Ben Buckman.net

In Obama's speech to Congress last week, he described a vision of every American attaining some higher education. The AP asked a bunch of experts for their thoughts; in a nutshell, the idealists in the group think it's great, and the conservatives think it's stupid. It's probably a little of both, but giving up on the vision before giving it a second thought is surely stupid. If everyone had a college degree, economics or common sense would dictate that the value of a degree would decline, the way inflation of money decreases its value. If a college degree were the equivalent of a high school degree fifty years ago, then the better jobs that now require college degrees would require graduate degrees; and then you're back at square one. Sort of.

Some principles about this issue seem self evident. First, in the global "knowledge economy" the country is grudgingly transitioning into, education is valuable. Second, if no one in the U.S. had a college degree or higher, we would never have had the most powerful, innovative economy in the world (even in depression). Third, not everyone who wants to go to college, or is capable of going to college, can afford to, and given the previous two points, that's a kind of deadweight loss to society.

Statistically, a college degree is supposed to open bigger and better doors for people, help them earn more money over their lifetime, etc. Personally I could argue that taking out huge loans to go to an expensive private university was probably not really worth it; I could have gone into the same line of work without a degree, or with a cheaper one; the opportunity costs of paying off loans vs a theoretically smaller income don't necesarily favor the former. But this seems a pointless line of reasoning to go down on the one hand, and only underscores the problem of cost on the other, not the value of higher education per se.

Our 1-in-4 high school dropout rate is obviously a national tragedy that demands action at multiple levels. Common sense suggests that this statistic is closely correlated with another national tragedy, the incerceration rate. Someone responding to a call for drastic improvement on these fronts with, "what a waste of money," or "most people are too stupid to go to college anyway," doesn't deserve much serious attention. Surely the education system in this country needs a lot of improvement at all levels. No one seriously believes everyone in 10 years will have a college degree, or even that everyone should; but you'd have to be really intellectually bankrupt to mock the vision to try.