Barack Obama wants to make community college free (politico). This announcement comes right after the American Economics Association meeting in which solid evidence was presented that the returns to attending non-selective colleges, at least for a lot of majors, is zero or negative (previous posting). Coincidentally, a friend came over for dinner this evening. Her sister has a master’s degree and teaches remedial skills in a Midwestern community college. “She pours her heart into the job, which can be tough because people come out of high school functionally illiterate. But she loves math and statistics,” said my friend, “so she did a study and found that students who’d been through her remedial program did not earn higher grades in their subsequent classes compared to a control group of students who did not get the remedial program.” What happened when the administrators saw the results? “Nothing. They’re still doing it even though it is expensive, time-consuming for students, and has been proven unhelpful.”
What do readers think? Will this make Americans more desirable to employers? Or just keep Americans age 18-20 out of the workforce and therefore out of the unemployment statistics?
Update: found a 1960 quote from Kingsley Amis: “The delusion that there are thousands of young people about who are capable of benefiting from university training, but have somehow failed to find their way there, is…a necessary component of the expansionist case…More will mean worse.”
I’ve spent time at a community college as a student (mostly while in high school) and as an instructor. This particular college has an extensive computer programming curriculum (as opposed to “computer science”), and works with area employers to churn out graduates skilled in the technologies that the employers need. One of the employers even maintains a corporate data center right on the college campus, and the college maintains laboratories of IBM mainframes and minicomputers and what-not of the sort used in business. From what I’ve seen, this program works out nicely.
You are missing the point of programs like these. People who work in them and attend them vote for Barack Obama.
At that level, school administrators are paid to dig ditches, not to ask whether ditches need to be dug.
Further, if all you know is how to dig ditches, it’s not in your interest to wonder whether ditch digging is a worthwhile task.
But when does reform ever come from within?
I’ve never heard a soul complain about the costs associated with attending a CC.
If an individual wants education in America, it’s available and affordable.
I cannot see how giving something away does anything but merely shift the associated costs to another party (in this case, the taxpayer).
The march towards socialism continues…
Smart, curious young people with ambition will succeed, college or no college. Super stars without college degree: Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Richard Branson, Michael Dell, Barry Diller, etc. There are many more people with no college who succeed at a more modest level. College is more a test of discipline and perseverance than brains. Not that discipline and perseverance aren’t valuable traits. Especially if you’re an HR manager looking for a cube dweller who can plausibly charge billable hours and won’t rock the boat.
Free community college will help “some people” become more desirable to employers. Don’t know if it will help “enough people” to be cost/benefit worth doing. Like most things in life, it depends. Depends on the students, teachers, and the subject matter. My guess is “targeted” technician level training would be most practical and beneficial to regional employers. Also, technician level training may expose students to subject matter they didn’t know existed and want to pursue further.
The United States Navy takes promising high school graduates and in about two years turns them into competent nuclear reactor operators for crew on submarines. It’s not an easy road. No summers off. Even after heavy screening only about half make all the way through. The classroom portion of training is six hours of instruction every day (real face time with knowledgeable walking/talking instructors) delivered fire hose style — open wide, swallow, and digest. The OJT portion is 12 hours a day learning to operate a real reactor plant. After all that (usually about 2 years into your enlistment) you are merely qualified to go aboard a submarine and begin learning the design and operation details of your boat. It may take another 6 months to a year to qualify as a submariner on the boat. It’s a minimum 6 year enlistment in order to get this training. But these people have no problem finding a job when they leave the Navy.
The purpose of this initiative is ideological indoctrination, not education. The more students he can pump through these schools the more converts to progressivism he believes he can get.
If I read your posting correctly, it seems like remedial teaching (in the example you use) has not effect at all on students. I find that hard to believe. The implication is that most, if not all, remedial students are beyond help (even when a professor “pours her heart into the job”). I think you have several past postings criticizing those who justify the failure of many public schools because of the “low quality” of their students.
Community colleges are a great idea and I have no reason (perhaps I don’t know that much) to doubt that they do a good job teaching valuable skills. I do agree with this “The Economist” article http://www.economist.com/node/21553476 suggesting that funding of community colleges should be based on student achievement.
Olentzero: I am not sure that her experience proves that people whose future grades don’t improve as a result of remedial classroom instruction are incapable of learning. Maybe it is evidence that people who didn’t learn much after 13 years of classroom instruction aren’t going to benefit from additional classroom instruction. Giving up on teaching people in a classroom/lecture/homework environment is not the same as giving up on teaching.
Most Americans (perhaps all, I’m not sure) study a foreign language in school. Most of them do not seem to have benefited much from those years of instruction. Since it is evident that learning a language is not beyond the ability of even the least gifted students, I think you can make a good case for the failure of the system/method. Perhaps most MIT graduates belong in a “remedial Spanish” classroom. I agree, giving up on a failed method is not the same as giving up on teaching.
Maybe the teacher doesn’t PROVE that her students are incapable of learning but it suggests it. I would posit that there are certain skills that are above the intellectual level of certain people. At some point you just hit an intellectual brick wall where your brain is just not capable of grasping the material – it’s over your head. Some people hit their limit at lower levels than others. Could there be clever and innovative techniques that are able to squeeze a wee bit more information into the brains of people who have hit their limit using ordinary classroom methods? Sure, but I’m guessing only to a limited extent – you are not going to turn intellectual plow horses into race horses by feeding them a different kind of hay. The whole premise of “No Child Left Behind” type thinking is flawed – it’s literally impossible to make everyone above average.
Izzie: So, when you have a group of people in your society who are, statistically speaking, designated losers, how do you get them to be happy in the same system that makes them losers?
Maybe by telling them they have a fighting chance to improve their chances.
Maybe by pretending the government is doing whatever it can to level the playing field.
bravo Michiel. Isn’t it interesting how the designated winners are always faulting the designated losers? What this thread completely misunderstands is that the whole point of community college is to prevent the designated losers from organizing a revolution. Privileged people love to fault the very things that keep them in their privileged positions because it tends to imply that their privileges are earned.
Community colleges were free when they were 1st introduced. Then the program ran out of money. It’s another unimaginative solution of reviving an obsolete lecture format system by throwing more money at it.
It may well be that the economic returns to most students for attending their junior and senior years of highschool are zero or negative, so perhaps we should start charging students for the cost of these last two years of their K-12 education. Or should we just continue to underwrite these years in order to keep Americans aged 16-to-18 out of the workforce and therefore out of the unemployment statistics?
How come in Germany can manage to do it? Have a look at the slides here: http://www.worldskillsleipzig2013.com/download/downloads/edu/BMBF_dual_training.pdf
384 occupations to choose from. Sixty-six percent of students go through the “dual” industry+school training system (1.6 million). I have seen this first hand in the pharma company I work for in Germany.
Meanwhile, in America….. FOOOOOTBALLLL!!!!
Michiel, who said anything about losers? College is not for everyone. This doesn’t make you a “loser”. I know plumbers who make more money and have better security than some people with physics PhDs. A liberal arts type degree is indeed for “privileged” people because “privileged” people have the luxury of wasting their time (and someone else’s money) on unproductive things. What’s nuts is wanting to make everyone “privileged” – i.e. give everyone not only the option but the incentive to destroy their own productivity too. We should be working in the other direction – not making the poor more “privileged” but getting the “privileged” to do something useful and not be parasites.
We are in a situation similar to what has happened with food. For centuries, the problem of the poor was not enough to eat. So we created all sorts of programs for getting free or cheap food to the poor, so now the biggest REAL problem is not getting the poor MORE calories but getting them LESS and getting them the RIGHT KIND of food, so they are not morbidly obese. But the wheels of the bureaucracy continue to turn in the other direction and sign ever more people up for food stamps (which pays for junk food on the same basis as real food).
Likewise, for centuries, the problem for the poor was lack of education with resulting wasted human capital – people could not achieve their full potential for lack of education. So we put in place a huge and expensive system for educating everyone. Now the problem is TOO MUCH education and the WRONG KIND. In both cases, the system doesn’t really exist to serve the needs of the poor, but of the big corporations (yes universities are big business too) and unions and bureaucrats that exist to divert money from taxpayers into their own pockets. The supposed ” beneficiaries” never even get to see the money.
Phil,
I would imagine that nearly any continuing of education would make certain levels of our population at least moderately more desirable to potential employers.
The question I have: does making this education free really mean more people will use it to their advantage? Probably not, IMO.
We are who we are. Good or bad.
This seems more an indictment of the mediocre quality of average American high schools, producing “graduates” needing remedial work before they can begin the work ordinarily required of community colleges which themselves are non-selective. And why not ask the question whether college, two-year or four-year– is appropriate for them in the first place?
This seemsa case of misdirected students seeking a pathway to employment they are ill-suited to follow and guided by people who are paid not to be helpful by directing them elsewhere but who benefit either way whether their students are successful or not. I am struggling to see how in this example in the community college does anything more but replicate the errors of the secondary schools from which their students come, by failed teaching and failed guidance.
Maybe because our high schools are simply prisons, where the prisoners make their own crazy society where education is not the focus?
http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html
“What happened? We’re up against a hard one here. The cause of this problem is the same as the cause of so many present ills: specialization. As jobs become more specialized, we have to train longer for them. Kids in pre-industrial times started working at about 14 at the latest; kids on farms, where most people lived, began far earlier. Now kids who go to college don’t start working full-time till 21 or 22. With some degrees, like MDs and PhDs, you may not finish your training till 30.
Teenagers now are useless, except as cheap labor in industries like fast food, which evolved to exploit precisely this fact. In almost any other kind of work, they’d be a net loss. But they’re also too young to be left unsupervised. Someone has to watch over them, and the most efficient way to do this is to collect them together in one place. Then a few adults can watch all of them.
If you stop there, what you’re describing is literally a prison, albeit a part-time one. The problem is, many schools practically do stop there. The stated purpose of schools is to educate the kids. But there is no external pressure to do this well. And so most schools do such a bad job of teaching that the kids don’t really take it seriously– not even the smart kids. Much of the time we were all, students and teachers both, just going through the motions.”
Elementary School == Free!
Middle School == Free!
High School == Free!
Community College == Free (soon to be)!
52 weeks unemployment benefit (with an XBox) == Free!
Obamacare == Free!
Yearly Cruise Vacations == When will this be free!!!!!
Forgot about the land of the free [1], welcome to the land of socialism.
[1] Isn’t ironic, that the land of the free has so much free stuff.
GermanL:
A prison . . . or an army.
This is exactly what was done in the Great Depression with CCC laborers, unemployed young men recruited to perform laborious outdoor work in U.S. national parks and other outdoor projects under supervision of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Their work product remains in many U.S. parks today.