College Is Not For AllMost young Americans miss out on commencement
JUNE 10, 2022
OREN CASS & WELLS KING
The countless ceremonies playing out across America this month are called “commencements,” supposedly, because they celebrate not the conclusion of an education but rather the start of whatever comes next: after high school, heading away to college; after college, the exciting new life of a young 20-something pursuing a career. This is the pathway idealized in the American imagination, and the one we spend hundreds of billions of dollars each year to pave. Yet it is not one that most young people follow.
Having belatedly discovered this fiction, progressives are now demanding widespread forgiveness of the student debt many young people accumulated as they stumbled along and then off the path. But this too misunderstands the typical experience of young Americans and only reinforces the obsession with college students as the population to be served.
According to new data from American Compass’s “Failing on Purpose” survey of 2,000 young adults and parents, only one in eight young Americans aged 19 to 22 are enrolled in college more than one hour from home. By comparison, half are still living at home. Look further down the road, and only one in eight young Americans in their mid-to-late 20s have earned a degree, moved out of their parents’ house, and found work that they consider a “career” rather than “just a job.” One in four never went to college at all; one in four dropped out.
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The choice is most obvious in data from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which reports that most of its member nations have 35 to 55 percent of their upper secondary students enrolled in vocational education and training. The United States is excluded from the data because we have “no distinct vocational path at upper secondary level.” President Barack Obama’s comment, “I’m glad that everybody wants to go to college,” captured well our nation’s college-for-all mindset and helps explain our conversion of high schools into college-prep academies.
Resources have flowed accordingly. The share of federal K-through-12 spending on career and technical education fell from 12 percent in the 1980s to 3 percent today. Across all levels of government, we now spend more than $200 billion annually to subsidize higher education while, for those not on the college pathway, we offer a firm handshake and the best of luck.
Perhaps our college-for-all model would be defensible if it worked. But the idea that everyone can succeed in college has long been discredited, if anyone ever believed it to begin with. Most parents acknowledge that “some students have the academic ability to succeed in college, but others do not”; most would prefer their own child be offered a three-year apprenticeship rather than a full-ride college scholarship—with good reason.
Why have we made this mistake? Mainly a concern about “lost potential.” A system that emphasized the needs of the typical student would inadvertently fail to maximize the potential of some high performers. Someone who could have excelled at Harvard might instead get “stuck” on a vocational track. And heaven forbid someone who could have become a prestigious management consultant in New York City instead becomes a successful general contractor and leader in the community where he was raised. This offends the meritocratic sensibilities of an elite that sees its own pathway as uniquely worthy and wants to believe that opening the same pathway to all will validate the game it has won. So education reformers focus religiously on test scores and college admissions, treat everyone as a prospective college graduate, and when that fails for most, well, they promise to keep trying.
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Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/college-is-not-for-all/
