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Should we really believe in the rising value of college at any price? |
| The
liberal bias in school textbooks and teaching, from the early elementary
levels through university programs, has been so pervasive for so long
now that it is difficult to imagine any other future. |
| That
now extends into local initiatives such as "workforce development" and
"worker retraining" programs which seek state and federal funding as a
key part of local community economic development programs.
This enlarges the role of the state to direct and fund
our education as the entitlement of a lifetime.
Is this really the direction in which we want to go to
solve our local education problems? |
| I
can't recall meeting any executive who professed great satisfaction with
the quality of education when hiring new workers directly out of
secondary schools. After 12 or more years in the public education
system, this raw material for competition in a knowledge-based economy
is still pretty raw. Parents actually choose to migrate to
communities which have a reputation for better schools, and yet the
employers in those communities rarely praise the results they see in
their new employees. Instead of being
well-prepared for a productive and responsible lifetime on their own, it
is widely accepted as inevitable among youth that one must find some way
to go to college in order to be successful, and that otherwise one may
be unfairly doomed to a lifetime of very limited opportunities and lower
income.
The key to a lifetime of prosperity seems to be to pay
any price, including many years of debt and the investment of any family
savings and any available scholarships or government benefit programs to
partake of the higher wisdom and greater opportunities which a college
degree is promised to assure.
Rubbish! These schools and colleges
aren't teaching the values which have contributed so much to the
extraordinary success of this country in the world, and the resulting
prosperity of so many people. This is like deliberately producing
a defective product, and then expecting consumers to pay more to fix it.
There is no reason why we should accept that our public schools can't
produce better outcomes. |
| There
are obviously a few notable counterexamples of people who became wildly
successful in their lives without ever obtaining a college degree, but
these are regarded as irrelevant aberrations - statistical outliers
which can't be explained by the prevailing trend assumption that college
is essential to success.
Ironically, some receive honorary degrees as though
their success in life would somehow still be incomplete without that
degree, and may then support such colleges by sharing their wealth
through academic philanthropy at the college level rather than their
local public schools.
The fact that college graduates expect and receive
higher salaries after investing very heavily in their own education
should actually be a cause for concern. They are often going
deeply into debt for many years to pay for that education, whether at
public or private colleges.
As they start their work after college, they may not
really be producing much more value for their employer than a
well-educated graduate of a good high school, or especially one who gets
4 years of work experience instead. Should anyone who invests in a
college degree justifiably expect to be rewarded immediately for that
investment at their first job, before they prove through their actual
work performance that they are worth it?
Should employers discriminate against those who choose
not to go to college, even if they are doing the same work? Should
they pay more for the graduates of a more exclusive, high-cost
university than graduates of a similar academic program which costs a
lot less? Isn't that reinforcing discrimination through admission
standards and subsequent hiring practices? Are we sending a signal
that students must go to the most expensive and prestigious schools to
really get ahead in life? Is that good? Why can't we respect
and reward them for making a prudent choice by attending a college they
can afford?
Why shouldn't high school graduates be just as
capable? What do the college graduates actually learn to better
prepare themselves for success in life? Why can they only learn it
in a very expensive college program? Why can't they keep learning what
they need to know in other ways? What actually makes their college
experience worth almost any price, unlike any other investment in their
lives? Why is it such a good thing for them to start their adult
lives deeply in debt? Why do parents accept this logic? Why
do they teach it to their kids from an early age, and push them to get
into a top name college?
We are constantly fed statistical evidence that
college graduates earn far more than high school graduates throughout
their careers, and that those who spend more on the most prestigious
schools earn the most. This reassures us that the skyrocketing price of
college, consistently rising faster than other inflation, remains a wise
investment. It's a matter of blind faith in the rising value of
college.
Of course, who does these studies, and why? Do
we normally accept a sales pitch that the value of a good or
service we want is so high that we should gladly keep paying far more?
Don't we usually challenge that assumption, and try to drive quality up
and cost down through innovative competition?
Why is the academic world protected from the forces of
market competition to achieve better outcomes for the investment?
Shouldn't we be willing to pay somewhat more when we demonstrably get
better quality outcomes, but not pay more as a matter of faith regardless
of the evidence about the value?
Yes, there are times when we gladly pay more for
something because of the higher perceived value. We pay more for
some brands than others, even if the product functionally serves the
same basic purpose.
A beat up used car may still get you to where you need
to go, but a Mercedes may make you feel better about the trip.
Should we all feel entitled to have a Mercedes? Does the relative
affluence of Mercedes owners prove that they have made the better
choices in life? Do prestigious colleges really deliver a better
product, or were their graduates already very likely to be successful
before they made that large investment? Did the exclusivity of the
admissions process and cost simply skew the sample? Does buying a
Mercedes which you can't afford improve your prospects of success?
Does buying one just because you can afford it prove that you are more
worthy of success in life? Think about it. |
| Let's
reconsider carefully how our education system works. Politically,
we still control the elementary and secondary system of public schools
at the local level. Our schools may have become very reliant on
state and federal funding for some mandates and basic standards for
consistency, but the quality should really be under our local control.
