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David Brooks is excited. Not about another long dinner sitting next to a horny Senator with roving hands. He is excited about a Democratic President spending money on local community colleges:
President Obama announced this week… a $12 billion plan to produce 5 million more community college grads by 2020.
Why does this interest Bobo? Government spending on anything but Republican defense contractors and banksters he usually considers enabling dependence. Relatively speaking, that’s not a lot of money. And students and faculty at such schools are not often beneficiaries of Republican largesse, although they form the backbone of American communities. He’s discovered that we have squandered our most important "asset":
Over the past 35 years, college completion rates have been flat. Income growth has stagnated. America has squandered its human capital advantage.
Those three sentences are non sequiters, distracting us from observing that squandering “human capital” is a fundamental part of the American business model. For starters, the phrase is business school jargon that dehumanizes people and de-emotionalizes decisions about them, casting them as commodities that can be discarded in favor of a marginally bigger bonus. Businesses are enabled in doing that by the gutting and non-enforcement of labor laws and rewarded for doing so by perverse government tax incentives and subsidies.
Mr. Brooks’ solution to this waste of resources is to improve local community college education, to make it more “accountable”, to tie money to reforms in digital networking and delivery of services, and “to spur a wave of innovation." For Bobo, the problem is not hard times or a government subsidized business model that harms labor. It is "accountability", a theme noticeably absent in his coverage of Republican presidential performance.
Selective accountability for others is an old neocon meme. Why ignore graduates of traditional undergraduate colleges and universities (other than that they are increasingly finding it harder to land jobs – because of the economy, not their training)?
I think there two background issues at play here: 1) the rising cost of traditional, public and private four-year undergraduate programs, and 2) tension over diversity and leadership as we confront fundamental changes to our national economy.
Cost
Cost is so obviously an issue that Bobo explicitly and condescendingly denies that it is:
I’ve had this discussion with my liberal friends a thousand times, and I have come to accept that they will never wrap their minds around the truth: lack of student aid is not the major reason students drop out of college. They drop out because they are academically unprepared or emotionally disengaged or because they lack self-discipline or because bad things are happening at home.
Affordability is way down the list. You can increase student aid a ton and you still won’t have a huge effect on college completion.
Every parent knows that cost is a fundamental issue in obtaining a higher education, at public as well as elite private schools. The latter, and the top ten public universities, are a de facto minor league for our national leadership team. Once "need blind" schools are under great pressure to admit those who can pay full cost. A modernized G.I. bill – a seminal factor in creating the post-World War Two middle class – barely squeaked through a Democratic Congress.
Costs and tuition have consistently risen at twice the rate of inflation for three decades. Republican state legislatures have systematically cut funding for state land grant universities, the backbone of the public higher education system. And college and university endowment values have plummeted, causing the sell off of assets, program cut backs, and desperate pleas to alumni and friends to "give what they can".
Social Leadership
David Brooks knows that the role of the university in society has been debated since Oxford was still a river ford for oxen. The oldest dispute is over whether their primary function is teaching or research. Benefits attributed to them include the utilitarian – graduates earn more money than non-graduates and research is often an engine running local and national economies. Non-economic reasons for universities include the cultivation of leadership, excellence and critical thinking. University graduates
make up the backbone of the country’s social structure. The legal, medical and teaching professions form the necessary core of our society….The philosophy of individuality, cosmopolitanism and social responsibility that is integral to higher education, is transmitted through the behaviour of graduates.
That quote from the UK’s BBC applies equally here. If spiraling costs restrict access to higher education, especially elite undergraduate and graduate programs, opportunity becomes restricted to the already wealthy and the few super talented students who outperform them. Two examples currently much in the news are Barack Obama and Sonia Sotomayor. Take them out of the mix or reduce their numbers and impact, and you revert to the John Robertses, Dan Quayles and George Bushes, and the nomenklatura identified by neocon think tanks as worthy of their institutional but indirect support.
Enhancing community college programs is very important. But it’s not the match that’s playing on center court.
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A lack of student aid may not affect drop-out rates, though I’d like to see Bobo’s “stats”. It certainly affects students’ decision about where to apply and which students are accepted.
