By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
It is a comment that you hear all the time from exasperated parents trying to figure out how they will ever pay the cost of sending their children to college: “This is crazy. How can anyone afford these skyrocketing college costs? Colleges are going to price themselves out of the market.”
To date, this frustration has not lead to a significant drop in college applications. Most parents, especially those who are the first in their family to attend college, continue to see a college education as the necessary path toward respectability and a decent job. They find it hard to recommend that their children learn a trade instead, even when they hear stories about small business owners and skilled craftsmen earning incomes comparable to successful white collar workers in the corporate world.
I have no way of verifying it, but I have heard that most European families do not hold this view of blue-collar work; that in Europe skilled technicians working at a Mercedes plant or chefs in an upscale restaurant are as well-paid and respected as professors or members of the government bureaucracy.
It strikes me that it would be beneficial if American parents were to adopt a similar frame of mind. If they did, they would not have to submit to the $60,000 per-year college costs only because they fear they would be “shortchanging” their children if they steered them away from college. Beyond that, colleges charging $60,000 per year would no longer have a captive market for their services, and, perhaps, find ways to control their costs.
The question is whether such a view of higher education can become a reality in the United States. Is it realistic to think that middle-class Americans in large numbers will ever view skilled workers as valuable and as respected members of society as college-educated professionals?
It is not impossible. Consider the November 22 column in the online edition of National Review by Victor Davis Hanson. Davis Hanson is an accomplished scholar, a professor of classics at California State University, Fresno, currently the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He harbors none of the bias against those who work with their hands that leads many parents to do all that they can to ensure that their children do not end up as blue-collar workers.
Donald Trump’s run for the presidency reinforced Davis Hanson’s conviction that American intellectuals should not reflexively be seen as an elite.
In his National Review column, Davis Hanson asks, “Is being smart defined as being on lots of corporate boards, having an impressive contact list of private cellphone numbers, name-dropping one’s Ivy League degrees, referencing weekends in the Hamptons or on Martha’s Vineyard, or being ranked in the top 100, 1,000, or 5,000 of some cool magazine’s list of go-getters and ‘people to watch’?” Davis Hanson says no.
He asks some questions that Americans pondering college for their children would do well to reflect upon. “Is there not wisdom in being able to drop an 80-foot pine tree with a chain saw within a foot of the mark, or to take apart a hydraulic ram in an hour, or to steer a bulldozer on a narrow uphill road?”
He makes some contrasts: “Can MSNBC news reader Brian Williams tell the truth any better than the Michigan lathe operator?” Would “Lois Lerner, formerly of the IRS and now enjoying a multimillion-dollar retirement, be more likely to file an honest tax return than the Wyoming rancher…would you feel safer knowing that Press Secretary Josh Earnest was working on a high-voltage wire outside your front door?” Ouch!
Davis Hanson continues, “Is the wrinkled man’s face as trustworthy as the thirty-something’s peach fuzz or the Botox grin of the middle-aged metrosexual on the evening news or the pollster who assures you that the election has already been decided before the voting?”
“Where is John Podesta today — who was a master of the universe two weeks ago? Is the Podesta name a stamp of honesty and sobriety?
“Do obsequious media still seek the latest gossip from Cheryl Mills or Robbie Mook, the boy wonder from Columbia who was to oversee the inevitable landslide victory?” Is “David Brooks still critiquing the president’s crease in his pants leg, or are our historians still wedded to the idea that Obama is a ‘god’ and the smartest man to have entered the presidency?”
“Did the sterling résumés of Jonathan Gruber and Ezekiel Emanuel prove to us that Obamacare was both fair and smart?
“What good did grifting for all those hundreds of millions of dollars do for the Clintons in their sunset years? Do they look healthier and haler for their frenzied pursuit of lucre? Did they gain greater respect and acclaim, the richer they became…are they resting in peace with the assurance of lives well lived? Are they finally deemed successful for scamming that last $50 million in their pay-for-play scheming? Did daily fibbing make Hillary more virtuous? Can a Yale law graduate make a mockery of the law in way a tractor driver from Mendota cannot?”
Hanson reminds us that it was “the Ivy League Trinity of Obama, Clinton, and Kerry who ‘reset’ George W. Bush’s reset sanctions against Putin, who canceled already-planned missile defense with the Czechs and the Poles; it was Clinton who pushed a ridiculous plastic reset button; and Obama who in a hot-mic quip stealthily promised Dmitry Medvedev that he would be more reasonable with Vladimir Putin after his reelection. . . .
“It was Clinton who in pay-for-play greed opened up North American uranium resources to the Russians, and Obama who personally mocked Putin as an adolescent school cut-up even as he appeased Putin at every turn. . . . Did the fact that well-spoken Fareed Zakaria snickered at the crudity of Trump suggest that he was not himself a Harvard-trained plagiarist?” Ouch, again!
It should go without saying that Davis Hanson is not belittling those with advanced degrees. Obviously, doctors, lawyers, engineers, and many college-trained professionals are essential members of society. Davis Hanson is a scholar, what people mean when they use the term “an intellectual.”
But college is not for everyone. There is much to be learned from his comparison of the blue-collar workers who make our country work and the cast of posturing characters with impressive college degrees who made such a mess of things during the Obama administration and while serving in Hillary Clinton’s run for the presidency.
The bottom line: Paying high tuition bills to turn our children into replicas of Robbie Mook and Lois Lerner is a bad bargain.
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Readers are invited to submit comments and questions about this and other educational issues. The e-mail address for First Teachers is fitzpatrijames@sbcglobal.net, and the mailing address is P.O. Box 15, Wallingford, CT 06492.
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