Debating RTT4HE
Ashley Thorne of the National Association of Scholars has written a response / rebuttal to my new Chronicle column, which argues that cash-strapped colleges and universities would benefit from a “Race to the Top” for higher education. She’s friendly about it and agrees with some of my points, but in the end we have very different ideas about the appropriate scope of higher education.
On the particulars, Thorne seems to share many of my views about the need to improve preparation, reduce remediation, facilitate credit transfer, help people learn and graduate and get good jobs and so on. But underlying her critique is a strong thread of conviction that too many people are going to college. And I just don’t believe this to be true. For decades now we’ve been investing huge amounts of time and money in growing the supply of college graduates. And for decades the job market has responded by increasing the wage premium for college graduation. If there was an oversupply of college graduates, we might expect employers to have taken the recent recession as an opportunity to shed these more expensive employees. Instead, the opposite has occurred–people with college degrees have weathered the storm the best while people without postsecondary credentials have taken the biggest hit.
For NAS, the too-many-graduates thesis goes hand in hand with the idea that