Brooks’ facile comment about what affects non-graduation rates assumes the lives of students like George Bush and Dan Quayle. It ignores the emotional and financial strains on families attempting to pay for even state public college costs, and how that affects student and adult job performance. The strain starts years ahead of high school graduation. With college loans and mid-career job changes and retraining, it continues for years afterward, and affects all other economic decisions by those families.
That’s easily fifteen years out of the lives of students and their families. Those costs and strains don’t take into account rising rent or mortgage costs, the higher cost or lower availability of health care, and the more tenuous hold on employment everyone has.
The aggregate strain is considerable and generational, and likely more than Mr. Brooks has encountered since he applied to or graduated from Chicago. Enhancing opportunities through community colleges will help millions. It leaves a bigger problem unimproved.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtMV44yoXZ0
Bobo is such a tool, a penny-wise-pound-foolish asshole.
The argument for community colleges is very much like early childhood education; the benefits to our society grossly outweigh the investment in so many ways, but the benefits are available only to a society which can think its way out of a wet paper bag and look at education’s systemic benefits.
I cannot help but wonder what the damage might be to our future if new jobs are slow in generation as forecast with this economic recovery; we will have millions of new job seekers among the young fighting for jobs their much older peers/parents need now that the better paying mature jobs have let the economy for good. Community college is a place for the young to not only bide their time as the recovery ripens, but to accumulate the kinds of knowledge-based tools they will need for the more complicated road ahead.
One thing idiot Bobo also has not grasped is the demands of our current K-12 education system on its participants; if every student spends a month a year preparing for a national NCLB-sanctioned test, they lose one whole year of school during the course of their K-12 career. Add the constant change in technology demanding even more education, and our K-12 graduates need another 2 years to play catch up — or more. Maybe Bobo is a victim of this problem, too, since he’s obviously not keeping up.
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Matthew 5:16 Sic luceat lux vestra coram hominibus ut videant vestra bona opera et glorificent Patrem vestrum qui in caelis est.
Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.
Bobo claims to be all for Obama’s efforts to add to the number of community college graduates. He even praises Rahm Emanuel and a Democratic Congressman from Californian, which immediately raises the issue of whether he’s a Greek bearing gifts. None of them are politicians whose stature Bobo would ordinarily want to raise.
My concern is that he uses Obama’s program to support local community colleges to distract from the plight of traditional four-year programs – public and private – and those hoping to attend them. If CC grads come at the expense of the others, the social consequences will be less overall opportunity and greater social stratification. We would be less competitive at home and abroad. We would be ruled by a narrower, less diverse or empathetic clique with a firmer hold on power. Not a positive outcome for representative democracy.
Bobo’s concerns about “accountability” are laudable in the abstract; they are laughable when raised by someone so disdainful of accountability when it applies to Republicans.
Just had a conversation with my kids yesterday morning about college. We’ll be able to afford a traditional four-year program, but there are two compelling reasons for families who can do so to think about community college.
First, freshman students are often obligated to live their first year on campus in dorms. (Bobo missed what an enormous challenge this is to a first-year college student; I know a lot of folks who dropped out after frosh year because of the entirety of their college lives, including the impact of dorm living on their studies.) My daughter would probably do better in her own apartment than a dorm, being a very private person who prefers solitude and quiet for studying. If she went to the local community college for freshman year while living at home, she could move into an apartment with select roomies at a four-year school for her sophomore year while easing into the demands of college.
Secondly, it’s hard to argue with the price. The cost of the local community college is half to a third of the nearest four-year public school. The educators at the community college are a mix of professionals from in the community who moonlight, and educators from the nearby four-year school who are not yet tenured. This yields a real bargain, since students will have instructors who can speak from real life experience and from instructors they would have had at the four-year schools.
Bobo, now being a fossil prematurely, also doesn’t realize that many community colleges have agreements with four-year schools as feeders. The local community college here has a 3-and-1 program, where students can take three years at the CC, and finish their program at a nearby private four-year school. This particular four-year school in district is TEN TIMES more expensive per credit hour than the CC, making it a win-win for both schools since the four-year can assure they have full classrooms and favorable cred with the community while the CC can offer a four-year program in a number of degrees.
