On the evening of February 26, I was among the four debaters on a PBS program jointly sponsored by the Miller Center and the Lumina Foundation devoted to this question: Does the United States need more college graduates to remain a world economic power? (You can view the debate online and check the television broadcast schedule here.)
Former Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings and Dr. Michael Lomax, president of the United Negro College Fund, argued in favor of the resolution. Ohio University economics professor Richard Vedder and I argued against it.
The debate was rather spirited and, I think, enlightening for the audience. What it boiled down to was a contest between the airy rhetoric of the affirmative side and the reality-based arguments of the negative.
In their opening statements, the affirmative debaters made these contentions:
· College education is beneficial because it opens up opportunities for people and can break long chains of poverty.
· College education raises people’s incomes substantially; graduates on average earn almost a million dollars more over their working careers than do non-graduates.
· College education provides people with the skills they need to succeed in the “knowledge economy.”
· The United States is falling behind other nations with regard to college completion among younger workers and it’s important to achieve President Obama’s goal of regaining the number one spot by 2020.
During the course of the debate, Professor Vedder and I took issue with each of the affirmative contentions.
First, we showed that a college degree does not necessarily open up good opportunities for individuals because degrees are now so common that having one is no distinction. Furthermore, there are other ways besides going to college for young people to get on a career path—vocational training, for example.
Second, we argued that it would not benefit our economic productivity to devote resources to college for additional students. Since we already have a surplus of college graduates in the labor force, expanding higher education further would only divert resources from more beneficial uses.
Third, we showed that college doesn’t necessarily enhance a student’s human capital because academic standards (at many schools, at least) are so low that students can graduate without improving on the poor skills they had in high school.
Fourth, we demonstrated that the “college earnings premium” argument is fallacious because what’s true on average is not necessarily true at the margin. The average of what college graduates earn (an average that includes many people who obtained their degrees decades ago, when standards were more rigorous) is irrelevant to what the next group of people who get degrees will earn. We know that many college graduates today end up working in jobs such as theater usher or bartender and they don’t get paid more just for having a college diploma on the wall.
Finally, we argued that putting more and more people through college would exacerbate the problem of credential inflation, i.e., employers insisting that applicants have college credentials for jobs that don’t require any academic training. Credential inflation already shuts people who don’t have college degrees out from competing for jobs they could do.
And what did the affirmative say to rebut our arguments and shore up their case?
Nothing.
They repeated their statements and tried to shift the debate onto other grounds. (I’ll get to that momentarily.) At no time did either speaker attempt to refute our arguments. No attempt to show that we don’t already have a surplus of college graduates or that, despite the surplus, we still need more. No effort to prove that most new college graduates really will earn high salaries. No counter to our argument that many students learn very little in college, nor any response to our credential inflation argument.
Instead, the affirmative tried to slide into arguments they probably felt were more congenial.
Dr. Lomax maintained that we should encourage more people to go to college because there are beneficial side-effects such as greater civic participation, higher employment and fewer health problems. The trouble with that argument, Professor Vedder pointed out, is that those are just correlations: people more inclined to civic participation, more apt to be able to keep a job, and less inclined to behaviors like smoking that are harmful to health are the kinds of people who are more drawn to college education. There is no reason to think that college causes people to adopt good habits.
Secretary Spellings maintained that the problem with American higher education is that (I’m paraphrasing, but this is very close) “We are very good at educating wealthy white students, but not very good at educating minority students.”
That’s tangential to the debate topic; if the economy somehow needs more college graduates, why should their family background matter? Neither Professor Vedder nor I had time for an extensive reply, but here’s why I think that statement is untrue.
American colleges and universities are delighted to have minority students. They’re usually specially recruited and often given favorable treatment by the administration and professors. Some minority students work hard, perform very well, and graduate with honors. So why is it that graduation rates for minority students tend to be low? Is it because schools haven’t learned how to teach them? I don’t think so. The explanation is that on the whole, those students enter college with far lower basic academic skills (which can seldom be overcome just with a remedial course or two) and less academic engagement.
If you doubt that, ask yourself if the very high graduation rate among Asian students is because schools are “good at teaching them,” or because those students generally have high skills and motivation as they enter college. That’s why college won’t work as a social leveling device—skills and motivation are not equally distributed.
Also, Dr. Lomax stated that it would be wrong to exclude people who need upward mobility from attending college, implying that by opposing a policy of expanding higher education, the negative, in effect, favored the exclusion of some students. I wish I’d had the opportunity to say, “We don’t want to exclude any person or any group. We simply don’t believe that it helps individuals–no matter what their race–who aren’t well prepared for or much interested in academic studies to lure them into college, where they’ll spend a lot of time and money getting a credential that may very well prove worthless.”
Eventually, one point of agreement emerged, that our K-12 education system is largely ineffective and particularly so for poorer families. Professor Vedder and I say that we ought to try to fix K-12 first. Unless and until we can do that, trying to put more people through college will be costly and ineffective.
If we want to get serious about improving our economy’s productivity, there are many, many things that would help. Governments massively divert resources away from productive, competitively determined uses and into unproductive, politically determined uses; they interfere with efficiency with innumerable laws and regulations; they drive away investors and entrepreneurs with high taxes.
The list of changes that would make the American economy stronger is extremely long, but putting more people through college is not among them.