Should higher education be a right, not a privilege?

Recent stories about the heavy indebtedness of college graduates have led to calls for the government to guarantee a free college education to all.

College, they say, has become at once more necessary and less affordable. More necessary, because an increasing number of jobs require college degrees; less affordable, because the cost of tuition has for decades grown faster than the rate of inflation.

In the 20th century, the United States made free secondary education available to all, and our educated work force — then the best-educated work force on the planet — made our industry more productive and our businesses more profitable, and they became the backbone of our middle-class society.

Surely, the advocates say, our now much richer society can afford to make a parallel investment today. One estimate suggests the cost of providing a public, college education for all might be in the neighborhood of $30 billion per year, which is not that large, relative to the scale of all federal expenditures.

At a time of ballooning public debt and trillion dollar deficits, however, when our ability to pay for all the benefits we already have promised — to the young, to the poor, to the old, to public pensioners, and now to everyone for health insurance — is in doubt, it is not clear that we can or should create a new, expensive entitlement.

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The proposal, however, has a deeper problem than its cost. The fundamental problem is that a universal “right to higher education” cannot guarantee that everyone will become educated.

The “right to higher education” really amounts to claim that taxpayers have a duty to pay the tuition and fees of students, who meet some specified qualifications. Neither the colleges, who will have an interest in getting the public funds, nor the politicians, who have an interest in providing benefits that will motivate young people to vote for them, will have any incentive to make those qualifications especially demanding.

What we can guarantee by law is that there will be publicly funded places in institutions where learning might happen, if the students were motivated.

Unfortunately, there is surprisingly little evidence that students learn all that much during their four years, and some evidence suggests many of them don’t learn anything at all.

One recent book, by sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, titled “Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses,” finds exactly what it claims in its title: Many students aren’t assigned much work, don’t spend many hours each week doing schoolwork, and don’t demonstrate much improvement in critical reasoning and writing.

It is true that critical reasoning and writing skills are hard to measure, and critics have raised objections to the test Arum and Roksa rely on. In this case, however, the burden of proof does not belong with the critics, but with the higher education industry. Before we expect taxpayers to pay more than they already do, we ought to be able to demonstrate to skeptics that our graduates have more knowledge and more skills than they had when they matriculated.

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Actually, what colleges should be able to prove is something more demanding still: That our graduates have more knowledge and more skills than they would have learned anyway in four years spent working.

In the meanwhile, what public policy can do to benefit young people would be to relax the rules that restrict employers from using tests to measure directly the skills and knowledge they want their new hires to possess.

Employers shouldn’t need to rely on a bachelor’s degree as an imperfect substitute for what they’re really interested in. They should be able to skip the credential and go right to the substance.

Particularly at a time when online educational opportunities are proliferating and constantly improving, we should move away from the one-size-fits-all, time-served credentialing model of education and toward a world where people learn what they want, from whom they want, when they are ready and motivated to learn it.

Motivation is the real issue. Education cannot be a right, because no one can make anyone learn anything. No one can make you good at any sport or musical instrument, unless you try hard and practice. Calculus, political science, and composition work exactly the same way. No one gets better at them unless they try hard and practice.

Which is why education is neither a privilege, nor a right, but a personal responsibility.

Joseph R. Reisert is associate professor of American constitutional law and chairman of the department of government at Colby College in Waterville.


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