A ‘College-for-all’ policy is bad for students, bad for jobs

Washington Times ^ | 02/13/2013 | By Walt Gardner

[SeekAndFind]

Evidence continues to mount that college is not for everyone, but the United States persists in the fiction that students are shortchanged without a four-year degree. The real losers in the final analysis are young people who are counseled to pursue a sheepskin when they have neither the interest nor ability.

The downside of this policy is seen nationwide. For example, in California the new requirements have led to an increase in the high school dropout rate, as students became discouraged trying to pass academic courses necessary for admission to the state university systems.

Yet these results were altogether predictable. When students see little connection between their studies and their future plans, they either act out or drop out. In either case, they become costly unintended collateral damage.

The Alliance for Excellent Education makes this unequivocally clear. The secondary education system in this country produces 1.2 million dropouts annually. If the dropouts graduated, the economy would likely benefit from nearly $154.3 billion in additional income over the course of their lifetimes. The numbers, ranging from $147 million in Vermont to $20.7 billion in California, reflect salaries, entitlements and criminal justice spending.

The picture in college is not much brighter. Students there aren’t learning very much. In “Academically Adrift,” Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa tracked several thousand undergraduates in two dozen universities. They reported that 45 percent of students do not significantly improve their critical thinking and writing skills after two years. Even after four years, only 36 percent did so. Although more than half of the freshmen who took the test didn’t take it again as seniors, the findings are not surprising. Too many students have no business being in college in the first place because they lack the wherewithal.

Despite these figures, reformers are in denial.

[Piranha]

There was a story from some decades ago about a professor, possibly a philosophy professor at City College of New York, whose student complained in class that he had taken away everything in which she believed. He responded that Hercules was responsible for cleaning the Augean Stables; he was not responsible for filling them up again.

For liberal arts college students this sstory is everything that is good about a university education according to the progressive values that they take in. For solid Americans, people who believe in tradition and want to be productive members of society, it shows exactly the danger of an unsupervised college education.

[virgil283]

If everyone can go to college then by necessity college has to be dumbed down.
Five years ago it was announced that more women were in college than men [it turns out men saw that there weren't jobs for these degrees and so they left]
...

[Chickensoup]

I hope it gets trumpeted far and wide that “College for all” was a leftist Clinton program, that turned perfectly good Voc schools into colleges to compete for government funding.

[Behind the Blue Wall]

If the conservative movement was smart, THIS is where they would be focusing in building for the long-term, NOT trying to pander to minorities with amnesty or whatever else. Create as many pathways to a good, prosperous, productive life OUTSIDE of the college system as possible. Colleges are expensive liberal indoctrination camps, and not much else. Most useful job skills can be better acquired on the job, online, through apprenticeships, etc. The more people begin to realize this, the less people will subject themselves and their children to the camps, and the better off we will all be.