By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
The topic of college loan debt has come up in several recent editions of First Teachers, especially the proposal by Democratic Party presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders for the government to forgive the loans, thereby requiring the taxpayers to foot the bill.
J.M. writes to offer his observations on the controversy: “The New York Federal Reserve Bank has published statistics indicating that only about 45 percent of college graduates are working at jobs appropriate for their skill level. The others are working at jobs that no one before now had thought to require a college degree, such as working at Starbucks.”
J.M. concludes “that the feedback system of matching people to jobs is broken. Any business that created expensive products that were used as door stops would quickly go out of business.”
Why then do colleges get away with convincing parents and students that a college degree is a worthwhile investment? Because, J.M. continues, a manufacturer of expensive door stops could stay in business “if it was subsidized by the government. Which is exactly what is happening in regard to college educations.”
J.M. suggests “a quick trip to the Internet where one will be given access to a goodly number of sites that allow you to apply for government guaranteed loans that needn’t be paid back until after you graduate. (I never tried to get into the process to find the fine print about what happens if you don’t finish!!) From what I’ve read, getting a college loan is a snap compared to a secured home loan.”
He points to the marked “disparity between the employment prospects of Shakespearean scholars and electrical engineers. Perhaps people who want to study Shakespeare do not care about what their degree will be worth on the job market and value knowledge ‘for its own sake.’ But I don’t think anyone would propose that college is seen that way by most young people these days. They see college as a path toward a good job, as a white-collar trade school that will provide them access to the upper-middle class.”
J.M. argues that, since that is the case, “we had best inform folks of the product they are buying; specifically, give them some data reflecting the success in securing gainful employment of graduates from a college they are considering.”
It is an intriguing point, no? Car companies boast of the “frequency of repair” rates of their automobiles, of how many of their cars are still on the road ten years after purchase. Why would it be unreasonable to expect colleges to do the same, to tell us what their graduates are doing for a living ten years after graduation? If prospective students had those facts available to them, it well may affect their decision to saddle themselves with expensive student loans.
J.M. adds that he is not detracting from the value of the liberal arts: “I’ve known many engineers and especially mathematicians who are talented and accomplished musicians, artists, and writers, even poets. Their pursuit of a marketable skill in college did not prevent them from taking courses in the fine arts, including Shakespeare’s works.
“It’s time to assess what college is actually supposed to produce. Perhaps the institution we call ‘high school’ should be completely reconfigured: 4-year high schools to prepare students for non-skilled and manual labor; 5-year tech/trade schools to teach an occupational profession, such as skilled craftsmen and assembly line technicians; and 6-year schools to train people to be an engineer, nurse, or give them pre-med training. Then what we now call graduate school could take care of training doctors, Ph.D.s, etc.”
J.M. concedes that his proposal “would take a serious beefing up of the ‘high school’ system, transforming it into a serious endeavor. Folks who want to pursue non-skilled manual labor could be out of the system after three years.”
On another topic: the status of educational vouchers around the country. A reader called to our attention an article by Greg Kaza in the May 14 edition of the Arkansas newspaper The Democrat-Gazette. Kaza is the executive director of the Arkansas Policy Foundation, a think tank based in Little Rock.
Gaza contends that we have reached what he calls a “tipping point” in the struggle to secure vouchers to permit students to escape failing public schools. He notes that “last month Arkansas became the 25th state to enact a school choice program,” permitting students in the state “to attend non-public independent schools using tax credits or vouchers. Nevada, Montana, and Tennessee lawmakers followed suit, making school choice the law in a majority of states, a development once considered inconceivable.”
As an example of Arkansas’ school choice program, Kaza points to the Succeed Scholarship Program, established, writes Kaza, “by Doug House, a North Little Rock Republican and retired U.S. Army officer.” The program offers vouchers to students with disabilities if “they have been enrolled in an Arkansas public school at least one year or are dependents of active-duty military members.” Each student will be given a voucher of “$6,521 in 2014-2015, up to but not exceeding the amount of tuition and fees at the private school” they wish to attend.
Kaza urges “center-right” politicians and education reformers to learn a lesson from how this progress has been made. He points to the success Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson had in setting up a voucher system in his state by allying himself with Polly Williams, a Democratic lawmaker representing an African-American constituency in Milwaukee. Williams and Thompson were able to secure support for their voucher plan by presenting it as a way to give the poor and minorities the power and responsibility to educate their children as they saw fit.
Writes Kaza, “The center-right in the states that now have voucher systems embraced the Milwaukee experiment,” and in doing so advanced the ideas of “Milton Friedman…who argued the competition engendered by school choice would benefit students, including those trapped in failing public schools.” The lesson became clear for the center-right: “It is possible to govern, not to remain in perpetual opposition” to segments in society usually thought to be secure parts of the Democratic Party base.
Kaza sees the success of the voucher programs as a challenge to liberal Democrats, who can no longer cast themselves as the only game in town when it comes to the needs of the poor and minorities. They “no longer enjoy a monopoly in the realm of public interest law” on educational matters, and “must now decide how — not if — they will meet the center-right halfway on the issue” of vouchers and school choice.
I don’t want to put words in Kaza’s mouth, but I think he would also say that vouchers, once firmly established for minority students, could in time be made available to the student population as a whole.
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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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