rethinking higher education

An intriguing post by Sarah Burris over at Future Majority comparing rising college tuition with the fact that many of the most stable job sectors in our economy are based on practical, rather than theoretical/book, knowledge and experience:

[O]ur culture spends a lot of time demanding more from our youth. While [Shop Class as Soulcraft author Matthew] Crawford talks about making twice as much as an electrician than he did at the nightmare summary writing job [where he mindlessly summarized up to 23 scholarly articles a day], he notes that many would find it repugnant he "didn't live up to his education," even consider it a waste of time and money. Crawford doesn't see a degree as a necessity for greatness.

His running thesis surrounds our systems of high school education that continue to cut classes that teach practical skills over book knowledge. His example is a heartbreaking year he spent teaching Latin in a high school where he swears kids would have had more of a connection to shop class, and absorbed skills that are just as useful.

When it comes to doctors and lawyers, advanced degrees are probably something you don't want to skip out on. But in a world where college is too far out of reach, we owe youth a bit of honesty about potential if they instead undergo proper training. We also owe them the respect deserved of everyone regardless of their class or the school they attended or jobs they hold.

Burris' comparison implies a very important question: what is the point of college? The knee-jerk progressive response, of which I have myself no doubt partaken, is to say that everyone should have access to higher education. But is the corollary belief really that going to college somehow makes everyone a better person, or more qualified to participate in the economy? Is this a realistic or, more importantly, progressive position to take in an era when private college tuition is, in a few cases, hitting or surpassing the $50,000/year mark (the national average for private 4-year universities is $25,143/year, but that's only the cost of tuition, not books, housing, etc.) and even public universities have seen a 6.4% increase in tuition over the last year (up to an average of $6,585/year for public 4-year universities)?

This is not a rhetorical question. It is possible that there's a reason why we should try to have universal participation in higher education, as we believe we should have universal graduation from high school. But perhaps it is time to rethink what the point of college is. One the one hand, there is an underlying implication in the traditional liberal notion that everyone would benefit from college, which is that the institution itself makes one a better social/global citizen, that it has the potential to expand the mind and make Renaissance Men and Women out of all of us. On the other hand, there is a sometimes complimentary but sometimes competing frame that college is needed to get you a job that will support a middle-class lifestyle. The latter, it seems, may be increasingly faulty.

Amy Traub at DMIBlog points out that blue-collar service jobs are often poorly paid due to lack of unionization. But as I'm sure many white-collar, college-educated young workers will tell you, white-collar industries aren't exactly the bastion of unionization or career stability, either. It is clear that unionization will benefit all industries, but it is unclear that the correct response to the demise of America's industrial-fueled middle-class factory sector is to send everyone to college. College is not and cannot be a panacea; the National Bureau of Economic Research study to which Traub cites for the proposition that "[j]obs for college-educated workers are already amongst the highest quality positions out there" attributes the wage premium for college-educated employees from 1980 to 2005 not on the college education itself, but rather on the slowdown on growth of supply of college-educated workers. Universal college education would create greater wage equity, as the movement for universal high school education did in the 1910s to 1980s, but in no way alone guarantees a growth in middle class jobs. This is a point Traub recognizes, explaining the need for greater unionization across new service industries, writing that "no matter how accessible we make higher education, there is no future scenario in which every job in America requires a college degree."

As Burris' argues in her post, it is not clear whether we are being honest with youth about what additional degrees are going to get them, and whether they are the best use of increasingly limited family resources from a purely career-based outlook. Rethinking post-high school job training--and in-high school job training, for that matter--is key to not only recovering economic stability and growth, but to recovering the promise of the American middle-class.