I've long wondered if we need to talk, sociologically, of a Credential Illusion, just as economists talk of a Money Illusion. It subtends the standardized testing debate, where progressives worry that testing will hurt the economically and socially disadvantaged because they will have far fewer high school diplomas, ignoring the fact that the labor market will adjust and put less reliance on the HS diploma to begin with.

I just watched an enlightening 2 hour show on PBS last night showing successes of reform in poor schools and poor school districts.

It was good for me to watch this since I have, I admit, attributed lower test scores in california to what I had guessed was the "immigrants slowing down all of the students" belief, rather than the teachers not doing their job.  I felt criticism towards teachers was misguided, no matter how well the teachers teach it wasn't fair to judge the lowered test scores on the teachers if the students can barely speak and read english.

The show I watched last night completely negates that presumption.  In New York City, a poor school district had become the 2nd top district, after reforming, with test scores higher than in districts of wealthier and (and more caucasian) children.

The lightbulb was that it was the reforming of the teachers actually that did the trick.  The reform was based around teaching the teachers to be better teachers.  And it worked, even with disadvantaged students.  Well there were actually several strategies that worked, but reforming the teachers was I think the biggie.

That said, I would buy into the ideal of college for all.  I don't know how much it would cost or who would pay for it on the realistic side.  But I would buy into it if it was doable.

There is nothing wrong with raising the bar and having more students go into grad school as a way for them to obtain the jobs they want.  A bachelors is already a dime a dozen, I'm living proof of this myself.  A better educated citizenry is nothing to complain about.

Those that have the grades and test scores to get into grad school should be able to apply for loans and grants.

Although outsourcing when it comes to Walmart outsourcing, many, especially on the left side of the political spectrum, is viewed as harmful and wrong, as it leaves less low skilled jobs in the U.S. supposedly, although conservatives believe it leads to the same amount of jobs since the outsourced economies buy more goods and services from us with their increased wealth (leaving many of us skeptical about that since not everyone works for or could even get a job with Microsoft for example, while software is sold in India and China), ....

I think it could possibly be useful in areas where the government or at least Democrats, value an issue, yet the financial reality makes it so that we never achieve our pipe dreams such as college for all or health care for all.

In both areas - college and health care,  I wonder if it might be useful to outsource.

I posted somewhere I guess it was my own blog entry I'm not sure, that I think Dems ought to get back on Clinton's health care for all initiative, but cut the costs of healthcare in half at the same time, making it a realistic dream, by outsourcing surgery and perhaps even paperwork (billing...)

Same for college.  I would bet India and Taiwan, etc, maybe even Mexico, could put together quality universities, where english is the language used, and where imported students were welcome and a big part of the business plan, for at least half the cost of American universities, perhaps a quarter of the cost.  Maybe it is already available with college as it is with surgery and medical billing and I am just not aware.  At any rate, i don't think we can have our cake and eat it too on issues like this - I think we need to promote and plan for outsourcing surgery and college for those that can't afford it in America.

Grad school becomes the new college.

Unfortunately, this trend has already begun. At some colleges in my state, over 50% of the incoming freshman class takes remedial math or English. There are understandable historical and social reasons for this, but I'd agree that a better use of resources would be to funnel the money going to such colleges to high schools instead.

I think that there will always be stratification in higher education. If everyone had a college degree, naturally people would start to ask, "Well, exactly where did you go to college?" Again, with ratings of colleges from places like US News easily available, that's happening already. It's no longer, "I'm a college grad," but rather, "I went to a top twenty university."

There's no really straightforward solution to the problem of grade or credential inflation. Standardized tests help to some extent, but of course have their own flaws. The difficulty is as much in the perception of the value of higher ed as it is in its intrinsic value.

The main problem is not that poor students can't afford college. This country has oceans of financial aid sloshing around. As William Bowen, Martin Kurzweil and Eugene Tobin note in their book, "Equity and Excellence in American Higher Education": "The number of students who are currently prevented from enrolling by a straightforward inability to pay is small."

Bullshit. It matters a great deal whether your parents can pay. College loans pay for school and maybe not even then. You still ghet to work unless your parents pay; which is what kills the completion rate.

(While I'm at it) I don't particularly see how universal college is going to help networking (aka college as social club). The point of networking and whatnot is to include some people and exclude others.

