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The Harvard Salient |
October 21, 1996 |
Somewhere on President Clinton's list of things the federal government could do to help you is a curious proposal. According to his campaign literature, "America's Hope Scholarships will make access to two years of college universal by providing students with a $1500 refundable tax credit for full-time tuition in their first year of college and another $1500 credit in their second year if they work hard, stay off drugs, and earn at least a B average in their first year." In other words, every American will be able to go to at least a community college for two years for free so long as they do not inhale. What crisis has impelled Clinton to throw scarce federal resources into getting more Americans a college education? Good question. The United States, after all, already has the most college-educated workers in the world.
The answer, according to the Clintonites, is that the high intellectual demands of jobs in the "Information Age" will require a highly educated citizenry. It is, however, instructional to see exactly what skills managers in the "sunrise industries" (Labor Secretary Robert Reich's term for industries that do neat high-tech things that he doesn't understand) want from their workers. Well, first and foremost, literacy is vital. A modern mechanized assembly line is a complex and dangerous place, even for a worker who can read &emdash; an illiterate worker is not only useless, but an OSHA investigation waiting to happen. Likewise, an inarticulate and illiterate service sector worker will not be productive. What else do workers need? Basic math skills are often necessary. Some familiarity with computers, or at least the ability to learn from a manual, is nice. That's about it for basic skills. Specific technical jobs often require specialized training provided by an employer to employees. Again, literacy is necessary to learn new skills and techniques.
It is striking that 50 years ago it would have been presumed that any graduate of high school would have all of the basic skills necessary to excel in these jobs. Keep in mind, that these jobs are the "Information Age" equivalent of the assembly-line jobs of lore &emdash; relatively well-paying and with decent working conditions. What has changed to require college-educated workers to work the assembly lines of the future? The problem lies with primary and secondary education. A high school diploma is no longer strong evidence of basic literacy and mathematical competence.
And so, in a nation where illiterate people have high school diplomas, the community college system performs a vital dual role. First, the very act of completing two years of college indicates, in all probability, that the individual is part of the literate fraction of the population of high school graduates. Second, the community colleges teach many students the skills that they should have been taught in high school. In neither case, however, are the community colleges performing a useful function. They are simply performing functions that should be performed by high schools, both in teaching basic skills and in certifying that students who graduate have those basic skills.
It is a mantra of introductory statistics, but one well worth repeating, that correlation does not necessarily imply causation. Nowhere is this elementary error more prevalent than in the argument for government policies to encourage more Americans to get a college education. Consider the Clinton-Reich line of reasoning. College-educated workers earn 80% (or whatever statistic you like) more than high school graduates. Therefore, college education raises wages. Therefore, if we give more people a college education, then wages will rise. This, of course, is rubbish. College-educated workers tend to be smarter than non-college-educated workers. It would be shocking if the smarter workers weren't making more money. If we were to double the number of college-educated people entering the workforce, we would achieve just that &emdash; doubling the number of college-educated people entering the workforce. Perhaps a few of the new college graduates would benefit from finally learning the basic skills that should have been taught in high school, but the majority would find no jobs to take advantage of their new skills.
The dirty little secret of the explosion in college-educated workers over the last few decades is just how little has changed. Yes, more and more Americans are going to work in a "professional" environment, but wearing a tie to work does not imply that the job is managerial or analytical. A graduate of a community college with a degree in "business studies" is likely to work in a job that may be nominally managerial (often including code words like "manager" or "director" in the title) but that resembles an assembly line job in terms of skills required and used. Giving a worker a nice title and requiring him to wear a tie is often used in lieu of giving a worker real responsibility and independent decision-making power &emdash; the sorts of things that would justify requiring college education.
The belief that a college education guarantees one a nice job has led to confusion about why we go to college. College can do one of two things. It can give an individual an opportunity to explore the higher intellectual pleasures of the liberal arts, or it can teach an individual specific skills, be they engineering, writing or hair-dressing. The value of the former is difficult to calculate. I greatly value my liberal-arts education, and I imagine that others would similarly appreciate such an education. Very few graduates of non-elite colleges, however, will ever have an opportunity to enjoy a liberal education. Rather, they will take classes that teach them specific skills, such as accounting or communications. The value of these classes should, at least in theory, be quite easy to calculate. A student takes an accounting class because he believes that it will add more to his salary than it will cost. There is no other reason to take an accounting class. A degree in accounting will only be useful if I enter a field that requires accounting. Otherwise, the degree is utterly useless. Accounting and communication classes cannot magically transform me into a "professional" worker.
There is considerable danger in the belief that college education should be made universal. It gives graduates of marginal educational institutions expectations that the market will never be able to meet. One often hears people (particularly college students) bemoaning the absence of "good" entry-level jobs for college graduates today, as though it were shocking that the number of managerial and high-paying professional jobs has not kept pace with the number of college graduates. It is time to get used to the fact that a college education by itself does not and cannot guarantee a "professional" job. Not even the federal government is capable of making everyone a manager.
-Douglas Gordon