College affordability is getting to be a hot button political
issue. President Obama addressed this in the state of the union speech
1/12/16. Addressing this issue is a good
thing, but it needs to be examined more closely
Right now, too many people are going to college, more than the
economy can support.
Not enough people are going into skilled trades. Entry procedures
into lucrative trades such as plumbing and electrical are corrupt. Entry is
dependent on knowing someone who will take one on as a journeyman or
apprentice. The old boy network is resulting in incompetent practitioners who
break things in my house. Entry into these professions needs to be more
transparent like entry into law or medicine.
We need to stop regarding traditional college as the solution to
employment problems. We need to educate people in how to run and start a
business. We shouldn’t
necessarily be encouraging so many people to go to college.
We have to reverse the process that has eliminated vocational
courses from high schools, focusing them exclusively on college prep. We are
raising a generation of people who are helpless to do ordinary things.
A couple of anecdotes:
This year, I attended a symposium at the University of Wisconsin
in memory of my father, Heinz Barschall, and celebrating his colleague, Willy
Haeberli. This occasion was timed to approximately coincide with my late
father's 100th birthday and Willy’s 90th.
My father was a professor at the University of Wisconsin,
Madison. For most of his career, he focused on nuclear physics. At this
symposium, I learned that in seeking graduate students to study in his
experimental physics lab, he preferred students who had been raised on farms,
because these students knew how to build things, especially experimental equipment.
I remember my father saying that American students were always
better than foreign students.
My kids went to a high school that had eliminated shop classes. I
would say that they were effectively educated to be helpless.
I was an exchange student in France back in the 1970’s.
The French educational system has always prided itself on being
free; however, my impression was that the system was more focused on weeding
students out than on educating them. There were exams at the ends of middle and
high school -- intended to force most students to flunk. At the university,
amongst students who had already been through the first two exams, only 50% got
through the first degree, which was called "license." The whole system was designed with the idea
that it was free, but study beyond the teen years was generally only available
to those who could pass these exams.
I feel that this process damaged the self-esteem of most French
people and has resulted in that country having generally more unemployment and
less entrepreneurship than here. The "free" education system in
France, at least back then, had a horrific human cost, in terms of pressure on
and damage to children. I saw rather alarming and obvious mental illness
amongst members of my high school class there that I never saw in my American
high school.
I would submit that that human cost ultimately damages their
economy as well.
Our system has been based on the hope of making everyone
successful with easy, empowering courses. This is better for students. This
results in increased creativity, confidence, and problem solving ability. We
should not be rushing to imitate foreign educational systems. The pressure I've seen on students in the NYC
metro area, where my kids grew up, is very damaging, especially to boys, who
develop more slowly than girls and can't cope with that pressure.
Comparisons between our high schools and foreign high schools are
also very misleading, because in foreign countries a large percentage of
students, perhaps a even a majority, aren’t necessarily finishing high school
and are therefore not part of these tests.
Saying we are going to make college free is not necessarily a
good solution. It will encourage even
more students to go to college, when too many people are already going to
college. It also will put many students
into higher pressure academic environments that are not necessarily good for
them.
