I appreciate the very thoughtful replies to my postings. My reply
follows.
I'm not saying that "_any_ form of federal, tax-payer support for access
to higher education should be done away with," as Mark Laffey
understands me to say. As long as the economy has any need for
additional people with certain kinds of professional skills, let there be
federal, tax-payer support so that such people are trained. All I'm
objecting to is that working people with falling wages continue to be
taxed to as to support the current charade wherein a _huge oversupply_
of college graduates, and people with more or less useless
professional/technical credentials, are being cranked out.
If "many employers won't take someone without a college degree," what
does that mean? It means that they are using this bogus criterion as a
rather arbitrary sorting mechanism, in order to choose from a huge
oversupply of people who are all perfectly capable of doing the job!
Remember, BLS says that 20% of all college grads are now working at
jobs that don't really require a degree to perform well. (These are jobs
that have never required a degree, in years past.) And in ten years that
figure (20%) will jump by more than half, to 33%, says BLS, if current
trends hold.
Given these realities, how much sense does it make for tax-payers to
spend many millions each year to assist mediocre college students to
jump through the requisite hoops, so that employers can use this very
arbitrary and obsolete sorting mechanism? (Studies have shown that re:
the vast majority of jobs that college grads take, IQ is a better predictor
of job success than are academic credentials. So why should employers
be allowed use this demonstrably inferior---and, to the rest of us, very
expensive---sorting mechanism?)
Contrary to Mark's suggestion, I am not casting aspersions about the
"gullibility or crass materiality of these students." I think the students
are doing the best they can to keep from ending up in that group of
laborers which American society is, increasingly, consigning to a sort of
ThirdWorld-style underclass. The problem here, is that young people
have an increasingly irrational and increasingly unjust system within
which to make their life decisions. The median income of 18-24 yr olds
has fallen by 50% in the last dozen years . . as the incomes of the top 2%
have multiplied. Many of the young people at the bottom are, quite
understandably, desperate. (Hence their growing rate of participation in
crimes of violence, drug abuse, and suicide.)
For an answer, I'm afraid we'll have to look to Harvard professor of
economics, Juliet Schor: The only real solution to the problem is to
redistribute the available work that needs to be done, so as to create more
jobs of all kinds, at higher hourly rates of pay, with more leisure time for
all workers. As soon as sufficient numbers of non-college grads can
again make decent wages, of the kind that will (again) allow them to buy
a decent house and pay for health care---without man and wife
working/commuting a total of 90+ hrs/wk---a lot of these kids will lose
their incentive to waste our money jumping though hoops on college
campuses.
Once again, if they want to go there to improve their minds, fine. But
not to jump through hoops created by Creeping Credentialism and the
employers who buy into it.
BTW, there are lots of ways for people to improve their minds without
going to a university and pursuing some cooked-up curriculum that's
supposed to lead to some upper echelon position.
Patrick Mason points out that "the relative return of a college degree has
been increasing since the early 1980s," as has the "differential" between
college grads and non-grads. Notice that this finding is entirely
consistent with a scenario in which the incomes of the graduates of top
universities have gone up at a very steep rate while the incomes of
mediocre students from mediocre colleges and universities have
foundered. A sharp enough rise in the first group will more than offset
the gradually falling wages of the second group. Meanwhile, through no
fault of their own, the incomes of blue collar workers have continued to
slide---at least in America---as their productivity (the highest in the
world) has continued to improve!
