports the theoretical mechanisms (and much anecdotal evidence) that predict the empirical results, namely disruption of teacher cooperation created by tournaments for promotions and increased administrative workloads, both resulting in job dissatisfaction.
Ultimately I believe such efforts amount to little more than tinkering at the margin, and an elusive quest for the magic bullet. No rule change or program is going to turn government-run schools from failures into success stories. The model itself is fundamentally broken and must be discarded if educational excellence is to be attained.
As long as children are assigned schools by the government and teacher's unions hold sway over government, sub-par performance will continue to be the order of the day. An entirely new paradigm for education based on competition must be realized if results are to be improved.
Living in Washington, DC has its advantages, one of which is the ability to attend variousprotestsand rallies. Today I decided to check out another such event, a Save School Choice protest, held across the street from the U.S. Capitol.
Getting off at the Capitol South metro stop, I made my way across the grounds of the Capitol and stumbled upon yet another rally -- two for the price of one metro ticket. This one, I later discovered, was to kick off the campaign for Senate passage of cap and trade legislation, also known as the Boxer-Kerry bill. Here was the scene:
Grassroots, wearing suits?
As the pictures indicate, the scene was basically a bunch of well-dressed people standing around holding the occasional printed sign. If Nancy Pelosi is really looking for astroturf she can find it in her own backyard.
After only a few minutes I proceeded to the school choice protest, which was audible from the cap and trade rally. Here's what I found:
Yes, that's Marion Barry
Mostly hand-made signs here
A bit larger than the cap and trade crowd, attendees at the school choice rally consisted mainly of kids and parents. There was a constant hum of the the speakers and kids talking amongst themselves, punctuated by occasional chants of "Put kids first!" Remarks from those at the microphone ranged from bland boilerplate (Margaret Spellings) to a style more typically found at a Baptist church (PA State Senator Anthony Williams, who even threw in a Moses reference).
My favorite sign
Talk is cheap
One speaker said something to the effect of "President Obama, we love you, but why won't you support school choice for our children?" One wonders how much longer the love will persist if the president continues to side with the teacher's unions over some of his most enthusiastic supporters.
Video clips from the protest:
I soon decided to call it a day and headed back towards Capitol South, stopping back at the cap and trade rally along the way. It had all the buzz and excitement of a bowl of oatmeal:
Yes, that's John Kerry.
The contrast could hardly be more stark. One protest featured real grassroots protesting against the establishment while the other appeared to be a collection of lobbyists, Capitol Hill staffers, and corporate interests, with the enthusiasm to match. One is backed by powerful unions and one is opposed by the unions. One is supported by the president and one isn't.
Which group has the better chance of prevailing in its fight?
The Washington Monthly looks at the role of accreditation in higher education, which is really just another form of licensing:
The biggest obstacle Smith faced in launching [his online education venture] StraighterLine was a process called accreditation. Over time, colleges and universities have built sturdy walls and deep moats around their academic city-states. Students will only pay for courses that lead to college credits and universally recognized degrees. Credits and degrees can only be granted by—and students paying for college with federal grants and loans can only attend—institutions that are officially recognized by federally approved accreditors.
And the most prestigious accreditors will only recognize institutions: organizations with academic departments, highly credentialed faculty, bureaucrats, libraries, and all the other pricey accoutrements of the modern university. These things make higher education more expensive, and they’re not necessary if all you want to do is offer standard introductory courses online.
The federal government, in other words, is helping to maintain a status quo that reduces competition, drives up costs and by extension reduces access to higher education. Federal involvement presents a sufficiently large barrier that entrepreneurs (motivated by profits!) who wish to expand educational opportunities and reduce costs are being stymied in their efforts:
Smith’s struggle to establish StraighterLine suggests that higher education still has some time before the Internet bomb explodes in its basement. The fuse was only a couple of years long for the music and travel industries; for newspapers it was ten. Colleges may have another decade or two, particularly given their regulatory protections.
Imagine if Honda, in order to compete in the American market, had been required by federal law to adopt the preestablished labor practices, management structure, dealer network, and vehicle portfolio of General Motors. Imagine further that Honda could only sell cars through GM dealers. Those are essentially the terms that accreditation forces on potential disruptive innovators in higher education today.
This is extremely unfortunate, as eliminating barriers to online education would both democratize the good and provide the equivalent of a massive tax cut in the form of reduced tuition. It's just one more example of a government policy ostensibly designed to promote the general welfare -- in this case ensure that educational institutions are up to par -- that is actually wielded by special interests for their own ends.