The Great British Literature skill set is good for cocktail parties perhaps, but not much use in competing with Indian college grads. That's the issue there: what kind of skill sets are you trying to universalize? Good writing? I have to agree with Bruno there then; the high schools need the improvements. In particular, you need to overcome the tendency to downgrade the schools overall when you universalize as has happened with high schools. (Im not faulting the people being universalized here (although that can be a problem as well), I am addressing the point that not learning is easier than learning, and not teaching is easier than teaching, so the tendency is to try and figure out ways to make failure looks like success, rather than turn failure into actual success.)

In short, I need a technological jump. The only one I see is computers, but not in the sense of putting computers in the schools, but in the sense of replacing the schools with computers where ever possible, and getting the best teacher to set up the computers. Which may not work; certainly teachers won't like it.

What I need is a solid metric (hee!) for knowledge_brainpack_rate. So I can double or triple it if possible.

ash

['No Child Left Behind means no child gets ahead. Hrmmm.']

I know a 30-something PhD working part time in construction, and that's his only job. I know many more PhDs - some with degrees from top ten programs - working as part time, low wage adjuncts and bartending, or selling shoes, or freelancing technical copy just to get by (that's if they can even get one of the highly competitive low wage adjunct jobs).

This is an incredible and unfortunate waste of intellectual capital.

It's worth considering whether Ph.D.s should be lumped in with all college graduates, however. Outside a few specialized fields, no one should go into a Ph.D. program expecting the degree to improve their employment prospects, whereas that seems to be the general assumption for a B.S. or B.A. I wish it were otherwise--the country needs more long-term science and engineering research, for example, work that is best carried out by those folks who might now be selling shoes or serving coffee.

Well, yes...but...

As somebody else pointed out, making America better-educated as a whole would (potentially) give us a global advantage. If education creates wealth, then universal college is worthwhile not because it makes competition more equal (it doesn't) but because it, um, makes the pie higher.

I would argue that it's worthwhile for non-economic reasons as well. The premise of universal education was that a reasonably well-informed citizenry was necessary to democratic rule. I would think that's more true now than ever, and that the base level of knowledge (and critical thinking ability) necessary for responsible citizenship is a lot higher than it was when public education became mandatory.

I don't share in Matt's doom and gloom about the prospect of churning out a more educated population overall. There were always be ditch diggers no matter how well we do.

College is not necessarily "for all", but it's either college, or a similar sort of apprenticeship or training "for all".  The reason is, in my opinion, very very simple: We either produce or we get poor.  As a society, as individuals.

We *need* the productivity, creativity, art, thoughts, and contributions, large or small, of *all* of our people.

This is, for me, among the most important tragedies of the war on Iraq: Our society needs the work of our youth far more than having their time (or their health or their very lives) squandered in a mess for which no good justification exists.

Probably what would make good sense as a longer term policy is something like the German system, where high school is longer and includes more college level material, and these extended schools are separated into vocational tracks

So, rather than requiring a 4 year degree from all citizens, you'd target the equivalent of a 2 years of solid college

The basic idea being that for individuals to compete in the new world, and to participate civically in a way that allows modern democracy to function and survive, folks will need a higher baseline education level.  This will probably involve more intense and longer schooling than we've previously had.

Kids are coming out without basic skills, which is an early school problem. But those who don't go to college also end up without the higher cognitive and communication skills needed for the modern workplace and a modern democracy, which probably wouldn't be taught even in a well-functioning average elementary or high school, except in college level courses.  They also are more likely to end up victimized within a complex global capitalist system which they don't understand well enough to navigate for success. 

These missing, college-level skills include deeper critical thinking, speaking and writing ability and a deeper understanding of the processes and systems which allow a global reality to function: democratic, economic, geo-political, environmental processes, many different areas. 

There's a need for real, widespread comprehension of other cultures, languages, realities, if America is to continue as a world leader and as a role model of the melting pot
Armies of the future for one thing will need to be heavily staffed by people with these soft skills, yet who will also be in real harm's way and thus will tend to be not so heavily staffed by elites.
We need generations to come out of school who understand the world beyond our borders and beyond their own personal bubble more deeply and are willing to commit themselves to getting involved with it.  Their choices at every level, career, consumption, investment, service, community need to be informed by a broad understanding of the world and a confident ability to function within it. 
America will fail as a world leader if it can't achieve these things, falling into the cesspool of fear-based, narrow, simplistic views.

...the notion of education for it's own sake, rather than as just a career move, is being ignored a bit. For example most creative types I know are pretty well educated, and happier for being well educated, even though many of them know they'll be laboring away on the margins for their entire lives.

"The new inequality is different from the old inequality. Today, the rich don't exploit the poor, they just outcompete them. Their crucial advantage is not that they possess financial capital, it's that they possess more cultural capital."

