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PARTISAN REVIEW
workers." This seems to mean that we have abundant forms of paid
employment for people who are literate, who have learned some body of
material, and who are capable of thinking constructively about what they
do. The implication that only college graduates could rise to such heights,
however, shows that we are only ankle-deep in the pool. Our economy
needs many kinds of highly specialized technical workers no doubt, but we
rarely ask ourselves whether mass higher education is the best way to pre–
pare people for these positions.
We wade only slighdy deeper in the pool by citing the adage that polit–
ical freedom depends on an informed citizenry. Has a college education
become the only path towards it? What happens when we at last admit to
ourselves that the specialized studies characteristic of most contemporary
college education do not produce a well-informed citizenry? Two weeks
ago I interviewed a graduate student for a national scholarship competition
calling for candidates committed to America's constitutional principles. He
was bright, personable, eager, and accomplished
in
two separate academic
disciplines. He was also a graduate of an elite liberal arts college, and as it
happened, he had never heard of Pol Pot, could not name a single article of
the U.S. Constitution, and explained the Bill of Rights as a device by which
the American colonists used to keep the British at bay.
We come to deeper waters when we try to reckon with the political
reality that the voting public, lured by the understanding that a college
education brings large dividends in lifetime earnings, demands access to
college for themselves and for their children.
Governments certainly have an interest in encouraging educational
accomplishment.
In
the United States, this is part of the promotion of the
general welfare; it's perhaps also to be understood in light of the clause in
Article I of the Constitution that grants Congress the power to "promote
the progress of science and useful arts." The issue we seem no longer able
to address forthrighdy is whether the public good is served by a system of
incentives that encourages high college enrollment if the unintended con–
sequences include
lazy
and ineffective secondary schools and stupefied
college degree programs. The consequences it seems to me are obvious:
high schools feel no real compulsion to educate since colleges will teach
that stuff, and colleges cannot do their job because they must first teach
what the high schools neglected.
Faced with the reality that college graduates have substantially
higher lifetime earnings than those whose educations stopped with high
school, students and their parents have strong economic reasons to pre–
fer college. But do governments have such corresponding and
compelling reasons to reinforce that preference with massive subsidies?
Wouldn't the general welfare be better served by a system of secondary
