An Opportunity Agenda to Replace ‘College for All’Emerging alternatives to traditional four-year degrees are shaking up the education industry.
Bruno V. Manno
Jul 27, 2023
K-12 education issues are often cast today as a story about Americans divided on what we want from our schools, a culture war between left and right. While there are fundamental disagreements, this story is mostly wrong. The result is a collective illusion—a false narrative—that ignores a stubborn fact. Americans broadly agree that we should end what’s been a central goal of K-12 education for many years: “college for all.”
In its place, Americans want a new opportunity program for young people, in which a college degree is one of many pathways to success. Facilitating this “opportunity pluralism” is a common-sense governing agenda for policymakers, based on a more flexible K-12 system. It also empowers the domestic realists of the ideological heartland, led by civic pluralists who nurture civil society by building different K-12 education pathways programs for young people. These programs can develop a young person’s agency by providing him or her with the knowledge, relationships, and networks—profitable knowledge and priceless relationships—he or she needs to pursue opportunity and human flourishing.
The name “opportunity pluralism” suggests broad appeal. What faction, left or right, could argue with a plurality of pathways to success? Yet K-12 education for many years has been dominated by the singular ideal of “college for all.” This model aims to move nearly all K-12 students down the same path, from elementary to middle to high school to college to a degree and, finally, to a job.
Certainly, college degrees are valuable, both professionally and personally. But the fixating on the degree as the golden ticket to employment has led to a harmful phenomenon Harvard political philosopher Michael Sandel terms the “credentialist prejudice.” Credentialism describes the bias that makes the college degree the preferred engine of upward mobility and key pathway to a flourishing life—to the growing exclusion of the uncredentialed. Credentialism harms workers and employers by barring people, particularly the disadvantaged, from meaningful work opportunities, and sharply limiting the pool of qualified workers whom employers can hire.
That's the bad news. The good news is that there is ample evidence that today many Americans, including young people, no longer subscribe to college for all. There are at least four reasons for this change.
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Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/an-opportunity-agenda-to-replace-college-for-all/
