Mismatch

At Fortune Rick Wartzman has an article that fills in the blanks on how “college for all” became the prevailing educational and economic policy in the United States:

In the wake of “A Nation at Risk,” curricula at most high schools became more academically demanding, with added requirements in mathematics, science, English, and social studies. More homework was assigned; more classroom time was scheduled.

But by ushering in these academic reforms, the report’s greatest legacy may well have been this: It reinforced the idea that unless every student wound up going to college, we had failed them—and they had failed themselves.

In particular, “A Nation at Risk” cemented the bachelor’s degree, in the words of a Century Foundation analysis, as “more and more the gold standard for the transition from youthful dependency to adult independence as a worker and as a fully empowered individual and citizen.”

The result is that—despite some recent, high-profile pushback against this “college-for-all” mindset and mounting skepticism about the “return on investment” of a college degree—we have consigned those who don’t have a four-year diploma to lesser-than status. Along the way, we have overlooked the fact that people express their brainpower in all sorts of ways, many of which can’t be captured by how fast they divide polynomials, how adeptly they can dissect Moby Dick, or how high they score on the SAT.

The proportion of the population affected by this bias is enormous, and the costs are staggeringly high.

concluding that the policy “has failed America”.

I wouldn’t put it quite that way. I would say that the primary beneficiaries of the policy have been colleges and there is a mismatch among the jobs our economy is creating, our population, and the policy. Billions have been spent on the policy and most that has gone to colleges and universities who have used it to increase the size of their administrative staffs.

Pew Research has found that 40% of recent college grads are ‘underemployed”, i.e. they’re taking jobs that don’t require a college degree. Just about a million U. S. go to H1-B holders or are outsourced offshore. I suspect that is a substantial undercount.

I would also make a more controversial claim: “college for all” ignores half of the population who are not interested in college or unable to complete college. We need a policy that is better aligned with the population we have and the economy we have rather than those we wish we had.