Republicans right to address education, but wrong on agenda
During this week’s Republican debate in Milwaukee, the issue of K-12 education was again substantively ignored even though the focus of the debate was the U.S. economy. However, higher education was not left out of the debate as Senator Marco Rubio availed himself of a couple of opportunities to attack the U.S. higher education system. He posited that the system is “outdated, too expensive, and hard to access.” In the debate, he didn’t lay out solutions beyond his talking points, so I visited his campaign website to understand how he would “modernize” U.S. higher education. He argues that we need to “overhaul our outdated higher-education system” and more specifically “modernize higher education system to fit 21st century economy” in four ways:
- Increase access to career and vocational education;
- Better utilize apprenticeships and valuable on-the-job training;
- Ease access to state colleges and online educational opportunities;
- Increase hiring of non-degree holding workers.
First, I have a hard time understanding how the hiring of non-degree workers is in any way related to the modernization of higher education. To me that seems like the anti-thesis of valuing higher education and the skills necessary in a 21st century economy. I suspect you could argue that an increase in career and vocation education is part and parcel of that argument. To support this modernization Republicans right to address education, but wrong on agenda | Cloaking Inequity:
