A recent report published by The Education Trust entitled “A Matter of Degrees: Improving Graduation Rates in Four-Year Colleges and Universities” argues that we ought to be deeply concerned over the fact that only about 60 percent of the students who enroll in four-year institutions in the U.S. earn a bachelor’s degree within six years. (The report is available online at www.edtrust.org.) Author Kevin Carey calls this a “huge national problem” and implores colleges to find ways to increase their graduation rates. Is the current graduation rate truly a matter that should have Americans searching frantically for solutions, or is this the educational equivalent of the disaster movie “The Day After Tomorrow?” I’m inclined to think it’s the latter.
Carey acknowledges that the low graduation rate in the U.S. is nothing new, but contends that “The negative impact of this low completion rate has been largely masked in recent years, because the number of students entering the system has been rising.” He does not explain how the supposed ill effects of having roughly forty percent of students who enroll leave college without receiving a degree are “masked” by increasing numbers of students. After all, the number of degree-less people has also been increasing along with the numbers of enrolled students If the lack of a college degree is a problem, then it has been manifesting itself to a larger and larger number of Americans, year after year. We ought to be able to see concrete evidence of this “huge national problem” now; to claim that it has been “masked” seems facile.
The author then argues that the consequences of not having a college degree have been growing more severe over time. Carey writes, “Once, those who tried and failed to get a college degree still had the opportunity to find a solid middle-management job and move up the career ladder. Lack of success in college was seen as an individual disappointment, not a national dilemma.” (The paper never does get around to explaining how this long-term college completion rate now poses a “national dilemma.” Exactly how is it a dilemma?) Today, however, “The rapidly globalizing 21st Century economy is putting relentless pressure on lower-skill manufacturing jobs that once allowed people without a post-secondary education to stay comfortably in the middle class.”
We often hear it said that jobs for people with less than a college degree are disappearing, but data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics don’t support that notion. According to BLS projections, over the decade 2002-2012, of the ten occupations expected to show the largest growth, only two (postsecondary teachers and general and operations managers) are jobs that call for a college degree. The other eight highest-growth occupations, including registered nurses, customer service representatives, food preparation and service workers, and cashiers, are jobs that can be filled by individuals with no more than an associates degree and usually just with on-the-job training. Furthermore, the BLS forecasts continuing strong demand for workers in such fields as construction and transportation. Manufacturing jobs are expected to grow rather slowly, increasing only 3.2 percent over the decade, but that is far from the cataclysm painted by many anti-globalists and implicitly accepted by “A Matter of Degrees.” (The study cherry-picks some BLS data, citing growth projections only for jobs that call for a college degree, while ignoring non-degree jobs projected to grow even more.) The alarm raised by the report, supported merely by pointing to a widespread misperception about rapid change in the labor market, seems to be entirely unjustified. We are slowly transitioning to a more global, knowledge-based economy, but it does not follow that jobs will necessarily require more formal education than in the past.
It is worth noting at this point that most of the jobs for which a college degree is deemed necessary do not really have any particular knowledge requirements that could be met only by individuals who have graduated from college. Most business management entry-level positions, for example, entail on-the-job training where prior knowledge of business management is far less important than the ability to read and write English. Employers generally use the BA requirement simply as a device for screening out individuals who, because they haven’t finished college, are presumed to be too hard to train. It just isn’t the case that jobs are now becoming so demanding that the four or more years spent in college makes the difference between having the ability to do them and not.
So what would happen if businesses found themselves with more positions to fill than they had applicants with college degrees? Carey suggests that the result would be damage to our economic competitiveness, but his view is rooted in the doubtful notion that having acquired a college degree adds the essential human capital that the work demands. It is much more realistic to believe that employers would simply relax the “requirement” of having a BA. They would consider individuals without a degree and use other means of identifying candidates who seem to combine the right attitude with trainability. To be sure, there are some jobs where knowledge that one would probably only have gained in the earning of a bachelor’s degree is vital — college coursework in accounting, for example, would probably be necessary for success in an entry-level position in an accounting firm – but in most cases, the “need” for a BA is just a screening mechanism having nothing to do with specific knowledge or skills. If there were really a shortage of “qualified” applicants, most employers would easily adjust by changing their hiring practices. In short, there is no reason to believe that the future prosperity of the United States is in peril unless we produce more college graduates.
If employers can adapt by lowering their requirements for applicants, it is also true that workers who find that they are unable to get a satisfactory job with their current educational credentials are able to adjust upward. That is, they can pursue studies leading to a degree if they think that it will pay off. Carey tries to make matters seem desperate when he writes, “For many, going to college was their first, best, and last opportunity for real economic mobility and success.” The person who decided to get a job right out of high school, or who dropped out of college after a few semesters, is not, however, branded for life by that choice. Great numbers of people return to college later in life to learn marketable skills and earn degrees. America has an education market so broad that it makes no sense to talk about people losing their “last chance.”
What I am suggesting is that we can rely on the spontaneous order of a free society to produce the right percentages of people with different educational attainments. The incentives of employers and employees pursuing their individual goals will give us the right percentage of people with college degrees. We do not need programs designed to deliberately change the results of the invisible hand in the educational marketplace.
Those of us who have taught undergraduates know that a large percentage of them are just not ready, either intellectually or emotionally, to take college seriously. They want, as Professor Murray Sperber puts it, a “beer and circus” environment and an easy degree. Unfortunately, a lot of students who receive such college degrees then find that the best they can do in the labor market is to take what used to be known as “high school jobs.” Economists Frederic Pryor and David Schaffer pointed out that regrettable fact in their 1999 book Who’s Not Working and Why. Possessing a BA is emphatically not a sufficient condition for landing a stable, good-paying job.
For that reason, it may actually be harmful to keep young people in college to complete their degrees. Carey praises a number of schools that have unusually high graduation percentages, but without identifying just what those schools do to achieve their high numbers. If they manage to keep more students around for the four or five or six years it takes them to graduate just through high grades, low expectations, and a lot of campus fun, then they are just wasting the time and money of naïve young people and their parents. Having a high graduation rate does not by itself necessarily denote educational success.
It isn’t just the low overall graduation rate that worries Carey, but the fact that the graduation rate for students from low-income families is far lower than it is for students from higher-income families. That has always been true and the cause is easily identified: The K-12 schools that most students attend in the inner cities do an abysmal job of teaching even rudimentary skills. (That isn’t an inherent problem, as the success of most students who attend private or parochial city schools attests.) Carey admits that “Some of the problem undoubtedly lies with our K-12 schools,” but glides right past that elephant in the room to press his case that colleges and universities need to do much more to close the education gap. But to expect them to make up for the massive failure of government inner-city schools is to expect the impossible. Complaining about low college graduation rates for students who have poor academic skills coming out of high school is like complaining that the painting department in an auto factory fails to correct vehicles with structural defects. The problem must be addressed at its source. Most colleges and universities in the U.S. try valiantly to overcome the educational deficits of students from poor homes and bad schools, but often those deficits are far too great to be rectified with a number of remedial courses.
“A Matter of Degrees” concludes with hand-wringing rhetoric: “If this doesn’t change soon, there is a real danger that higher education will cease to be an engine of social opportunity, and start to be more of a reifying agent of already severe educational and social inequalities.” I disagree emphatically. Higher education has been, is now, and will continue to be an “engine of social opportunity” for individuals from all walks of life in the United States. Large numbers of students from poor and minority families who are willing and able to partake of the serious offerings at American colleges and universities will continue to earn degrees and use them as a springboard to success. That will happen whether or not we follow the advice of this report and undertake programs to raise the college graduation rate.
If the U.S. has a “huge national problem” in education, it is not that the college graduation rate isn’t higher than it is. The problem is that our K-12 system so poorly equips so many of our young people that they are not capable either of college studies or of doing many good jobs that call for some degree of language or mathematical skill. As Dr. Edward Gordon wrote in a 2001 white paper entitled “America’s Meltdown: Why We Are Losing the Skill Wars and What We Can Do About It,” “America now faces the worst of all possible worlds in which high-tech jobs and even traditional craft jobs will go unfilled, while millions of badly educated Americans languish with low-pay, dead-end employment.” Business managers constantly lament the fact that so many of the applicants they receive – including those with college degrees – lack even the basic knowledge and skills necessary to function on the job. Finding ways of pushing more of our badly-educated youth through to college degrees will do about as much good as putting beautiful paint jobs on cars with cracked axles.
“A Matter of Degrees” marks the launch of a new focus by The Education Trust on higher education. It’s not an auspicious start.