As this chart shows, and I have noted before, two areas where costs have exploded in this country in recent decades are health care and education. While some seek to explain the surge in health care expenses by citing factors such as more expensive medical technology and drug development, it is not at all obvious why education should be experiencing similar inflation. If anything it would seem that improved technology should make education, which is essentially the dissemination of information, much easier and cheaper.
So what explains these rising costs? Any examination has to start with the two determinants of price, which are supply and demand.
The supply of higher education is largely a function of the number of institutions that can award degrees. In order to award degrees an institution must first become accredited by the Council for Higher Education Accreditation. This is a barrier to entry to the education market. It is in the self-interest of the CHEA to not be overly liberal in its granting of accreditation as it means more competition for students.
Nevertheless, it is still possible for a for-profit company to eventually enter the market and try to compete with other institutions for students and their tuition dollars. One such example is the University of Phoenix where undergraduate tuition averages $12,000 (while this may seem like a lot, consider that many schools with lower tuition also receive public funding and/or have endowments).
It is also worth noting that until 2006 that such distance learning programs were hindered by the "50 percent rule" that mandated colleges conduct at least half of all classes in an actual classroom, with a physically present teacher, or half of all students to be physically enrolled in order to receive federal student loans.
You can look further down the food chain and examine whether the colleges themselves are suffering from supply problems of their own in terms of faculty and staff and have bid their costs up, this explanation seems dubious with little reason to think that the supply of academics or staff is particularly tight.
On the demand side of the equation, however, we see a lot of factors that could explain the cost increase.
First there is the fact that much of the cost for college is -- just like health care -- borne by third-payers. Grants, scholarships, low interest loans and the like make consumers less cost conscious and apt to consume more education resources than would otherwise the case. Indeed, it is perhaps more than mere coincidence that college costs have risen so dramatically in the wake of passage of the Higher Education Act of 1965 which sought to "strengthen the educational resources of our colleges and universities and to provide financial assistance for students in postsecondary and higher education."
Although more speculative, there is also substantial reason to think that a college degree serves as an important signaling mechanism. In our society it seems that those without college degrees are much less employable, even for those jobs where it is not at all apparent why a four years of higher learning are needed such as secretarial work. This might be a tribute to the poor state of public education and the low value of a high school diploma or a result that with so many people possessing BAs that businesses simply raise their requirements.
With a high premium placed on obtaining a degree, barriers to entering the education marketplace and sizable third party payments the rapid increase in tuition should come as little surprise. Higher education is an area ripe for the introduction of new efficiencies, with economist Richard Vedder offering some suggestions:
What might be some useful reforms? Emulate competitive market practices by increasing incentives for college decision-makers to reduce costs, for example by giving bonuses for cost savings. Tie presidential compensation to indicators both of qualitative improvements and tuition cost restraints. Numerous potential cost-savings come to mind. The central administration should rent buildings to departments to encourage more efficiency, including year-round use.
Slash administrative staffs. Increase teaching loads. Eliminate low enrollment and costly graduate programs. Get out of non-instructional businesses like housing, food, and building maintenance. Make tenure a fringe benefit with a dollar value tied to it that faculty can buy from a fixed dollar fringe benefit menu available to them.Use technology to lower—not raise—costs. Vary tuition for various programs depending on costs and demand.Integrate high school and college learning more, reduce barriers to transferring between institutions, and encourage students to enroll in lower cost community colleges.
It seems clear that a lot of money is being wasted on education that could be better spent elsewhere, as any parent facing a $20,000 college tab can probably attest. Too many people are going to college (6 year graduation rates hover around 50 percent) and receiving their education at institutions that do an inefficient job of providing it. It's a problem that demands a solution other than simply throwing more money at it, which is the preferred course of action by too many of our politicians.
There's a public school about a five minute walk from my house that has had extensive renovations done to it and is scheduled to reopen later this month. These efforts largely stem from the fact that ten years ago it was named the worst building in the D.C. public school system. As my local free paper says:
At the time, bare wires hung from the ceiling, asbestos clung to the walls and lead paint coated the classrooms. The outdated heating system was even worse, said Adams Morgan resident Jeffrey Wilkes. "The building engineer would take a steel pipe and hit the gas valve" to turn it on, he said. "Anybody that has half a brain would look at that and say 'This isn't right.'"
So why has it taken so long to get the necessary repairs made? As the paper says:
...In 2001 officials selected architects for a wholesale modernization. In June 2004, the city closed the campus to prepare for construction. A few months later, students arrived at their interim school, K.C. Lewis at 300 Bryant St. NW. But nothing happened at the Adams Morgan school.
"They didn't do anything for two years, except make empty promises," said Adams Morgan advisory commissioner Nancy Shia, who organized demonstrations calling attention to the conditions there.
