From the Editor
THE AMERICAN: Volume 2, Number 5: September/October 2008
Dear Reader:
It’s back to school season and this fall over 17 million students have descended on America’s college campuses. Undergraduate enrollment has increased by roughly 20 percent over the last decade and is expected to jump by another 10 percent to 15 percent by 2016.
That’s good news, right? Maybe not. In this issue’s cover story, Charles Murray argues that far too many Americans are going to college. Indeed, according to Murray, today’s college system may be partly responsible “for the emergence of class-riven America.”
To understand how that could be, let’s first stipulate the good qualities of the American system of higher education.
Only a nation as rich and devoted to developing human capital as ours would have the ability to make a sustained commitment to higher education. Thanks to generous alumni giving and shrewd capital management, our elite schools are extraordinarily wealthy. The market value of the 20 largest university endowments is over $100 billion. These endowments have helped guarantee the steady increase in spending on students witnessed since the early 1990s. Colleges in the United States now spend over $350 billion a year in an effort to educate young adults.
And U.S. universities are leaders in cutting-edge research and technology development. According to a new report discussed in American Scene, “The United States accounts for 40 percent of total world R&D spending and 38 percent of patented new technology inventions by . . . industrialized nations.” We can thank our nation’s research universities for helping foster a culture that makes such innovation possible.
But there is another, less sanguine way of looking at America’s university system and the role it plays in the nation’s life. Murray argues in his article that the college degree has become a source of class division in America as we have accidentally turned a B.A. “into a symbol of first-class citizenship.” In Murray’s view, many millions of Americans lack the cognitive ability to complete a college degree successfully. Despite this, they are pressured to attain a B.A. for what it symbolizes to the broader economy and culture.
Murray’s research on education comes at an important time, since it may help answer a question that has puzzled social scientists in recent years.
Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz are economists at Harvard University and the authors of a thought-provoking new book, The Race Between Education and Technology. They highlight the significant financial advantages that come with higher education. “The economic benefits to college and post-college training are at historically high levels,” they report.
College graduation rates, however, are not what one would expect, given the economic advantages that come with a college degree. “What is preventing America from crossing the finishing line?” they wonder.
Part of the answer may be that too many people are trying to complete college-level work without the ability—and the genuine desire—to do so. While 30 percent of 18-year-olds go to college today, only about 10 percent of them have the tools needed to succeed in college, Murray says.
If Murray is right—and I encourage you to read the whole piece to see his argument in detail—we should be less surprised that Americans aren’t crossing the college finish line. Indeed, given the increased stigma that comes with failure to obtain a B.A., we might want to reconsider the wisdom of having encouraged so many students to enter college in the first place.
Cheers,
Photograph by Mary Nobles Ours.