I know a high school senior who’s so worried about whether she’ll be accepted at the college of her choice she can’t sleep.
The parent of another senior tells me he stands at the mailbox for an hour every day waiting for a hoped-for acceptance letter to arrive.
Parents are also uptight. I’veheard of some who have stopped socializing with other parents of children
competing for admission to the same university.
Competition for places top-brand
colleges is absurdly intense.
With inequality at record levels
and almost all the economic gains going to the top, there’s more pressure than
ever to get the golden ring.
A degree from a prestigious
university can open doors to elite business schools and law schools – and to jobs
paying hundreds of thousands, if not millions, a year.
So parents who can afford it are
paying grotesque sums to give their kids an edge.
They “enhance” their kid’s resumes
with such things as bassoon lessons, trips to preserve the wildlife in
Botswana, internships at the Atlantic Monthly.
They hire test preparation coaches.
They arrange for consultants to help their children write compelling essays on college
applications.
They make generous contributions to
the elite colleges they once attended, to which their kids are applying –
colleges that give extra points to “legacies” and even more to those from
wealthy families that donate tons of money.
You might call this affirmative
action for the rich.
The same intensifying competition
is affecting mid-range colleges and universities that are doing everything they
can to burnish their own brands – competing with other mid-range institutions
to enlarge their applicant pools, attract good students, and inch upward on the
U.S. News college rankings.
Every college president wants to
increase the ratio of applications to admissions, thereby becoming more elite.
Excuse me, but this is nuts.
The biggest absurdity is that a
four-year college degree has become the only gateway into the American middle
class.
But not every young person is
suited to four years of college. They may be bright and ambitious but they
won’t get much out of it. They’d rather be doing something else, like making
money or painting murals.
They feel compelled to go to
college because they’ve been told over and over that a college degree is
necessary.
Yet if they start college and then
drop out, they feel like total failures.
Even if they get the degree,
they’re stuck with a huge bill – and may be paying down their student debt for
years.
And all too often the jobs they
land after graduating don’t pay enough to make the degree worthwhile.
Last year, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of
New York, 46 percent of recent college
graduates were in jobs that don’t even require a college degree.
The biggest frauds are for-profit
colleges that are raking in money even as their students drop out in droves,
and whose diplomas are barely worth the ink-jets they’re printed on.
America clings to the conceit that
four years of college are necessary for everyone, and looks down its nose at
people who don’t have college degrees.
This has to stop. Young people need
an alternative. That alternative should be a world-class system of
vocational-technical education.
A four-year college degree isn’t
necessary for many of tomorrow’s good jobs.
For example, the emerging economy will need
platoons of technicians able to install, service, and repair all the high-tech
machinery filling up hospitals, offices, and factories.
And people who can upgrade the
software embedded in almost every gadget you buy.
Today it’s even hard to find a
skilled plumber or electrician.
Yet the vocational and technical
education now available to young Americans is typically underfunded and
inadequate. And too often denigrated as being for “losers.”
These programs should be creating
winners.
Germany – whose median wage (after
taxes and transfers) is higher than ours – gives many of its young people
world-class technical skills that have made Germany a world leader in fields
such as precision manufacturing.
A world-class technical education
doesn’t have to mean young people’s fates are determined when they’re fourteen.
Instead, rising high-school seniors
could be given the option of entering a program that extends a year or two
beyond high school and ends with a diploma acknowledging their technical expertise.
Community colleges – the
under-appreciated crown jewels of America’s feeble attempts at equal opportunity
– could be developing these curricula. Businesses could be advising on the
technical skills they’ll need, and promising jobs to young people who complete
their degrees with good grades.
Government could be investing enough money to
make these programs thrive. (And raising taxes on top incomes enough to temper the wild competition for admission to elite colleges that grease the way to those top incomes.)
Instead, we continue to push most
of our young people through a single funnel called a four-year college
education – a funnel so narrow it’s causing applicants and their parents
excessive stress and worry about “getting in;” that’s too often ill suited and unnecessary,
and far too expensive; and that can cause college dropouts to feel like
failures for the rest of their lives.
It’s time to give up the idea that
every young person has to go to college, and start offering high-school seniors an alternative route into the middle class.