According to Wilkes, officials with the Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs said they had lost the plans for [the school]. "We just rolled our eyes," he said. "The system has been dysfunctional for a long time."
Unbelievable. But whatever you do, don't give the kids vouchers.
The Economix blog has the states ranked by their K-12 education spending:
Here is a website that compares the states on education performance. Let me know if you can find any real correlation between spending and performance.
Update: A graph I made with the K-12 education performance listed on the aforementioned site but listed in the same order as the graph above by spending:
There are two huge areas in American society where costs have exploded relative to just about everything else. One is health care, which this blog has discussed ad nauseum. The other, which shouldn't come as much of a surprise, is college.
Reason.tv explains why government aid is not the answer:
Some related thoughts here. Rather than simply accepting rising tuition costs as a fact of life we should be making more of an effort to understand why they are occurring and the forces behind this phenomenon. But handing out money is easy, why rethinking the system -- which would upset the established order -- is hard.
I just can't understand how anyone can oppose vouchers. How can those that claim to speak for the poor and downtrodden lead the charge against this program?
And so to the extent that we can upgrade not only our high schools but also our community colleges to provide a sound technical basis for being able to perform complicated tasks in a 21st-century economy, then I think that not only is that good for the individuals, but that’s going to be critical for the economy as a whole.
I want to emphasize, though, that part of the challenge is making sure that folks are getting in high school what they need as well. You know, I use my grandmother as an example for a lot of things, but I think this is telling. My grandmother never got a college degree. She went to high school. Unlike my grandfather, she didn’t benefit from the G.I. Bill, even though she worked on a bomber assembly line. She went to work as a secretary. But she was able to become a vice president at a bank partly because her high-school education was rigorous enough that she could communicate and analyze information in a way that, frankly, a bunch of college kids in many parts of the country can’t. She could write —
Today, you mean?
THE PRESIDENT: Today. She could write a better letter than many of my — I won’t say “many,” but a number of my former students at the University of Chicago Law School. So part of the function of a high-school degree or a community-college degree is credentialing, right? It allows employers in a quick way to sort through who’s got the skills and who doesn’t. But part of the problem that we’ve got right now is that what it means to have graduated from high school, what it means to have graduated from a two-year college or a four-year college is not always as clear as it was several years ago.
And that means that we’ve got to — in our education-reform agenda — we’ve got to focus not just on increasing graduation rates, but we’ve also got to make what’s learned in the high-school and college experience more robust and more effective.
President Obama is right, schools as a whole have declined in performance since his grandmother attended high school. It is also worth noting that since his grandmother was in high school the federal government spends far more money on education and there is no apparent link between spending and performance as these charts show:
It would make sense for Obama to rethink whether additional money or federal involvement is desirable or even necessary. Indeed, if money does not result in improvement then it would seem to suggest that the underlying problem is systemic in nature rather than a lack of resources. Tinkering at the margins is insufficient, rather the model must be completely rethought, including government's role as a primary provider of education services.
Obama is also correct that a large part of the function of a degree is credentialing, which in my view is a big mistake. Speaking from personal experience I would estimate that a minority of my classes in college and graduate school accounted for a majority of the knowledge I obtained, which is basically the Pareto principle. Our current approach seems to promote over consumption -- i.e. waste -- and makes little provision for autodidacts and the benefits of self-teaching.
Even if forgoing college becomes economically attractive, the social cachet of a college degree remains. That will erode only when large numbers of high-status, high-income people do not have a college degree and don't care. The information technology industry is in the process of creating that class, with Bill Gates and Steve Jobs as exemplars. It will expand for the most natural of reasons: A college education need be no more important for many high-tech occupations than it is for NBA basketball players or cabinetmakers. Walk into Microsoft or Google with evidence that you are a brilliant hacker, and the job interviewer is not going to fret if you lack a college transcript. The ability to present an employer with evidence that you are good at something, without benefit of a college degree, will continue to increase, and so will the number of skills to which that evidence can be attached. Every time that happens, the false premium attached to the college degree will diminish.
Most students find college life to be lots of fun (apart from the boring classroom stuff), and that alone will keep the four-year institution overstocked for a long time. But, rightly understood, college is appropriate for a small minority of young adults--perhaps even a minority of the people who have IQs high enough that they could do college-level work if they wished. People who go to college are not better or worse people than anyone else; they are merely different in certain interests and abilities. That is the way college should be seen. There is reason to hope that eventually it will be.
I have a BA in International Affairs and MA in International Trade and Investment Policy. I live in Washington, DC and work for a Fortune Global 500 company as a public policy analyst. I can be contacted at 2getrichisglorious-at-gmail.com.
