Reforming higher education to serve students will require more competition from vocational schools instead of political promises to offer free tuition.
The way forward isn’t “enormous increases in government support for college,” as Ingrid Eisenstadter summarized the Democratic platform for Barron’s.
That path has some foreseeable, but ignored, effects.
“These plans are guaranteed to escalate already high dropout rates, as more and more students start their higher education with no financial risk to themselves. They will, however, have ever greater academic risk, since 75 percent of community-college students now start their ‘higher education’ with remedial reading and math classes, and less than 10 percent graduate on time,” Eisenstadter wrote.
The process is routine economics. The less risk and cost associated with an action, the more people will try it. That doesn’t mean that more people will complete it and achieve their goals.
“The ratio of debt to inability that causes students to drop out is unknown, but the more the government lures unqualified students into the groves of academe, the more students will be falling out of the trees,” she wrote.
Higher education doesn’t have a cost problem. Its graduates are better off than their peers and overwhelmingly say their degree was worth the time and effort. What higher education has is a completion problem. Only 59 percent of students earn a four-year degree within six years. For those dropouts, they’re weighed down by debt and wasted effort. Before making college even more accessible, institutions need to reaffirm their commitment to graduating the students they already teach.
Spurring competition can come by reforming how colleges receive federal funding and teaching students to take the financial cost of enrollment into account. Or they can skip the traditional four-year experience.
“There’s another alternative to time and debt misspent in college: an aggressive return to public vocational high schools like the one I went to,” Eisenstadter wrote.
Opening students to a binary beyond “college or poverty” could make the economy more resilient.
“These schools—also known as career or technical high schools—teach students trades, crafts, and technical skills alongside the usual algebra, geography, and foreign-language classes,” she wrote. “They can fill jobs as electricians, automotive-repair techs, chefs, paralegals, nurses’ aides, and many more—skills that will grow in value as time passes.”
Vocational schools offer students the chance at a high salary and low debt. Some colleges have opened up to vocational certificates, especially community colleges.
Given the increasing costs of college and the falling enrollments for all schools outside of nonprofit four-year institutions, the shift would adapt to student needs without expanding the responsibility of the government to pay for higher education. Students, who benefit the most from their education, would be responsible for funding themselves. And, with the focus on skills instead of enrollment rates, they’d have a career that could cover the cost.
