AMERICAN.COM

As I mentioned earlier, I am currently reading Real Education by Charles Murray. In the book, Murray makes four big points: a) Ability varies; b) half of the children are below average; c) too many people are going to college; and d) America’s future depends on how we educate the academically gifted. It’s the third point I am concerned about for the moment. Here is President Obama is his recent Osawatomie, Kansas, speech:

But we need to meet the moment. We’ve got to up our game. We need to remember that we can only do that together. It starts by making education a national mission — a national mission. Government and businesses, parents and citizens. In this economy, a higher education is the surest route to the middle class. The unemployment rate for Americans with a college degree or more is about half the national average. And their incomes are twice as high as those who don’t have a high school diploma. Which means we shouldn’t be laying off good teachers right now — we should be hiring them. We shouldn’t be expecting less of our schools –- we should be demanding more. We shouldn’t be making it harder to afford college — we should be a country where everyone has a chance to go and doesn’t rack up $100,000 of debt just because they went.

Obama’s words remind me of this passage in the book:

The problem begins with the message sent to young people that they should aspire to college no matter what. Some politicians are among the most visible offenders, treating every failure to go to college as an injustice that can be remedied by increasing government help.

Murray makes several points that dispute Obama:

1. Only 20 percent of all students have the academic ability to do college work without decreasing the difficulty level.

2. For the student who wants to become a hotel manager, journalist, software designer, farmer, hospital administrator, four years of class work at a brick-and-mortar college is unnecessary — especially if K-12 did a better job a providing a classical liberal education.

3. The income for the people in a wide variety of  occupations that do not require a college degree is higher than the average income for many occupations that do require a BA. For some, being an electrician is a better career path than being a middle-level manager, both in terms of wages and job satisfaction.

Now this is not to say education should end at high school. Certainly not, as Joel Kotkin points out in City Journal:

The shortage of industrial skills points to a wide gap between the American education system and the demands of the world economy. For decades, Americans have been told that the future lies in high-end services, such as law, and “creative” professions, such as software-writing and systems design. This has led many pundits to think that the only real way to improve opportunities for the country’s middle class is to increase its access to higher education.

That attitude is a relic of the post–World War II era, a time when a college education almost guaranteed you a good job. These days, the returns on higher education, particularly on higher education gained outside the elite schools, are declining, as they have been for about a decade.  …  The reason for the low rewards is that many of the skills learned in college are now in oversupply. … The oversupply of college-educated workers is especially striking when you contrast it with the growing shortage of skilled manufacturing workers.  …  Two-year colleges will be crucial to the effort to train skilled workers. One of these schools, Central Ohio Technical College, has recently expanded by 70 welding students and 50 aspiring machinists per year. Many of the college’s certificate programs are designed and partly funded by companies, which figure that they’re making a wise investment. …

Such shorter educational alternatives will become ever more important as industrial workers retire. The average skilled worker in the industries supplying the gas boom is in his mid-fifties. “At our plant, you have lots of people with 20 to 30 years’ experience,” says Kirk, who has three high-skill openings that he can’t fill. “But there’s no apprenticeship program—no way to fill the future growth. We are simply running out of people.”