However, if you take a college degreed "ditch digger", this person is more likely to start his or her own ditch digging company, and find success, through knowing something about running a business, particularly if the ditch digger (bad example but to use someone else's example from this thread) degreed in business administration.

And this does increase competition which theoretically is good for the economy.  (although sometimes i wonder if too much competition can be a bad thing, where we all get Walmart'ed to death (nickle and dime each other due to budget constraints) as a result - something that might be taking place in our economy as we speak.)

As far as the college network - I have no such network and I am a college grad.  I don't think it is the case for everyone in college.  I've heard fraternities can offer this.  But most are not in fraternities or sororities.  Of course I am a graduate of a calif. state university not ivy league.  From my experience, there is more of a network from employment than college.  If you need a job you can always contact friends who you used to work with and ask them if they know of an opening at the company they are now with, etc, if you both got laid off.  I am not even in touch with anyone from college at this point in life either, at age 43.

I've always wondered about the college networks that I seemed to have missed out on (I went to a top twenty non-Ivy private university as an undergrad, top twenty public in my field for grad school.) People sometimes talk as if networking in college is the equivalent of socialization in primary school, but I think it's more along the lines that if you're interested in a career in which personal relationships are important, and if you're the kind of person that can build and maintain such relationships to benefit your professional life, then in college you'll have the chance to get started.

Matt, I think you missed the point, again.  Emanuel's district has a lot of recent immigrants - Eastern European, primarily Polish, and Hispanic, primarily Mexican - so I think he has a good grasp on the importance of education and the results of not having one.  Of course, we should strive to allow every student to be able to go to college if they desire.  Period.  One of the best pieces of legislation every written was the GI BIll.  How many stories do we hear now of famous people who went off to WWII and then came back and went to college on the GI Bill.  I would bet that if a study was done we would find out that the investment in Americans paid dividends in tax revenues a hundred fold.  In short, what Emanuel wants to do is invest in Americans.  Quit with the elitist crap, it's really boring.

The monopoly that 'accredited' institutions of higher learning have on printing parchment, when you come to think of it, is really just a form of rent-seeking

Silly anti-institutionalism. Distance learning is indeed growing by leaps and bounds in the internet age; you can get a lot of great degrees from Australian universities without ever showing up, or perhaps showing up once to take some oral exams, and those degrees are fairly well respected. But it's critical that those degrees come from institutions with consistent and respected standards for granting degrees. The establishment and maintenance of reasonably uniform and demanding standards is how a society ensures competence in professional fields. Give that up, and you wind up with, well, Mike Brown and Harriet Miers.

To put it another way: if you can learn it on your own, why can't you learn it in a university? Are you not good enough to get in, or to get a scholarship or stipend? Maybe that says something about your skills in that field.

Take one simple method.

(This occurred to me when I read that the revenue from Princeton's endowment exceeds the revenue from undergraduate tuition.)

Give kids the option of a tithe--a commitment to contribute 5% of their earnings for the rest of their working lives back to the university.  This would end the sticker shock, the financial aid negotiations, the pressure to pursue a degree that has direct monetary benefit and so forth.

Matt's concern about elite schools is, I think, misplaced--perhaps by his experience at such a school.  School status matters much less than people think, and matters less with each year that passes.

But if you did take the money out of the equation entirely--universities could drop this whole need-blind nonsense, and also end some campus social stratification with kids assigned to menial work-study jobs--more kids would apply to more programs. 

And, overall, the endowment would benefit.  This, after all, is the real goal of any university--to grow the endowment. 

But even if you disagree with this approach, it's certainly not difficult to find some way to direct the increased income stream stemming from a college education back into paying for it.   Even if this is a Red Queen increase (which I don't believe to be the case*), it is still a good thing to give kids an opportunity to keep up, and money should not be the barrier when the net effect of the educational opportunity is an increased flow of income.

----------------

*George Akerlof has demonstrated pretty convincingly that education is a signal to employers. The signal is that 1) you are willing to invest in yourself (and therefore are of value) 2) have a time horizon as long as four years.  This makes sense, of course, because no matter what course work you have done, it is very quickly supplanted by what you need to know in the working world. It's why majors don't matter, except, again, as signals.  My comment that elite universities don't matter is essentially a claim that their signalling value diminishes over time.

A Harvard college grad who makes law review at George Washington and takes a job as a real estate lawyer in a Pittsburgh firm is different from  the Harvard College Grad who make his way onto the staff of an up and coming new media site, while also finding his way into other areas of political media influence.  The HCG component diminishes faster than Matt seems to realize.  And, in fact, the Independent was at least as important as the Harvard part.  The elite college signal becomes less important as other signals accumulate.

