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Education Is A Lifelong Process, Not A Birthright

Posted by Chris Berry on June 12, 2008 in Jobs and Careers, Rights and Wrongs

Inventing new rights has always been a favorite pastime of liberal politicians, and Senator Obama recently pulled a new one out of his hat when he declared that a college education was the birthright of every American citizen. This proposition is absurd on so many levels that it is impossible to refute them all. I will focus only on the most basic flaw in his argument, which is the idea that we all need a college education in the first place.

The most commonly cited statistics indicate that there is a large lifetime earnings gap between those with college degrees and those without. Unfortunately, these statistics paint an incomplete picture. Simply comparing all high school graduates and all college graduates in aggregate terms provides very little insight. What we need to do is break these large populations into manageable cohorts before it is possible to draw any meaningful conclusions.

There are several questions that would be worth our while to study in greater detail before enacting any sweeping policy changes.

• What is the earnings differential between high school graduates who receive vocational training versus those who don’t?

• What is the difference between college graduates with technical versus liberal arts degrees?

• Is a Humanities degree from a bottom tier college really worth more than vocational training in high school or community college?

• What is the value of technical training at the high school level compared to that received at a two-year college?

• How do community college graduates fare against those who study at for-profit technical schools?

These are just a few of the questions we need to ask, and unfortunately I don’t have ready access to the answers. My guess is that if we examined these questions thoroughly, the argument in favor of college for all would be considerably weakened.

There is no question that our current public K-12 system leaves students poorly equipped to compete in a global economy, but for a large percentage of students, additional education is not the answer. We need to focus on improving the current system, rather than expecting our colleges and universities to make up for the shortcomings of our high schools. Thirteen years of public education should be sufficient preparation to become a productive member of society.

One of the first and most important steps we must take is to recognize that a one-size fits all solution simply doesn’t work. Instead of insisting that every child meet the same minimum levels of academic achievement, we should work to maximize the performance of every student based on their individual potential. This means presenting students with a wider variety of educational options earlier in the process, based on their interests, aptitudes, and abilities. I’m not suggesting that students should be forced into different tracks based on test scores, but that we should place a much greater emphasis on legitimate alternatives for students who do not intend to pursue a college education.

Although career opportunities for unskilled workers are becoming severely limited, there is little doubt that we will continue to need large numbers of carpenters, plumbers, electricians, and mechanics, along with a host of other highly skilled workers. Emerging industries point to the need for technicians capable of servicing wind turbines, photo-voltaic arrays, and hydrogen powered vehicles. There will continue to be plenty of jobs available for highly trained blue collar workers, but the knowledge and skills required to perform these jobs are becoming increasingly technical. It’s hard to argue the need to study art history, philosophy, or anthropology as a requirement for any of these careers, but there is no doubt that better preparation in the Three R’s is an absolute must.

We need to place a much greater emphasis on vocational and technical training in our public schools, and at the same time we must eliminate the stigma associated with these programs. All too often, vocational students are regarded as second-class citizens within their schools, even though many of these students will enjoy greater lifetime earnings than their college bound classmates. This is undoubtedly a factor in the high dropout rate for non college bound students. We must ensure that vocational students have access to training in a variety of relevant fields that will allow them to enter the workforce with a set of marketable skills. In addition to vocational training, we must also ensure that these students have the essential communication and computation skills required to function in the workplace and the modern economy.

Beyond high school, our community colleges should play a much larger role in allowing people of all ages to develop and maintain marketable skill sets throughout their working lives. In the past, it was entirely possible for a worker to spend an entire career using one set of basic skills. Today that is simply not possible. The pace of technological advancement is so rapid that a specific skill might be highly prized one day and worthless the next. A four year college degree is certainly not the answer to this problem. We need to look beyond the idea of education as simply being one phase of our lives, and to think instead in terms of lifelong learning. In today’s global economy, each of us will require constant training and retraining throughout our working lives in order to ensure our continued employability.

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