Thomas Donlan of Barron’s structures his latest editorial commentary in the form of a less-than-uplifting commencement speech.
Welcome to the world, young college graduates. This is what you always jokingly referred to as the “real world.” Sorry to tell you, but it’s no more real than the cloistered world you left. It, too, is full of myths and governed by myth makers. It, too, is controlled by people who claim to care about you but actually don’t. It, too, is full of rigged games.
One thing is different: This world plays for real money, and it plays for keeps. You really do have to pay back your college loans, regardless of whether the education received at your alma mater creates value for you in the marketplace.
This is why President Barack Obama thought it would be nice to help the next cohort of high school graduates compare the 4,700 or so universities and colleges in the U.S. He assigned the U.S. Department of Education to offer up data on graduation rates, college dropout rates, earnings of recent graduates, and the accessibility of institutions to low-income students and students who are going to be the first in their families to break into higher education.
The president is a graduate of two Ivy League schools, receiving a bachelor’s degree in political science from Columbia University and a law degree from Harvard Law School. There’s no chance that either school will slip in national respect.
But further down the academic ladder, there is fear and loathing for the president’s plan. Administrators, teachers, and students are justly afraid for their reputations. Students may find, as some of this year’s graduates have, that going to college is no guarantee of a comfortable job or entrance into the upper-middle class. …
… Many American high school graduates are not ready for college, but they go anyway. College preparation is not adequate to sustain so many students; admission standards are too low; many colleges offer remedial courses to provide learning that did not occur in high school; too many schools collect a semester’s tuition in advance and send the student packing. Instead of diploma mills, many schools are dropout mills.
Unfortunately, the fix most often pursued is to reduce “barriers” to college completion: more financial aid, more remedial courses, easier courses, and so on.
The U.S. tried this before. A broad movement arose at the end of the 19th century to bring more Americans to a higher level of education. Fewer than 15% of Americans had graduated from high school, so high school was made into a free entitlement, with lower academic standards. By 1999, 83% of Americans had graduated from high school, but they had to go to college to get something like the education that high school grads received in 1900.