...high school graduation isn't attainable for MANY...

and literacy is low even among those who do graduate

anyone read Al Gore's comments re: television a day or two ago? 

Outside a few specialized fields, no one should go into a Ph.D. program expecting the degree to improve their employment prospects,

In a lot of science-related areas this isn't true, and science is the real engine of economic growth. It's even true in fields that are tangential to science, that have to do with the management of science. In public health it's increasingly necessary to have a Ph.D. in addition to a Master's if you expect to rise to the top management, analysis and consultation levels in government, nonprofit and private organizations. You can call this "credential inflation"; I'd prefer to think of it as increasing excellence and high standards in the field. It is however a pain for my wife, who is now frantically getting a Ph.D. to stay competitive.

Distance learning is indeed growing by leaps and bounds in the internet age; you can get a lot of great degrees from Australian universities without ever showing up, or perhaps showing up once to take some oral exams, and those degrees are fairly well respected.

Yes, but that is not the same thing at all.  The online universities still maintain the monopoly on parchment-printing and make the students jump through the same kind of hoops and write the same checks, it's just that the students are permitted to warm their own chairs while doing so rather than the university's.  I don't know about the situation in Aus, but in the US, this is still not an inexpensive option.  I know friends who took courses in subjects that not only did they already know but that they already knew better than the instructor.  One had the instructor ask him, "Why are you here?" and his reply was, "Because they don't give you the piece of paper for what you know."
 

But it's critical that those degrees come from institutions with consistent and respected standards for granting degrees. The establishment and maintenance of reasonably uniform and demanding standards is how a society ensures competence in professional fields.

No, it isn't critical.  First of all, acredited institutions don't NOW have consistent standards for granting degrees in their curricula, in the content of their courses or in their grading (do they have grade-inflation in Aus?)  We could assure competence by actually testing for it -- the same way Abe Lincoln demonstrated he was competent to practice law.

Give that up, and you wind up with, well, Mike Brown and Harriet Miers.

Both graduates of certified educational institutions.  The rap on them is not their lack of education but rather that their professional experiences in the decades afterwards did not prepare them for the high-level jobs in question.

To put it another way: if you can learn it on your own, why can't you learn it in a university? Are you not good enough to get in, or to get a scholarship or stipend? Maybe that says something about your skills in that field.

As it happens, I have a PhD in a technical field from a top U.S. university.  But even so,  I would say that I'm not necessarily smarter than people in my field who don't have advanced degrees, and also that a large and growing fraction of my learning came outside and after the formal education.

Why would you be opposed to alternative accredidation methods that would award the equivalent of bachelor's degrees for demonstrating mastery of the relevant material without students having to spend all those years and write all those enormous checks (and spend many more years paying off all those student loans)? 

Concerning grad school becoming the new college: this is unfortunate for a few reasons. First, a college education is overkill for many jobs for which it is currently an entry requirement; more and better vocational training would be better for many students. Second, "a college education" often translates into "a college degree", which does no one any good, especially people who may not be in a position to evaluate what's being offered. This is a common problem for poor kids who may be the first in their family to ever go to college. Bringing grad school into the picture confuses matters further. Third, graduate study, for the most part, is a different kind of beast than undergraduate education: it makes different demands on students, and (for the sake of this discussion) it turns out people who generally compete for a much smaller pool of jobs. It would be great if the economy could support an arbitrarily large number of Ph.D.s, but that doesn't currently seem to be the case.

Have you not seen that pattern among the folks you're talking about?

Some yes, some no. I talked about both kinds. Actually started out with an example of 'not': quinceras and weddings and family over books and college.

There are lots of people who would prefer not to have to do school or work at all, but would prefer to be rich so they can wind surf or ski or shop all the time.

Didn't you ever meet someone who said 'why do you want to fill your head with all that stuff for" or a parent who got mad because a child wanted to study art and not learn something 'practical'?

BTW, I didn't mean to be judgmental with my comment, rather, I meant it to be a reality check as to the topic of discussion. I myself have a hard time not looking down on cultures and people that don't value education. I try to keep an open mind on it, though, since I think people like that will always exist.

p.s. All of this is related in my mind to one of the major problems of the attempts at communist states in the world: that many people will work and learn as little as possible, prefering to 'play.'

And also how many of the types how who aren't interested in white collar jobs often like to dis 'the rat race.'