Should Everyone go to College? (No. 2)

This is the second of a series of occasional posts that will deal with this question.

President Obama recently called on every American to receive at least one year of higher education or vocational training. However, there is no agreement among higher-education experts as to which students are most likely to succeed in college; what kind of college they should attend; whether the individual or society benefits more from post-secondary education; and whether college is worth the high cost and likely long-term debt.

In the current issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education (vol. 56, # 12, pp. B7-B10; Nov 13, 2009), several experts answer this question (among others): Who should and shouldn’t go to college? Charles Murray, political scientist and scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, has this to say:

It has been empirically demonstrated that doing well (B average or better) in a traditional college major in the arts and sciences requires levels of linguistic and logical/mathematical ability that only 10 to 15 percent of the nation’s youth possess. That doesn’t mean that only 10 to 15 percent should get more than a high-school education. It does mean that the four-year residential program leading to a B.A. is the wrong model for a large majority of young people.

[I should point out that the American Enterprise Institute is a right-wing think tank established in 1943, whose scholars are considered to be some of the leading architects of the second Bush administration's public policy. While I do not support or endorse the AEI or, for that matter, the second Bush administration's public policy, I think Mr. Murray's comments are worth consideration insofar as they appear to be objective.]

Marty Nemko, a career counselor who lives in Oakland, California, has an interesting response to the above question:

All high-school students should receive a cost-benefit analysis of the various options suitable to their situations: four-year college, two-year degree program, short-term career-prep program, apprenticeship program, on-the-job training, self-employment, the military. Students with weak academic records should be informed that, of freshmen at “four year” colleges who graduated in the bottom 40 percent of their high-school class, two-thirds won’t graduate even if given eight and a half years. And that even if such students defy the odds, they will likely graduate with a low GPA and a major in low demand by employers. A college should not admit a student it believes would more wisely attend another institution or pursue a non-college post-secondary option. Students’ lives are at stake, not just enrollment targets.

Another noteworthy response is by Marcus A. Winters, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute:

In general, people benefit from education and should acquire as much as they can. Though there are many good reasons to do so, the best economic research suggests that the wage return for a year of college course work is more than enough to justify pursuing at least some higher education. That not all students have the skills necessary to keep up with college course work says more about the effectiveness of our K-12 education than about the cognitive ability of American students.

[The Manhattan Institute is a right-wing, free-market-oriented think tank established in New York City in 1978.]

Norton Grubb, professor of policy, organization, measurement, and evaluation at the University of California at Berkeley’s Graduate School of Education, says:

Students should go to college if they understand (and want) the economic or occupational benefits of college, as long as they understand the length of time and difficulty of attaining a degree. They should also be college-ready, and they should be enthusiastic about the intellectual roles of college—the chance to take general-education courses, the intellectual and cultural life of most colleges, the opportunities to develop broad and curious intellects. Otherwise college is likely to be narrow and utilitarian.

Of course, many of the students I encounter have an anti-intellectual attitude, which obviously makes it difficult, if not impossible, for them to succeed. More responses to this question and other questions can be found here.

Should Everyone go to College? (No. 1)

This is the first of a series of occasional posts that will deal with this question.

Open admissions, the policy of permitting students to enroll in a college or university without regard to academic qualifications, grew largely out of the turmoil of the period 1965-75 that coincided with America’s intense involvement in the Vietnam War. A college degree, it had long been known, was the major pathway to upward economic and social mobility, and anyone who wanted one, said the activists, should have access to the institution of his or her choice.

Only a handful of the nation’s 4,064 degree-granting institutions of higher education, perhaps no more than 150, have admission standards that are highly competitive. Most colleges and universities, state and private, have open admissions or nearly open admissions.

“Professor X” works part-time in the evenings as an adjunct instructor of English. He teaches two courses, Introduction to College Writing (English 101) and Introduction to College Literature (English 102), at a small private college and at a community college in the northeastern United States. He believes that the idea that a university education is for everyone is a destructive myth. In an article entitled, “In the Basement of the Ivory Tower” that appeared in the June 2008 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, Professor X explains:

Mine are the students whose applications show indifferent grades and have blank spaces where the extracurricular activities would go. They chose their college based not on the U.S. News & World Report rankings but on MapQuest; in their ideal academic geometry, college is located at a convenient spot between work and home…

My students take English 101 and English 102 not because they want to but because they must. Both colleges I teach at require that all students, no matter what their majors or career objectives, pass these two courses…

I wonder, sometimes, at the conclusion of a course, when I fail nine out of 15 students, whether the college will send me a note either (1) informing me of a serious bottleneck in the march toward commencement and demanding that I pass more students, or (2) commending me on my fiscal ingenuity—my high failure rate forces students to pay for classes two or three times over. What actually happens is that nothing happens…

There seems, as is often the case in colleges, to be a huge gulf between academia and reality. No one is thinking about the larger implications, let alone the morality, of admitting so many students to classes they cannot possibly pass…No one has drawn up the flowchart and seen that, although more-widespread college admission is a bonanza for the colleges and nice for the students and makes the entire United States of America feel rather pleased with itself, there is one point of irreconcilable conflict in the system, and that is the moment when the adjunct instructor, who by the nature of his job teaches the worst students, must ink the F on that first writing assignment…

Sending everyone under the sun to college is a noble initiative. Academia is all for it, naturally. Industry is all for it; some companies even help with tuition costs. Government is all for it; the truly needy have lots of opportunities for financial aid. The media applauds it—try to imagine someone speaking out against the idea. To oppose such a scheme of inclusion would be positively churlish…[But] I, who teach these low-level, must-pass, no-multiple-choice-test classes, am the one who ultimately delivers the news to those unfit for college: that they lack the most-basic skills and have no sense of the volume of work required; that they are in some cases barely literate; that they are so bereft of schemata, so dispossessed of contexts in which to place newly acquired knowledge, that every bit of information simply raises more questions. They are not ready for high school, some of them, much less for college.

You can read Professor X’s entire essay here.