College students are celebrating the passage in Congress of legislation to restrain the interest rate on the loans they get from the federal government, but the legislation is less a boon to them or to the country than to colleges themselves.
For what is really important these days isn’t secondary education at all but primary education, whose decline in the United States relative to the rest of the world is really a matter of national security.
By contrast college in the United States has become largely a mechanism of educational inflation and patronage to educators, dragging out to 16 years what used to be achieved for far less expense in 12.
Connecticut should know this as well as any state, since a survey conducted three years ago by the state Higher Education Department found that almost 70 percent of freshmen in the state community college and state university systems required remedial math or English or both.
That is, most high school graduates in Connecticut probably have not mastered high school material, even as that material long has been dumbed down. Public college surveys in other states have reached similar conclusions.
The Connecticut survey findings were potentially shocking, but state government’s response was only to outlaw college remedial courses so there might never again be such embarrassing surveys and so educational inflation could continue unquestioned.
A scandal is being recognized in the predicament of many recent college graduates who have entered adulthood with huge debt from college loans but without marketable skills and who have had to take menial work they could have gotten even if they had dropped out of high school.
This is partly their own fault and partly government’s, since government will give loans for almost any course of study, not necessarily courses of study likely to lead to jobs with incomes that can support loan repayment.
College can be a broadening experience, and everyone in the country should be exposed to finer and higher things in one way or another just as a matter of ordinary citizenship.
The questions are exactly how and the cost, and it is hard to justify the cost of college when the country has far fewer jobs that require college degrees than it has workers with college degrees and when even a quarter of retail clerks and 15 percent of taxi drivers have college degrees.
Has college elevated such people or just burdened them with debt for life and actually limited their opportunities with that burden?
The policy alternatives here are obvious: Improving primary education by enforcing standards and stopping social promotion and being more selective with higher education subsidies.
But Connecticut’s feckless policy remains that everybody should be able to go to college at public expense even if he has failed high school.
Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester.
