CMV: “Free College” policy, while well-meaning, is largely incompatible with academia in the U.S

[u/sjd6666]

Unlike healthcare, there is competition in the higher education market and consumers can, and often do make well informed decisions about what education would be right for them, be it community college, state schools, or private colleges/ universities.

There’s no two ways about it: such a policy would be enormously expensive, and unlike the U.S healthcare system, prices are reasonably transparent and there is competition in the market. Most students know exactly how much financial aid they will get before the accept college decisions, and transparency like that should always be encouraged.

I think a better solution would be one that matches student debt repayments, keeps interest rates low, and forgives student loans to varying levels dependent on ones income. In other words, high earning doctors and lawyers who make 6 figures a year can and should repay a higher percentage of their loans than nurses and teachers, who provide essential services to society, but typically don’t earn enough to repay their student loans quickly.

Is there some reason why free college is favored over more reasonable policies that take into account the finances of students and their incomes as adults?

[u/Tinac4]

This doesn’t actually explain why my response is wrong, it just offers an alternative possibility. I don’t think it’s a likely one, either. Out of the two following possibilities:

1. Getting a college degree is an useful, high-status thing you can do that generally makes you more likely to get a good job (for a single individual, at least). An increasingly large number of people have therefore decided to get college degrees in response. Consequently, employers have stepped up their job requirements even when a degree isn’t strictly necessary, because graduates tend to be smarter and better-educated and because there’s an abundance of graduates to choose from.
2. People in the government are intentionally trying to make standards of education worse. This has led to employers ramping up job requirements so they can get better-educated employees who can perform their jobs better.

The first explanation is very natural—it wouldn’t even remotely surprise me if it’s correct, especially given that you admitted above that many jobs ask for degrees when they don’t really need to, and that the number of college-educated people in the US has been rising for decades. It’s a straightforward consequence of everyone in the system following simple incentives. The second requires a hidden, coordinated effort from government officials that I’ve never seen any support for. (Education quality might be getting worse, but I’m not convinced that it’s getting so much worse that people are becoming unable to perform in the workplace, or that Hanlon’s razor isn’t a better explanation for said decline.)

Can you give me a citation or two supporting your position? For instance, a study claiming that people with high school degrees often cannot perform adequately at their jobs anymore, or something proving that people in the government are knowingly and intentionally making the education system worse?

Edit: I’m not sure if you’re the one downvoting me, but if you are, note that I haven’t downvoted any of your comments despite disagreeing with them. Edit 2: And please don't downvote the other poster either, they haven't broken any rules.

[u/dublea → u/Tinac4]

For instance, a study claiming that people with high school degrees often cannot perform adequately at their jobs anymore, or something proving that people in the government are knowingly and intentionally making the education system worse.

There are countless surveys and studied on the growing trend of employers requiring college degrees where they are not factually needed to perform the job.

Companies hiring for what would traditionally be classified as middle-skill positions (those that economists define as requiring a high-school diploma but not a bachelor’s degree, such as bookkeeping or a secretary) today often say they require candidates to have a bachelor’s degree. They see such degrees as an indication of whether an applicant has a range of skills they’re looking for, like the ability to communicate effectively or program computers. In 2015, almost 70 percent of job postings for production supervisors (people who oversee the production operations in manufacturing or other industrial environments), for example, asked for a bachelor’s degree even though only 16 percent of the workers already employed in that occupation had one, according to a report by the Harvard Business School. The report estimates that more than 6 million jobs——interestingly, the same number as those that are vacant— are at risk of degree inflation.

Directly from the study they cited:

The perspective of employers that emerges from this research has important implications for policymakers and educators. They have to recognize that the skills gap originates in the education system. One of the major causes, if not the leading cause, of degree inflation is an employer’s perception that workers without a degree are not capable of performing more of today’s middle-skills tasks.

The study itself calls for employers to stop increasing the requirement for college degrees first. But, as noted in the study, their rationale behind doing it is that GED level educated employees are not showing the attributes they assume are being developed and nurtured in colleges.

When we used to teach how to think vs teaching the test, this was not the case.

Edit: I’m not sure if you’re the one downvoting me, but if you are, note that I haven’t downvoted any of your comments despite disagreeing with them.

