When a friend’s daughter was in town a couple of years ago visiting American University, where she had been accepted as a freshman, I showed the girl — a California native — the sights of Washington, D.C.
As we crossed the National Mall, she asked me what that big building was at the end. I told her it was the Capitol, and she asked, “What’s that?” I explained that was where Congress meets, and she asked, “What’s that?”
The girl was weeks away from graduating from a swank high school, had been accepted into a supposedly competitive university, is the daughter of parents with post-graduate degrees … and she’d never heard of Congress.
I would have assumed she was an anomaly or blamed the California school system if I hadn’t heard similar comments from other young people who attend top-rated high schools in Virginia, such as the daughter of a co-worker who mentioned a classmate visiting Europe — “one of those places that starts with an A.” Amsterdam? Austria? Antwerp? “No,” she said. “I think it was Alcatraz.”
Clearly, she was not a candidate for higher education; she hadn’t mastered fourth-grade geography. Yet after struggling to graduate from high school, she went on to attend one of Virginia’s state universities — exemplifying one of the reasons college costs now are so high: Taxpayers subsidize college for people better suited to asking, “You want fries with that?”
Only in Lake Wobegon is every child above average. In real life, not everyone can benefit from advanced education. Not every career demands it. But while a high school diploma historically meant that an individual had been adequately educated for adulthood — could speak and write grammatically, perform basic mathematics, and had a working knowledge of science, geography, civics, and history — as my young friends so ably demonstrated, that is no longer the case.
The failure of secondary education means that a college degree is roughly the equivalent of what a high school diploma was a generation ago. Consequently, college instruction is not necessarily higher education; in many cases, it’s remedial, with universities having to teach freshmen basics they should have learned in ninth grade. Employers know that, which is why even the most menial of jobs now requires a college degree — spawning lower-tier state universities that are essentially seat-selling operations.
For example, at Radford Universityin southwest Virginia, the average SAT score for incoming freshmen is a meager 990. Only 6 percent of students graduated in the top 10 percent of their high school class; 28 percent finished in the bottom half.
Yet Virginia taxpayers send about the same amount of money to Radford ($58 million in fiscal 2009) as they send to the College of William and Mary, where the average SAT score is 1350, and 85 percent of students were in the top 10 percent of their class in high school.
The demand for more college seats creates a demand for more financial aid, and Congress blithely complies. Last week, the House passed a measure to spend an additional $20 billion on financial aid to students — the biggest boost since the G.I. bill of 1944. It did so not only without asking whether all the students eligible for financial aid need to be in college, but whether the colleges they will be attending need the additional money.
Last year, the average college endowment increased by 17 percent. Dozens of schools now have endowments of more than $1 billion — and it isn’t just the heavy hitters such as Harvard University, which has an endowment of $35 billion. The University of Maryland’s Great Expectations campaign set a goal of $1 billion.
Even the University of Delaware’s endowment tops $1 billion. Spending just 1 percent of that money on financial aid would free $10 million for scholarships. When so many schools are flush with money, why does Congress continue to soak taxpayers?
Throwing money at schools that don’t need it to spend on students who don’t deserve it defines government waste. Before the House bill is reconciled with the one approved by the Senate, perhaps lawmakers should educate themselves on whether such expenditures are actually needed.
Examiner Columnist Melanie Scarborough lives in Alexandria.
