While our students perform poorly on standardized tests relative to other countries, we have the most desirable institutions of higher education in the world and have a disproportionate share of Nobel Prize winners.  How is this so and do we denigrate out school system too much?

One explanation is offer by Thomas Sowell in Success Concealing Failure.  This was published in the Jewish World Review on 10/29/99, and is included as a chapter in The Thomas Sowell Reader.

excerpt:

AMONG THE MANY clever and misleading defenses of our failing educational system is the assertion that our universities are among the highest rated in the world and Americans consistently win a disproportionate number of Nobel Prizes. Both these claims are accurate — and irrelevant.

While Americans won the lion’s share of Nobel Prizes again this year, not one of these winners was actually born in the United States. If people born and raised elsewhere choose to come here and use their talents, fine. But do not claim their achievements as some vindication of the American educational system.

On the contrary, the painful question must be faced: Why were a quarter of a billion native-born Americans unable to win a single Nobel Prize this year, when a relative handful of naturalized Americans won so many? This is not a vindication but an indictment of our educational system.

Even more revealing, there is a systematic relationship between the difficulty of the subject and the percentage of American doctorates which go to Americans.

HKO comments:

While Sowell’s comments may be accurate there are other factors that have accounted for American success stories such as Steve Jobs and Steven Spielberg.  There is an American spirit that combines impatience, a healthy disrespect for authority, personal freedom, and a can do attitude.  What is missing in this article is why so many groundbreaking technologies the product of American minds.  Mark Zuckerberg, Sergin Brin (Google) are a few others that come to mind.

While this is not to excuse the quality of our school system and its importance for those who are not the outliers of success,  perhaps there are other factors that have allowed us to overcome this problem.  Perhaps formal education has proven itself less relevant.  This is a product of their poor performance and breakthrough widely available technology made available by some very smart dropouts.

“You dropped a hundred and fifty grand on a fuckin education you coulda got for a dollah fifty in late chahges at the public library.” From the movie Good Will Hunting.

Among the lessons we are still learning from the housing bust is the role played by well intentioned but counterproductive government housing policies.  It became an important political objective to have lower income people own homes, even if in doing so we created a financial risk not only for the recipients of our largesse, but for the entire housing market. We suspended prudent lending standards and created implicit government guarantees that allowed auditors and ratings agencies to abandon any semblance of the due diligence we used to trust to them.

Behind this noble destructive effort was a policy that almost anyone should be able to own a home.  Today we realize that ignoring stable income and credit worthiness causes problems.  Some people, we now realize, are just better off renting.

By throwing money into this policy we upset the normal market, creating  a boom and a bust.  This destroyed the wealth of a lot of homeowners who were qualified to own a home.

Are we experiencing the same flawed thinking in higher education?

We believe that everyone should be entitled to a college education, and we encouraged debt to fund it. The Obamacare bill had a provision that privatized education loans.  There used to be private companies that made loans for higher education.  Now that the government has usurped that market they can use it as they please.  Obama once referred to forgiving college loans for those who went into government service.  There is a nascent movement afoot to forgive college loans, vocalized by some of the Wall Street occupation crowd.

But just as we have learned to question the necessity of everyone owning a home we should question the necessity and the wisdom of everyone having a college diploma.  Education is a great thing not just for the higher income that it used to provide but for the greater understanding that it should strive to provide.  But  education is not limited to the institutions that charge enormous  tuitions.

Professions such as medicine, law, law, accounting and architecture requires some sort of documented credentialism.  Studies of history, philosophy and the sciences are meaningful contributions worth pursuing in an organized fashion.  But this does not mean that everyone needs to have a college diploma.  Trades provide valuable and necessary and often lucrative alternatives.

This does not even address the quality issue.  We used to graduate from high school with the skills to take on a lot of jobs that now require college credentials.

As in housing,  by reducing the standards to attend college and by funding it generously we reduce the value and increase the cost for those who do not qualify for government largesse.  Graduates are now saddled with debt in a poor employment market.

Government’s intrusion into higher education  has increased demand for the service and the funding to pay for it. This is the same formula that has driven up health care costs and housing costs.   If we do not learn this single lesson from the housing boom and bust  we are likely to repeat it in higher education.

If the concept of wealth is properly expanded to include human capital, not just homes and stocks, it is clear that total wealth has become far less concentrated and more widely dispersed than it used to be. Percentages of narrowly defined wealth held by some top percentile do not begion to capture how much more widespread the ownership of real capital, financial capital and human capital has become.  Fewer than 8 percent of those above the age of 25 had a college degree in 1960, but that fraction doubled to no more than 16 percent by 1980 and nearly doubled again to 28% by 2004. Although rewarding investments are never risk-free, investments in education normally pay dividends just a surely as blue-chip stocks do.  A much larger fraction of Americans own stock than was true in the past, and a much larger fraction own air-conditioned houses and cars, and a much larger fraction also owns valuable human capital.  Wealth has not become concentrated in fewer hands, as some have claimed, but has instead become increasingly dispersed among a widening share of the population.

From Income and Wealth by Alan Reynolds

HKO Comment:

The more people who get a college degree the less valuable it becomes in the market place.  We are finding more people today with a college degree who are doing jobs that were well handled only a few years ago by workers with a mere high school diploma.  Part of this is because of a bad economy, but part of this is because we may be graduating too many from college.

Most people value college as a glorified trade school and measure its value by the wage you earn in a job.  Without a financial justification for the cost of a college education, higher education could not maintain its overly inflated cost.  Those who value an education for its own merits and seek intellectual development beyond what can be measure on a W-2 have a very valid even if it is a minority perspective.

from the ‘never waste time killing those who are busy committing suicide’ files….

NEA General Counsel Bob Chanin explains what is truly important to the teacher’s union: