Conservative comments on BHO's higher education plans

A Ph.D. in Every Pot. By Andrew Ferguson
Obama's diploma mill.
The Weekly Standard, Mar 09, 2009, Volume 014, Issue 24

In the long, long list of presidential directives that President Obama handed down to his countrymen in his televised Day of Reckoning speech last week, one was more far-reaching than it appeared at first glance. "Tonight," he said, "I ask every American to commit to at least one year or more of higher education or career training." He said he didn't much care what kind of higher education it was: "community college or a four-year school; vocational training or an apprenticeship." The ultimate goal is that by 2020 "America will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world." Then we'll be able to compete in that globalized economy we keep hearing about, "where the most valuable skill you can sell is your knowledge."

The goal, though comfortably far off, is impressive enough, but the point was driven home with unusual force. First, the president insisted that "dropping out of high school is no longer an option." Anyone who doesn't finish high school, he said, is "quitting on your country." (This attack on the patriotism of high-school dropouts drew whoops of approval from his audience on Capitol Hill.) So everyone has to finish high school, and everyone who finishes high school has to go on to higher education. And if they go on to higher education but don't go on to get a degree, America won't regain its world title in college graduates. They'll be letting down the team.

To prevent such an outcome, the president will provide a variety of inducements, from the tiniest Pell Grants for a two-year associate's degree to full rides at the fanciest four-year colleges. And as you might expect, the people who stand to receive the most money under the president's proposal are adamant in their belief that the country probably will not survive unless it is enacted at once. The president of the American Council on Education could barely contain herself.

"The education components of the new economic stimulus package prove that President Obama will back his words with resources and action," said Molly Corbett Broad. This is lobbyist talk for ka-ching! "If America is to compete economically," she went on, "we must have a competitive work force and a new generation of innovators and entrepreneurs."

The assumption here is that the way to make somebody a competitive worker is to send him to college, an idea that will astonish anyone who's ever been served in a restaurant by a waiter with a master's in art history. This is just the first of the confusions that dog the president's proposal, which for the moment exists only in hypothetical form. Another confusion comes from his hazy definition of what the problem is.

The 2020 goal relies on a gloomy factoid that has become a favorite of hand wringers and heavy breathers in the education-obsessed community. According to data compiled by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the United States ranks tenth among the 30 developed nations in the higher-ed "participation rate"--the number of people between the ages of 25 and 34 with postsecondary degrees.

But the poor ranking isn't nearly as portentous as it seems, as several educational researchers have pointed out, to little effect. Clifford Adelman of the Institute for Higher Education Policy noted recently in (the indispensable) Inside Higher Ed that the OECD rankings take no account of the country's vast demographic and ethnic stew, and ignores a 45 percent increase in foreign-born immigrants over the last 15 years that tilts toward the young and unschooled. If a country's population is growing at the younger and older ends, then its higher-ed participation rate in the middle will appear artificially low. Most of the United States's OECD competitors have flat or declining population numbers, along with greater social conformity.

When you expand the cohort to those between the ages of 25 and 65, the U.S. participation rate jumps and the United States ranks fifth among the 30 OECD countries. It turns out that lots of Americans earn their degrees after they've passed college age and even the middle years. "Lifelong learning," and the federal government's insistence on "fostering" and "nurturing" a "culture" thereof, has been a fetish and cliché of our politicians for 20 years. Weirdly enough, it seems to have worked. Lifelong learning makes more sense than cramming all your schooling through the window of the late teens and early twenties. As a vocational matter, late learners are more likely to concentrate attention on abilities that the current marketplace needs, unlike kids who have to predict what jobs this finicky global economy of ours will be rewarding 10 years from now. And the learning is more likely to stick. Adults are smarter than teenagers. In general.

Thus the OECD rankings are less gloomy than the president thinks. If there is a problem with a shortage of workers with associate's degrees or B.A. degrees, it is more concentrated than he lets on. The Gates Foundation announced last November that it's spending close to $100 million to encourage young people to get a higher-ed degree. Unlike the president, however, the foundation will spend money where the difficulty lies. While more than 60 percent of high schoolers go on to post-secondary school, the number for poor black and Hispanic high schoolers is roughly half that. These are the students that the Gates program will encourage and subsidize. More important, it will bring them into community colleges and vocational schools exclusively. At the least they will get an associate's degree and a marketable skill. Then, if they're inclined, they can go on to a four-year school.

The president's view is more romantic. With certain exceptions, he'll have taxpayers pay for anyone to go anywhere--wherever higher-ed is sold, whether it's to learn hospitality management at DeVry University or to study neocolonialism at Oberlin. Many taxpayers will find this approach indiscriminate, even incoherent. For behind the president's proposal is a contradiction set deep in the American understanding of things--deep in American democracy itself.

On one hand, the president takes the purely utilitarian view of what higher education is for: You get a degree so you can get a good job, and, as you work, you make the country more prosperous. On the other hand, by including traditional four-year liberal arts colleges and universities in his plan, he implicitly endorses the opposite view: Higher education is for spiritual advancement, the development of character, and the refinement of the mind, and it must be, moreover, accessible to everyone. It is the collision of American practicality and American romanticism. The second view considers the first crudely materialistic, the reduction of education to mere training; the first sees the second as . . . well, nice, I suppose, but pretty much beside the point. Haven't you heard about that global economy?

The idea that the two views can be reconciled is why the restaurants of our great country are overrun by art history majors spilling osso bucco on disgruntled customers; these delicate souls have been trained for everything but work. It's also why more than half of students who enroll in traditional four-year schools never finish; they didn't want be trained for everything but work. They wanted to be trained for work. It has also inspired a multi-billion dollar industry designed to help teenagers get into a four-year college whether or not they really want to go.

When he included four-year schools in his list of higher-ed options, the president was being very generous. (Why wouldn't he be? It's not his money.) But the traditional college was only one of four options. In practice the three others--postsecondary education understood as job training--will be where the action is and, if we're lucky, where the students are.

The democratic ideal of outfitting everyone with a liberal arts degree has always been vaguely unrealistic, and now the lack of realism is becoming unavoidable. Whether intentionally or not, the effect of pursuing the president's goal will be to reconfirm the utilitarian view and slowly -render the traditional view irrelevant--an overpriced indulgence that the country can no longer afford. For traditional colleges, this is a Day of Reckoning the president didn't mention.

Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.