The Costly Obsession With B.A.s

For decades American higher education has fixated so much on the benefits of baccalaureate degrees that it has barely noticed that two-year degrees and even less-taxing one-year certificates have come to provide many kinds of students with better pathways to good jobs and pay.

So claim James E. Rosenbaum, a professor of sociology, education, and social policy at Northwestern University, and two colleagues in their new book, Bridging the Gaps: College Pathways to Career Success (Russell Sage Foundation). They say that far too many students end up leaving higher education without qualifications of any kind, and with large debts, for reasons colleges should try harder to control. “By refashioning procedures and rules, the institutions can really get rid of some of the failures that they right now are encouraging,” Mr. Rosenbaum said in an interview.

Sometimes students fall short of gaining credentials because of family and work demands, but higher-education institutions fail, too, in many ways, contend Mr. Rosenbaum and his co-authors, Caitlin E. Ahearn and Janet E. Rosenbaum. Poor advising, confused and confusing placement tests, and ineffectual career guidance: Those, they say, are the colleges’ fault.

Those shortcomings contribute to shockingly low college-completion rates, said Mr. Rosenbaum, who in 2001 published Beyond College for All: Career Paths for the Forgotten Half (Russell Sage Foundation). He noted that about two-thirds of high-school graduates now enroll in college right after high school, and nearly 90 percent attend a college of some kind within eight years of graduating, compared with only 45 percent of graduates who entered college right after high school in 1960.

Completion is another matter. Only 20 percent of community-college students obtain bachelor’s degrees within eight years, even though most aspire to that goal.

He suggests that more colleges should emulate the fresh, successful approaches adopted by some institutions that Bridging the Gaps describes. Those institutions have, for example, collaborated with area high schools to align courses and requirements, improved mentoring, and in other ways helped students to move, incrementally and more manageably, toward sometimes less-ambitious but still-beneficial credentials.

How beneficial? Well, said Mr. Rosenbaum, among statistics worth noting is that the top 25 percent of those whose highest earned credential was a one-year certificate or an associate degree now go on to earn more than the majority of baccalaureate-degree holders.

One key to ensuring that students don’t drop out of community college before acquiring a credential is to guide and support them better, he said. For example, students should know what he and his co-authors learned from instructors of occupational courses: that many programs of study below the bachelor’s-degree level require only modest academic preparation, and even accomplishment.

“I’m not calling for lower standards,” he said, “but I certainly am calling for making students aware of the fact that if they’ve got some solid eighth-to-10th-grade skills, they could certainly get some benefit from going to college to get one of these sub-B.A. credentials.”

So, for example, community colleges can tell students interested in becoming, say, emergency medical technicians that they will need solid arithmetic skills, but not advanced math. Many rewarding jobs and careers can be within reach of students, including low-income students from families with little history of college attendance, he said, if colleges encourage those students’ enthusiasms, rather than extinguish them.

Peter Monaghan is a national correspondent for The Chronicle. Email him at pmonaghan3@mac.com.