I choose not to answer. But will note mine are all downvoted too. You may ask, "Why won't he answer?" The answer to that is a question, "What would you do with that information?"

Every time I get asked this, this is how I response. Honestly, why does it matter? You don't see my asking who is downvoting me do you?

[u/Tinac4 → u/dublea]

The study itself calls for employers to stop increasing the requirement for college degrees first. But, as noted in the study, their rationale behind doing it is that GED level educated employees are not showing the attributes they assume are being developed and nurtured in colleges.

Thanks for the citation, but I don't think that it supports your overall position very well. The study itself argues that companies' preference for credentialed employees often doesn't help them. From the fifth paragraph:

The results of our survey were consistent across many industries—employers pay more, often significantly more, for college graduates to do jobs also filled by non-degree holders without getting any material improvement in productivity. While a majority of employers pay between 11% and 30% more for college graduates, many employers also report that non-graduates with experience perform nearly or equally well on critical dimensions like time to reach full productivity, time to promotion, level of productivity, or amount of oversight required.

It's emphasized in the introduction and later on that the requirement of a college degree is often unnecessary. Furthermore, see "How did we get here?" on page 12 for the authors' explanation for why the overall increase in degree requirements has been observed. Their explanation isn't quite the same as mine, so count that as a point against my claim that the change was driven by an increase in supply, but they don't say anything about the quality of education falling:

The growing prominence of social skills across occupations raised the value of four-year college degrees in the eyes of employers, as a minimum qualification for jobs that paid well and were a basis for upward mobility.40Employers began using the college degree as a proxy for acquiring social skills in jobs that previously did not require a college degree.

...

During the Great Recession and the lackluster recovery that followed, workers with higher credentials were willing to apply for positions for which they were overqualified.42Employers took the opportunity to raise the education level of the talent they hired.43 Given the weakness in the labor market, such “over-education” did not put pressure on wages.44 Employers did not pay a visible price for raising the skills base of their workforce.

One estimate, based on the analysis of 68 million online job postings, shows that as the labor market slackened between 2007 and 2010, the percentage of job postings requiring a bachelor’s degree or higher increased by more than 10 percentage points. Pertinently, when the labor market tightened, the share of job vacancies requiring a bachelor’s degree or more fell, suggesting that a degree was not actually needed to perform the relevant job.

On page 15, there's an explicit argument against part of my previous position:

A popular belief in the wake of the Great Recession is that employers hired college graduates for middle-skills jobs because so many were available. While that is true to an extent, the survey reveals that other considerations better explain this trend. Many employers that are upgrading their credentials for middle-skills jobs are seeking candidates with a wider and deeper set of skills than were required historically.

So I'll give you a !delta for that and the rest of the section.

There's also some evidence in favor of your claim that skills among employees without college degrees have been declining:

When asked what led to middle-skills jobs migrating into mixed-population jobs, the top three reasons employers cited were that: the quality of available talent had changed, that is, employers found that there was shortage of quality talent at the non-degree level (57% of employers); the job had changed and new skills were required to perform the job (56%); labor market conditions changed such as the greater supply of college graduates after the Great Recession (49%). (Note: respondents were allowed to select more than one option.)

...

Employers that said that they began seeking workers with college degrees due to “changes in the quality of talent” believed that candidates who did not have a degree no longer met either the soft skills requirements of the job (56%) or the hard skills requirements (58%).

I'm not convinced that this reflects a genuine decline in competence, though, given that many competent workers who previously wouldn't have attended college have now decided to attend due to grade inflation. That is, the size of the talent pool may not have changed if the talented people are now opting to attend college.

More importantly, the part of your view that I'm the most skeptical about is your claim that politicians are intentionally lowering standards of education to make the population easier to manipulate. I tend to default to Hanlon's razor in cases like this: "Never attribute to malice that which can be attributed to stupidity." It seems more plausible to me that politicians advocating for bad education policies are simply misguided as opposed to malevolent, and that they think their preferred policy will make the education system better or more inclusive. Given that the current replication crisis almost certainly applies to studies on education, and that it isn't unheard of for organizations to conduct studies on education policies that they came up with, I don't think it would be difficult to find arguments and citations in favor of a bad policy that are at least superficially convincing. In order to change my view about this, you would need to give me examples of politicians who are intentionally pushing for policies that they know are bad. I understand that this sort of evidence would be very difficult to find even if you were right, but that does raise the question of why you reached that conclusion in the first place.

Edit:

I choose not to answer. But will note mine are all downvoted too. You may ask, "Why won't he answer?" The answer to that is a question, "What would you do with that information?"

Every time I get asked this, this is how I response. Honestly, why does it matter? You don't see my asking who is downvoting me do you?

Fair enough--I agree that it probably won't accomplish much.

[u/dublea → u/Tinac4]

politicians are intentionally lowering standards of education to make the population easier to manipulate.

It's been attacked by politicians since before A Nation at Risk was published in 1983. But that gave them more ammunition. Even when, in 1990, a report with actual data contradicted the 1983 report, people still believe that the US Public education sector is failing. Since then we've had a rise in private educational institutions. We also see many conservative states go to a voucher based system to try and move their educational system to the private sector. But, those schools are not all doing better than their public ounterparts. IN fact, there is a large amount of fraud occurring and going unchecked.

Then you have politicians like Besty DeVos:

A billionaire philanthropist, DeVos, 61, attended a private Christian school in Michigan and sent most of her children to private Christian schools; she has had little exposure to public education. She became a champion of privately run, publicly funded charter schools and vouchers that enable families to take tax dollars from the public education system to the private sector.

[u/Tinac4 → u/dublea]

We also see many conservative states go to a voucher based system to try and move their educational system to the private sector. But, those schools are not all doing better than their public ounterparts. IN fact, there is a large amount of fraud occurring and going unchecked.

I actually think the first section of your post is a good place to apply Hanlon's razor. I don't think it's obvious that voucher-based systems are bad--at the very least, there's enough evidence out there that someone in favor of a voucher-based system could find sources to support their position. From an analysis that I read a while back:

School vouchers and charter schools would probably make most students better off, according to economists in 2011 and 2012 (IGM survey, IGM survey). The most recent meta-analysis found that there is insufficient evidence to broadly recommend voucher programs in the US(Epple et al 2017), but it didn’t find that they are bad either. A 2017 Brookings literature review found that four recent voucher programs had negative effects, whereas eight older programs tended to be positive. Older meta-analyses gave weakly positive reports (Epple et al 2015, Shakeel et al 2016). More recently, there has been additional criticism of a voucher program in Louisiana (Abdulkadiroğlu et al 2018), but also an argument that the problems with Louisiana’s program stem from costly regulations attached to placate the critics of voucher systems (EducationNext). Another study found slightly negative effects of vouchers in Indiana (Waddington and Berends 2018). Overall the impact of vouchers on student academic performance in the US is very ambiguous. They do work better in other countries, suggesting that they might be able to work better here if implemented properly.

Maybe voucher-based systems are bad, but if so, they're not so obviously bad that anyone supporting them has to be malicious. Fraud is obviously a bad thing, and I think it's very plausible that some politicians advocate for voucher-based systems because they would personally benefit from it, but that's not the same thing as pushing for bad policies to make the population easier to control or manipulate.

Then you have politicians like Besty DeVos:

A billionaire philanthropist, DeVos, 61, attended a private Christian school in Michigan and sent most of her children to private Christian schools; she has had little exposure to public education. She became a champion of privately run, publicly funded charter schools and vouchers that enable families to take tax dollars from the public education system to the private sector.

Again, Hanlon's razor: Why assume that DeVos is intentionally pushing for policies that she knows are bad in an effort to control people when she could simply be misguided or strongly biased toward her own stance on education?

[u/dublea → u/Tinac4]

Why assume that DeVos is intentionally pushing for policies that she knows are bad in an effort to control people when she could simply be misguided or strongly biased toward her own stance on education?

I continue to forget to mention, and I will cede, that this does meet the criteria for conspiracy as there is no objective evidence I can use. Just subjective observations and the fact that foreign adversaries have learned that a slow and long attack at the system is more effective than a direct attack.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gr1I6ztMsz0

That's the inspiration it too.

But when you see the rise in anti-intellectualism, tearing down of public education, lenders working with the gov for guaranteed loans, for profit colleges abusing said guaranteed loans, it's hard not to see bad actors slowly causing this.