I swear Bobo never does a lick of research on anything he writes. Don’t get me started on the bullshit argument he uses of “accountability.” Ugh. The man is clueless.
I think Bobo is well informed and as purposefully articulate – or inarticulate – as the occasion demands. I also think his notion of accountability is highly selective and self-serving.
Brooks is passionate about what he wants, but undersells it. I do not think it is often what he says he wants, and rarely is it what would benefit most Americans.
There you go again. After Bobo kindly went out of his way – “a thousand times” – to tell his liberal friend that cost is not a factor, you contradict him. How uncivil.
Community colleges are an important part of the educational system. They meet many needs, from door openers because of location or cost, to end results for some and stepping stones for others. Their immediate effects may be local; in the aggregate, they are substantial nationally.
My point was not to underrate them. It is to highlight the larger problem Bobo ignores by dismissing cost as a problem, and by talking about “accountability” or “tearing down the system” to rebuild it, or using what are already familiar modes of digital networking and information delivery.
The bigger picture is the old debate about what role universities should play and how we pay for them. Not all the colleges we need can be funded by pizza billionaires in Ann Arbor, oil billionaires in Chicago, or banking and steel billionaires in Pittsburgh.
Not all the research we need can be funded by big pharma or big ag. Not all the leaders we need can come from the farm teams for the Hoover or American Enterprise Institute. Some of them have to come from those who want to emulate Izzy Stone or Thurgood Marshall or Caesar Chavez. Some will had to have rubbed shoulders with the David Brookses at Chicago, the Paul Krugmans at Princeton, the Stephen Jay Goulds at Harvard.
As with energy and foreign policy problems, we need many approaches and cures, a reality implicit in Bobo’s title (No Size Fits All). His arguments, however, suggest Bobo is searching for more creative ways to administer things as they are, not for creative new leadership that will reorient our priorities or come up with new solutions to old problems.
One of the other points I should have made, which fits hand-in-glove with the need for additional education to backfill for the loss of K-12 time to NCLB and technology:
Community colleges are great for people who are technologists and technicians, blue and pink collar folks who need certifications but not degrees. They aren’t getting an adequate amount of this kind of training in K-12 programs any longer, since NCLB has cut so deeply into the overall education program. We’ve denigrated work so much in this country, valuing only white collar workers; ignoring the place these community colleges have in the careers of workers is but one more slight to blue/pink collar work.
And yeah, the money. Bobo says it’s not about the money.
Jeebus, what a moron. Of course it’s about the money. If I could buy something I needed for 10 to 25% of its retail price, of course I would. If I could get a sure 3- to 10-fold yield on investment, of course I would. Crikey, when do we ever get deals like this?
Of course I learned this at community college as well as public and private four-year institutions…
Or as the Greeks would have said it:
Oh jeepers, I’d better brush up. I thought it was
Obviously I need some work on my Greek. That’s what happens to us folks who attend community college…
It’s all Greek to me.
How elegant the one upmanship. It reminds me of a speech by Churchill after Labour’s post-war success brought to the House many non-public school members who hadn’t the luxury of spending their youths studying Latin or Greek.
In giving a speech, WSC used a phrase from one or the other, then, unusually, stopped to translate. The Labour members booed, assuming he intended to insult their backgrounds. (A double insult, since WSC knew little of either language.) His “reveal” was that, as an Old Harrovian who had never attended university, his translation was intended for the Old Wykehamists in the House (old boys from Winchester, England’s premier public school). The surprise leveling comment, from a man accustomed to his privileges, brought down the House.
The title is also a play on words and a reference to the Roman Polanski film, The Ninth Gate, with Bobo in the part of Dean Corso, the unscrupulous book trader whose efforts to obtain a book whose secrets will raise the devil turns out rather badly, or well, depending on one’s faith.
If you need your daily fix of real journalism and can’t wait until Marcy puts up her next post, read Glenn Greenwald on the death of Walter Cronkite. He throws in David Halberstam for good measure, and Tim Russert for contrast. He could have titled it In Memoriam for Journalism (links omitted):
Book Salon up at the Mothership with Andrea Batista Schlesinger’s The Death of Why? hosted by Mark Bauerlein