I’m speaking about the executive director of the group NC Forum. Last Friday, his group (I suppose it’s his own handiwork) issued an intellectually dishonest attack on my paper The Overselling of Higher Education. The lead “editorial comment” badly mischaracterized my paper. Inter alia, the comment claimed that my paper “completely ignores one of the most fundamental arguments for acquiring education beyond high school” namely, the “direct connection between higher education and higher pay.”
Minor problem there — I devoted several pages to a refutation of the idea that putting more students through college will necessarily do anything to raise their earnings, including evidence that substantial numbers of college graduates currently settle for low-paying jobs that could be learned by a moderately intelligent high school student.
Emails and phone calls to the executive director, one John Dornan, have been ignored. I’d like to ask for equal space for a response, but evidently Mr. Dornan isn’t interested in a serious exchange of ideas. His attack on my paper was rather clearly motivated by politics, since he insisted that my conclusions were “predictable” given the “conservative roots” of JLF and the Pope Center. But politics had nothing to do with my paper, which stands or falls on the strength of its argumentation and evidence, not on my (much less anyone else’s) political philosophy.
