Oxblog and Matt Yglesias are wondering about the idea of making college education near-universal, and particularly the ramifications of such a move for the American workforce — i.e., would you have over-educated people slumming it in menial jobs, or would we end up with a European-style system, with high unemployment and immigrants imported to do the work that well-educated Americans look down on? (The latter sounds a lot like California to me . . .)
I’d pose a different question, though. Suppose you tried to universalize college education — how many people would actually go for it? At present, a little over a quarter of all Americans have college degrees, and around half try college for a while but never graduate. No doubt a lot of these people drop out, or never go, for financial reasons, and having government-subsidized college tuition would certainly raise both matriculation and graduation rates appreciably. But I’m not sure the rates would be raised to anywhere near universal levels. I think that many, many people drop out or don’t go to college because they don’t want to go . . . because they’ve spent a dozen years in school, they don’t like school, and they want to get out into the world and start making money.
I saw a fair amount of this urge even among my friends and neighbors, and I come from a culture where the necessity of “going-to-college” is hammered into you starting in the cradle, if not earlier. I guess you could try to replicate the obsessed-with-admissions climate of East Coast suburbia in working class communities around the country, but I’m not sure that’s either feasible or desirable. Or you could get around it by mandating college attendance, they way we mandate elementary and secondary school. But given that college-aged kids are generally considered adults, not minors (except for that pesky alcohol prohibition), I’m not sure forcing them to attend school is going to fly — at least not in the freedom-loving U.S.A.
Finally, a faintly politically incorrect question: Isn’t it possible that there’s a significant segment of the American population that simply wouldn’t benefit from going to college? I’m no IQ-determinist, but it seems like forcing some people into an extra four years of schooling might run, rather quickly, into a problem of diminishing returns. (Especially since I suspect that what America really needs are better elementary schools, not more emphasis on higher education.)
— Ross Douthat
The Dish 