The Education We Deserve

Neither President Obama nor Governor Romney has addressed the precarious state of American higher education during their months of campaigning. Senator Rick Santorum’s comment during the Republican primaries that President Obama’s ambition that “everyone” go to college made him a “snob” still resonates with those who do not see the intimate relationship between higher education and the overall quality of personal and civic life. Robert J. Samuelson of The Washington Post, supporting Mr. Santorum, said it was time to ditch the “college-for-all crusade, which looms as the largest mistake in educational policy since World War II.”

Some students may not be ready for college. But for the most part, students in every economic class should have the right to improve their station in life. Mr. Samuelson forgets that the post-World War II generation had the G.I. Bill of Rights. The bill educated several million ordinary servicemen starved for knowledge and remade the American middle class. The snobbery is in imagining a class of people incapable of college. Today, for economic reasons, millions of young people cannot attend a college. Of young people in the bottom economic quartile, only one in five goes on to college.

President Obama’s education program aims to improve access and affordability. It includes support for community colleges and tax credits to make college more affordable. Mr. Obama’s call for all Americans to enroll in college concerned only one year’s attendance at a community college. That would be a starkly minimal goal that would bring Americans only within sight of the level of competence of young Europeans who graduate from high-school-level technical programs.

At the same time, the administration and members of Congress have cracked down on the deceptive tactics of for-profit colleges that dupe men and women coming home from war into taking classes they cannot afford and then fail to equip them with employable skills. Since the average student finishing college owes $25,000, the president wants colleges and universities to provide more transparency about job prospects and student default rates. Meanwhile, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has introduced an income-based repayment plan whereby payments are reduced for those in low-paying jobs and forgiven after 10 years for graduates in public service occupations, like police, teachers and firefighters.

Governor Romney’s plans are not detailed. He would reverse a recent reform by the Obama administration that eliminated banks as middlemen in the distribution of federal student loans and would return to bank-based student lending. He would allow students in credential-granting programs to learn at their own pace rather than require a set amount of classroom time for the degree—an experiment that seems worth trying.

Job-training is only one aim of post-secondary education. Education, as the term implies, should include a deeper appreciation of life and one’s obligations to the larger community. If democracy is to thrive, all who qualify should have access to four years of higher education, which would include the liberal arts, the standard core of literature, history, philosophy, mathematics and sciences. To skip over Shakespeare, Beethoven, Chekhov, Rembrandt, Orwell and Dickens will leave an emptiness in our shared cultural life. Ideally, common classrooms, dorms, sports and clubs also build friendships among students of every race and economic background.

To promise higher education to every citizen is an investment in our common future. While the United States needs an expansion of educational possibilities for veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, every young American should have access to affordable higher education. Both political parties would be well advised, therefore, to restore the cuts they contemplate in Pell Grants for low-income college students. For while personal responsibility is the American way, without government support for students and higher education, the United States will fall behind the rest of the industrial world in the skills of its workers and their participation in our civic culture.

A recent College Board study reports that 67 percent of those polled see education as an extremely important issue; the majority in every political grouping are willing to pay $200 more in taxes each year to support education. Democrats say that for reasons of equity and available resources, the federal government has the responsibility; Republicans believe the states should lead. Over three quarters of those polled agree that the United States should lead the world in granting postsecondary degrees. The American Dream has its cost, but to fail this challenge is to accelerate the drift into two societies of the haves and the have-nots.

This article appears in September 10 2012.