My Old School

David Leonhardt takes a look around and realizes that American universities have trouble doing the basics, like making sure the kids who start as freshmen actually graduate and have something to show for their time and money: US Colleges Are Failing In Getting Students to Graduate

If you were going to come up with a list of organizations whose failures had done the most damage to the American economy in recent years, you’d probably have to start with the Wall Street firms and regulatory agencies that brought us the financial crisis. From there, you might move on to Wall Street’s fellow bailout recipients in Detroit, the once-Big Three.

But I would suggest that the list should also include a less obvious nominee: public universities

Would it be rude of me to suggest that each of those areas of economic activity have been the luckless recipients of attention from liberal/progressive activists? Wall Street firms, like all segments of the finance world, have long been the subject of blistering Lefty screeds, from Marx on down. The "regulatory agencies" overseeing the modern finance industry virtually all date back to the New Deal and have changed very little since then, for all the talk of de-regulation. The Big Three have taken it from all sides: environmentalists, highway safety nuts, cultural commisars decrying SUV's, grasping unions, etc. And public universities? They're practically a massive WPA project for otherwise unemployable PhD's and administrators.

At its top levels, the American system of higher education may be the best in the world. Yet in terms of its core mission — turning teenagers into educated college graduates — much of the system is simply failing.

Only 33 percent of the freshmen who enter the University of Massachusetts, Boston, graduate within six years. Less than 41 percent graduate from the University of Montana, and 44 percent from the University of New Mexico. The economist Mark Schneider refers to colleges with such dropout rates as “failure factories,” and they are the norm.

The United States does a good job enrolling teenagers in college, but only half of students who enroll end up with a bachelor’s degree. Among rich countries, only Italy is worse.

Leonhardt and I both agree: after reading the above we see failure. But, where Leonhardt sees a social failure in which not enough kids are graduating from college, I see something else. If there are majorities of entering students who are failing to finish college, that says to me that they might not be ready for college work, or (more likely) don't want to put in the effort to do college work. And in some cases, who could blame them? If, say, you're a natural born salesman, why sit and listen to 4 years of dull lectures when you could get out there and start earning a living? On the other hand, why pay tens of thousands of dollars, and expend years of your youth, if you are getting terrible grades and are bored by your course work? Most people start college because they have been told by the adults around them - their parents, teachers, the media, etc. - that it is the only guaranteed path to prosperity. I guess that means loading up on $100,000+ worth of debt is also a key to prosperity. Gotta spend money to make money!

The real problem is the higher education bubble that has built up over the last 20 years, as left-wing politicians have turned to expanding college enrollment as the cure for what ails ya. The message should be going the other way; college is an option, but it's not the only one. But progressives don't want to hear that.

That’s a big reason inequality has soared, and productivity growth has slowed. Economic growth in this decade was on pace to be slower than in any decade since World War II — even before the financial crisis started.

Oh come off it. The whole point of going to college is to get a credential that sets you apart from the herd. Since when were colleges enforcing equal results for all?

Failing to graduate from college is nowhere near as crippling to your prospects as failing to graduate from high school. That's why the impetus to finish college has to come from within, not from yet another layer of useless administrators. You can't make a horse drink water, and you can't force a 20 year-old to graduate from college. Anyone can finish high school, or at least get a GED. And there are so many colleges out there that any high school grad can get into college. But, actually finishing is up to the student, not the university and certainly not "society." In fact, there are plenty of jobs out there for people who have a brain and who work hard. College can't teach you that. In fact, there are a lot of dumb lazy people out there who have figured out that getting through college means you DON'T have to display any great skill to impress certain employers; you just need the sheepskin. Some equality.