Asking the Wrong Questions, Debating the Wrong Issues
Recently, there has been a flurry of articles and reports about higher education and the policy choices that will affect its future. As a communications professional, I would normally welcome the attention to higher education; the whole sector is underreported, in my humble opinion. However, this recent coverage has centered on the wrong questions and the wrong debates—and is diverting attention from some really important trends and problems.
Both the Chronicle of Higher Education and the New York Times have recently published forums on the question, are too many students going to college? This is the kind of question editors love because it makes it easy for them to line people up on either side of a seemingly important debate. But the answer to this particular question is pretty clear-cut: for any individual student, going to college is clearly better than not going. This is why students are flocking to colleges of all sorts—two-year, four-year, for-profit, not-for-profit, public, private.
The economic data are clear on the larger societal value of sending more people to college too. Tony Carnevale, president of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, has published two definitive articles—one in AAC&U’s Liberal Education, and another in New Directions for Community Colleges—clearly demonstrating (1) the income advantage of going to college vs. entering the workforce without college-level learning (a wage premium that, surprisingly, has continued to rise even as the supply of college-educated workers has also risen); and (2) that even after accounting for current economic conditions, the demand—and the rewards—for college-educated workers will increase over the coming decades. As he puts it, “between 2002 and 2012, there will be 24 million new jobs for workers with associate, bachelor’s, and graduate degrees, a 30 percent increase.” Moreover, if we simply keep educating students at the same rate we are now, we will have trouble meeting this demand. These articles provide lots more data that debunk many of the myths circulating in the media right now, and everyone in policy circles and higher education leadership should read them both!
Another reason this debate gains traction is that everyone likes to complain that students “these days” don’t have the skills to do college-level work. This, of course, is partly true: far too many students arrive at college needing remediation. But it does not follow that we can simply ignore these students and still expect our economy to thrive. The college-readiness deficit results, in part, from the inability of high school reform to keep up with rising skill demands. But Carnevale also definitively shows that, in fact, “there are more than half a million students, mostly from working class and low-income families, who complete high school in the top half of their classes but never earn an associate, bachelor’s or a graduate degree within eight years of high school graduation.” Surely we can, and should, bring these students into the system and do whatever is necessary to educate them at the college level. Carnevale also points out that “roughly half of low-income workers and out-of-school youth have literacy levels that qualify them for college-level work.”
Instead of debating whether too many kids are going to college, shouldn’t we instead focus on (1) getting more of them college-ready and (2) getting more of these low-income students on an educational track that will provide them with the kind of liberal education needed for success? This is part of the agenda AAC&U is prioritizing through its Making Excellence Inclusive and LEAP initiatives.
Cliff Adelman of the Institute for Higher Education Policy and Andreas Schleicher at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development have also recently garnered press attention for their dust-up over the data on our country’s declining “ranking” in terms of educational attainment. Here again, instead of arguing about whether we’re losing the battle for “most-educated nation” to Finland, shouldn’t we be more concerned about whether we’re actually educating our own students to meet our own economy’s needs? And does the kind of education we’re providing lead to both economic success and a better-educated citizenry? These are the questions AAC&U is pursuing through our projects and meetings. And at our upcoming annual meeting in Washington, DC, in addition to holding sessions on these and other important topics, we’ll be releasing findings from a new national survey of employers about the skills and abilities they look for in college-educated workers—the ones we’re clearly not producing enough of!
