Today’s “Daily Journal” guest columnist is George Leef, director of research at the John W. Pope Center for Higher Education Policy.
President Obama’s vast agenda amounts to a huge dose of politicization for a nation that’s already far gone into the quicksand pit of governmental control. For more than a century, Republicans and Democrats have taken turns (and often cooperated) in expanding the power and expense of government at all levels. In 1909, very little of America’s resources — to be more precise, Americans’ resources — was diverted into uses ordained by politicians. Individuals were free to decide how to spend, invest, or donate nearly all of their income and wealth. A century later, things are far different, proof of Jefferson’s saying that it’s the natural order of things for government power to gain and liberty to give ground.
It used to be the case that Americans confronted few prohibitions on their conduct other than those of the common law, and hardly any mandates. No one was forced to register for possible military service, to file income tax returns, to “contribute” to a governmental retirement program, and so on. A whole book could be devoted to the erosion of our liberty and at least one has been: James Bovard’s Lost Rights.
Now America is under the control of a president who salivates at the prospect of using federal coercion to remake the nation. Barack Obama is utterly, unflinchingly certain that he knows how to improve the lives of the people through more laws, more regulations, more programs, and, above all, more government spending.
One of the many facets of Obama’s plan for national elevation is in higher education. In his February 24 speech to Congress, he informed the people that they needed to become better educated, not only for their own, but for the national, good.
In keeping with the central planning mode that so characterizes his approach, Obama said that the country needed to put more people through college. “Right now,” he stated, “three-quarters of the fastest-growing occupations require more than a high school diploma. And yet, just over half our citizens have that level of education.”
That certainly sounds like a serious problem. We might ask, though, where does that “three-quarters of the fastest-growing occupations” number come from, and what does it mean?
The number comes from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). The BLS publishes lots of labor market data and surveys, including a document looking at the 30 occupations projected to have the greatest percentage growth in the coming decade. If you look closely at the document, you see that the president engaged in some statistical chicanery to make it appear that higher education needs federal “stimulus” (just like so many other things). To get to that “three-quarters” number, you have to add together the 15 occupations where most of the workers have a bachelor’s degree or higher (such as computer software engineers), the four where workers usually have an associate’s degree (such as dental hygienists), and the three where workers usually have a vocational certificate (such as manicurists).
So, to arrive at the impressive-sounding 75 percent figure, Obama had to include many occupations for which people need only some vocational training. Is there any reason to believe that we need some “stimulus” to get Americans who want those jobs to enroll in the necessary training courses? No. There never has been and isn’t now.
But there is a deeper bit of deception involved here. Obama referred to the numbers of occupations rather than the numbers of workers in them. When you look at the numbers of workers, things are a lot different.
The three occupations expected to have the largest increases in the number of workers employed are all jobs that people can do with only on-the-job training (OJT) — jobs like home health care aides. If you add up all the occupations that call for only OJT, it’s nearly 52 percent of the expected job growth. If you add in those jobs mentioned above that call for some vocational training, it’s over 58 percent.
Therefore, while Obama wants us to think that we’re falling well short educationally and need more people to complete college, in fact the BLS numbers show nothing of the sort. The majority of the job growth, according to the BLS, will be in work that demands nothing more than simple trainability, not advanced academic study.
One of the most common clichés in American life these days is that most jobs (and certainly all “good” ones) now require college education. Isn’t that a reason to expand “access” to college education as Obama proposes?
There are a couple of things wrong with that idea. First, many jobs that now “require” a college degree don’t actually call for any particular knowledge, but only a degree. Many employers now use the possession of a college degree as a screening mechanism; they require applicants to have them only because they’re presumably a little more easily trained and a little more reliable than people without them.
An excellent example is found in the case of Enterprise Rent-a-Car. Enterprise requires its rental agents to have college degrees. Does anyone take courses on that kind of work in college? Of course not.
There is a mountain of evidence that the U.S. has already greatly oversold college education. Many young Americans go to college, convinced that it is the ticket to a prosperous career. They may graduate (lots of them drop out) but with weak basic reading and language skills — and a load of debt — only to find that the best job they can find is something like working a rental car counter, being an aerobics instructor, or serving as an airline flight attendant. If the president is interested in getting the full picture, the BLS also has statistics on the percentages of college-educated people doing jobs that demand no advanced academic training.
“Wait a minute,” I can hear people thinking, “don’t college graduates enjoy much higher earnings than people without degrees?” That is true on average, but that does not mean that everyone who manages to get a college degree will automatically get an earnings boost. Going to college guarantees a lot of expense, but it does not guarantee any increase in income.
If we further subsidize higher education, the result will not be a more productive workforce with soaring incomes. What we will get is a further expansion of the higher education industry and further credential inflation. As Stanford education professor David Labaree wrote in his book How to Succeed in School Without Really Learning:
“The difficulty posed by (the glut of graduates) is not that the population becomes overeducated … but that it becomes overcredentialed, as people pursue diplomas less for the knowledge they are thereby acquiring than for the access the diplomas themselves provide. The result is a spiral of credential inflation, for as each level of education in turn gradually floods with a crowd of ambitious consumers, individuals have to keep seeking ever higher levels of credentials to move a step ahead of the pack. In such a system, nobody wins.”
Right — nobody wins. But some people lose, namely those who either can’t or just don’t want to sit through lots of formal education. There will be fewer and fewer jobs open to them.
In the world of political theatrics, it sounds good to most people when politicians say they’re in favor of more education. It sounds so concerned and visionary. The trouble is that more education isn’t necessarily good. At some point, costs start to outweigh benefits and that point differs from person to person.
The federal government should no more promote college education than it should promote, say, health club memberships. An individual can be very fit without ever going to a health club, and another can be woefully unfit despite going to the club every day.
Obama’s notion that the country “needs” more college education is by no means the worst thing about his authoritarian vision of a “better” America, but it’s emblematic of all that’s wrong with it — the belief that politicians know best.