Is higher ed on wrong path in US?

By Joel Mathis and Julie Ponzi

Tribune News Service

It’s a scary time to go to college – and to be involved in higher education. It increasingly takes a post-secondary degree to get a middle-class job in America, but the emphasis on work is triggering an exodus from the humanities like languages, literature, arts and music. Meanwhile, student debt is so crushing that many bright students skip college entirely – or end their educations with loans to repay but without a needed degree. Everywhere you look, higher ed seems to be in trouble.

Why? What’s going wrong with higher education? What are liberals and conservatives getting wrong about the issue? Are they getting anything right? Joel Mathis and guest columnist Julie Ponzi debate the issue.

JOEL MATHIS

Liberals want just about everybody to go to college. President Obama has proposed letting every American go to community college tuition free; there are folks on the left who’d rather take federal higher education spending and use it to send everybody to a four-year school, if they choose.

There is a good reason for such big thinking: Just think what the GI Bill helped do for 1950s America. What’s more, the days when an American could graduate high school and walk into a comfortable middle class job are gone. A degree is increasingly required for such opportunities. So expanded access is a worthy goal.

Just not yet.

First, we must target students who start school but don’t finish: Only 56 percent of Americans who start a four-year degree finish within six years. In most universities, 55 percent is a failing grade.

Sometimes students wash out because of the expense. But sometimes they give up because they haven’t received the right kinds of help. Targeting those students can raise graduation rates.

A better approach was recently featured in The Atlantic. Arizona State University has learned to give individualized attention to each of its students, including the 13,000 students who take classes through its online program.

The university uses a tool called eAdvisor, which guides students “about which classes they must take to graduate on time, and then tracks their progress along the way. If a student falters by, for example, dropping a required class, eAdvisor automatically e-mails the student and his or her adviser,” The Atlantic reports. Under the program, 41 percent of students from poorer families have graduated in four years – up from 26 percent prior.

A little encouragement goes a long way. But it must be a deliberate effort, and it needs to happen at more than one school.

JULIE PONZI

Americans have been led to believe that they must have higher education in order to get a good job. It isn’t true. But this misbegotten belief has become a self-fulfilling prophecy with disastrous consequences for the middle class.

The desire for education is emblematic of the American longing to rise. But today’s progressives hold that because higher education often can result in good economic outcomes, increasing access to it must be an imperative.

As is often the case, progressives haven’t thought through the unintended consequences or asked the right questions. What if an unqualified increase in access to higher education turned out to diminish its essential goodness? What if pushing higher education on people who lacked the ability or inclination actually impeded their quest to rise? And what if the quality of education suffered as a result?

That’s exactly what has happened over the past 60 years or so. Usually when demand increases, supply increases with it and prices drop. Not so with higher education, which receives billions in federal and state subsidies every year, keeping prices high.

But as we have increased demand for degrees – or, in truth, the jobs people think a college degree will confer – what we have actually done is create a market that cannot possibly deliver what it promises.

Americans today aren’t really demanding higher education. They’re demanding credentials for a job. But colleges and universities have sold degrees that don’t deliver on their promise. Consumers are waking up to the reality that we have cheapened the value of the product, even as we continue to demand a higher price for it.

College costs have skyrocketed beyond the limits of any rational cost-benefit analysis for most people. Is higher education on this model really the sustainable or worthy development progressives would have us believe?

Joel Mathis is associate editor for Philadelphia Magazine. Julie Ponzi is a fellow at The Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy.