Make College Free Like High School? Bad Idea

There is no magic point at which a genuine college-level education becomes an option, but anything below an IQ of 110 is problematic. If you want to do well, you should have an IQ of 115 or higher. Put another way, it makes sense for only about 15% of the population, 25% if one stretches it, to get a college education. And yet more than 45% of recent high school graduates enroll in four-year colleges. Adjust that percentage to account for high-school dropouts, and more than 40% of all persons in their late teens are trying to go to a four-year college--enough people to absorb everyone down through an IQ of 104.

Doing well in college requires an IQ of 115 or better. To do well in the professions one should have at least an IQ of 120. To succeed at the leading edges of science and technology, an IQ of over 125 is recommended. More people who start college are failing to complete a course of study. That is fine for the college, which rakes in the money regardless of completion rates. For students, parents, and everyone else who pays, it is usually a waste of time and money.

Two Harvard economists are now displaying their abysmal ignorance of the real world by recommending that society provide universal access to college, just like high school.

"Education has not kept pace," says Katz. "In the early 20th century, we created almost universal access to high school. We have not done the same with college..." _Chronicle

The Harvard professors do not understand what they are talking about. If we want to make college into the economic waste-bucket and dumbed down training environment for delinquents that high schools have become, then universal college is the right approach.

A far more intelligent approach is to enlarge opportunities in two year colleges and vocational training. The developed world suffers a shortage of skilled tradesmen, which should give vocational training a higher priority than it currently has. And a two year associates degree will give most job applicants the opportunity to acquire the rudimentary skills in writing, reading comprehension, basic technical competence with computers, and the beginning research skills necessary in a more demanding modern workplace.

Four year degrees are more frequently squandered on areas of study such as gender studies, queer studies, ethnic studies, basket weaving, and any other number of "recreational, no brain required" degrees. Of that group, basket weaving develops the only truly useful skill.

You expect college professors to lobby for more societal spending on academia. Tenure breeds contempt for the chumps who are actually paying their generous salaries and benefits packages, and sitting through their lectures. Expect such sinecured quasi-nobility to promote an outlandish and counter-productive expansion of privilege.

Society cannot afford to squander money on today's dysfunctional academic atmosphere of time wasting and indoctrination.