The College-for-All Debate

The goal of “College for All”—the notion that every student should engage in some form of postsecondary education—was hotly debated this week, from a forum sponsored by Education Week to the pages of The New Yorker. Individuals on both sides of the controversy make cogent points, in my view, but I think there is more reason to be troubled by the push-back against, than by the aspiration behind, College for All.

President Obama has strongly supported the idea that all Americans should obtain at least one year of postsecondary training or education. Major resistance was voiced in February when a highly respected group of leaders at the Harvard Graduate School of Education published a report entitled, “Pathways to Prosperity.”

Taken literally, the goal of college for all does have a certain similarity to the widely discredited goal in K-12 education that 100% of students be proficient in math and reading by 2014. Neither is ever going to happen, and, as an empirical matter, many jobs do not require a college education. Given high failure rates among many college students—who incur substantial debt, yet acquire no degree—the Pathways to Prosperity argument, as represented by Harvard’s Ron Ferguson in the recent Education Week debate, suggests that beginning in K-12 schooling, students should be shown multiple paths, of which college is only one.

In the debate, Amy Wilkins of the Education Trust raised concerns that alternative pathways would lead to a watered-down high school curriculum and a tracking system for low-income and minority students. Ferguson, alternatively, suggested that stratification should be addressed as a separate issue, and emphasized that all work should be considered “honorable,” even if it doesn’t require a college degree.

This is complicated debate, but I have four reasons to want to keep the pressure on for greater college attainment for students from all backgrounds.

* First, the biggest job growth between 2008 and 2018 is expected to come in occupations requiring high levels of education. Examining data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Peter Sacks, writing in Minding the Campus, finds that jobs requiring a master’s degree will see the greatest growth (21.2 percent), followed by jobs requiring a doctoral degree (20.5 percent), a professional degree (19.6 percent), and a bachelor’s degree (14.2 percent). By contrast, jobs requiring a high-school degree plus on-the-job vocational training are forecast to grow less than 10 percent.

* Second, while all work is honorable, not all kinds of work are honored in the marketplace, particularly today, given the precipitous decline in organized labor. After World War II, when organized labor represented a third of private sector workers, it was possible to earn a middle-class wage without any postsecondary education because workers banded together and fought collectively for a fair share of productivity gains. Today, with labor representing less than 7 percent of private-sector workers, the union avenue to a middle-class standard of living has significantly narrowed, leaving postsecondary education as the primary path open to economic success.

* Third, while Ferguson suggested that stratification and the existence of multiple pathways present separate issues, I worry that formalizing multiple pathways at an early age will reinforce stratification. Going in, we have a fairly good idea of which sort of high-school students will end up on college-bound tracks (those from middle- and upper- class families) and which sort will be channeled into “alternative” pathways (those from low-income and working-class households). If we had a well-oiled machinery of meritocracy, which identified talent and drive with great accuracy, divvying up students into different paths in high school might be highly efficient. But there are profound inequalities of opportunity at the K-12 level, such that the least socioeconomically advantaged student is expected to score 399 points lower on the math and verbal portions of the SAT than the most economically advantaged student. Even among high-scoring students (those in the top quartile), only 44 percent of low-socioeconomic-status students attend a four-year college, compared with 80 percent of those from high socioeconomic-status households. A system which pushes hard to get more students into college will put greater pressure on the K-12 and higher-education system to address these inequalities, harvesting the enormous untapped talents of low-income and working-class students. By contrast, I worry that a system that preaches that there are many pathways to success and that all work is honorable will find more of an audience with young working-class students than those from more affluent families.

* Fourth, college isn’t only about preparing students for the work force. It is also about preparing students to be intelligent and well-informed individuals who can make important decisions incumbent upon citizens in a democracy. As Louis Menand writes in The New Yorker, students should read certain books in college “because they teach you things about the world and yourself that, if you do not learn them in college, you are unlikely to learn anywhere else.” Will terminating studies in high school help a student become “an informed citizen and culturally literate human being” in the same way receiving a college education will? If not, our democracy should think twice before embracing a rallying cry of “college for some.”