Those parents who want to invest in obtaining a better
education for their children should not be obliged to pay double by
retreating to private schools while still paying for the public ones.
They are not cheating the public schools out of resources through that
choice. They should be free to choose, without the economic
disincentive of paying for public education in which they do not have
confidence of the quality. Similarly, the growth of the "home
schooling" movement is an obvious indicator of a failed system.
There have been lots of debates about school voucher
programs and other initiatives, but the basic point is that responsible
parents will accept responsibility for the education of their children.
They will not just turn them over to the local schools, ignore what
happens at school, and simply hope for the best. |
| The
point is that this is not a national, partisan political issue.
It's a local issue which is crucial to the future success of all
Americans regardless of political party preference. It is vital to
ourselves throughout our lifetimes, our families, our neighbors, our
employers, our employees, and our leadership of the free world as a
strong and vibrant local economy full of very capable, hard-working
people who believe that they have the power to create a better future
for themselves. We cannot afford to become
economic ghost towns through neglect of our own educational
responsibilities. It is not the problem of distant state and
government political leaders and the bureaucracies they organize and
oversee. It is vital to the survival and growth of prosperity in
our communities. That doesn't mean we should pay any price for
educational services. It means that we should be very vigilant
consumers about the quality control and value delivered by those local
services. |
| As
liberals so often like to paraphrase Einstein, insanity is making the
same mistake and expecting a different outcome. The notion that
everyone must go to college to succeed in life, regardless of the cost,
is a liberal article of faith because they are largely the ones who are
doing the teaching at any price, with as little effective oversight of
the quality and value of their product as possible. There is
really very little incentive for them to improve their performance as
long as consumers are willing to pay any price. On the contrary,
we send the wrong market signals by rewarding them further to fix their
own mistakes in additional academic programs, rather than rewarding them
for better outcomes in the first place. This
would be analogous to having a business which measures the defect rate
very selectively to avoid finding problems before delivery, and then
rationalizes the problems instead of fixing them, and endlessly asserts
that the problems can only be fixed for customers who complain and are
willing to pay extra for the repairs or process changes. The US
auto industry rewarded product failure that way for a long time.
Now they expect government to bail out their continued failures after
they lost market share to foreign competitors who made quality a top
priority while the American companies were still making excuses.
Forget about quality concepts like statistical process
control, "lean" methods, and so forth in education. Such
pernicious ideas emanate only from the evil world of corporate greed
from the liberal academic perspective. As a matter of faith,
market forces are not applicable to education. They only matter
after graduation - to better reward those who bought into their
programs, and thereby rationalize unlimited spending on academic
programs and research for the good of the country. It is asserted
to be so essential to our society that we can't trust the private sector
to find solutions to our needs for a better workforce. The
solution is to keep investing even more in the same mistakes.
Insane, right? |
| The
purpose here is not to propose specific solutions which will be
universally applicable to all schools in the country. That would
be the liberal model - directing change from the top by seeking new
mandates. |
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Instead, the point is to challenge our own assumptions about how to find
local solutions to the pretty obvious education problems which business
leaders observe in their communities, whether they are hiring high
school dropouts, graduates, or those who have some or a lot of college
education. |
| What
can we do to ensure that all children in our community, regardless of
the wealth or poverty of their families, enjoy and respect the equal
opportunities and their own responsibilities and freedoms which this
country was very carefully established to defend?
Are we teaching them that the deck is stacked against
them unless they conform to the expectations of their liberal teachers
from early childhood through university education? Are we teaching
them to be creative, innovative, and resourceful with full confidence in
their freedom to choose their own futures, and create their own success,
or are we teaching them dependency theory?
Do we reward initiative, or do we reward conformity?
Do we teach them that it is just their responsibility to attend school
as directed and not fail tests for a certain number of years, or do we
motivate and inspire them by personal example to take full advantage of
their potential, and to believe in themselves? |
| Yes,
"lifetime education" is a necessity today. It always was.
That doesn't mean enjoying free public education benefits for a
lifetime. We should never stop learning. We should take
personal responsibility for improving ourselves throughout our lives,
and not complain that it was easier for somebody else. We
shouldn't expect government programs for "workforce development" or
"worker retraining" or other social initiatives which compensate for
weak schools to be our only path to success. We shouldn't accept
failure if our community doesn't receive all of the desired state and
federal funding for such initiatives. We need to
be careful that we aren't reinforcing a message that government is
responsible for ensuring that we all enjoy good, high-paying jobs
throughout our lives as though that were an entitlement of being an
American. We live in a very competitive world full of very bright,
capable, and motivated people. We have to work hard for our
prosperity. Are we really teaching the values which lead to such
success?
If we don't do a much better job of developing our own
globally competitive "human capital" here and delivering much better
value from our very large investments in education, then we will be
dooming our own communities to a much less prosperous future for
generations to come. We will be the dropouts of the world who only
did as little as was required by our political leaders. We need to
accept personal responsibility for our own success in life regardless of
how many years of formal education we attended. |
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