Be Thoughtful of College Choice

Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn and a tech billionaire, offers some very sound advice on the "college-or-not" debate. Despite my regular assertions that most people should not go to college, Reid reminds us that anyone can and should go to college if he or she is thoughtful and purposeful about it.

I particularly enjoyed Reid's response to a question of whether an eighteen-year-old knows what he wants to do for the rest of his life. Students should simply not think that way and try to develop a thirty year plan. For, even if the student is the same person - and in terms of personality, initiative, and interests he probably will be - the world will have changed. Thus, students would simply want to secure knowledge and skills in a general area of which they have interest which would make them always marketable and adaptable in any age.

Thus, skills in writing, critical thinking, computation, and technology offer a pretty solid foundation. Beyond that, the market will decide who succeeds and who fails.

College Not For All

A new Harvard study (PDF) says American students need to begin to decide in middle school whether they want to prepare for four-year college and then a career. The alternative approach, the study says, is to begin vocational training for a job earlier.

The study is inspired by European systems of education, and its authors say too many students are graduating high school without middle-level skills that could help them land well-paying jobs as electricians, for example. About a third of jobs in the next decade won't require a four-year college education, the study says, and this program would help American kids prepare for them.

This is not surprising to anyone on the front lines of education - yet it is completely lost on all the reformers who get the press. The Obama Administration and their narrow-minded - altogether clueless - minions continue to push college for all to the exclusion of real discussion of practical education.

Reforming College Expectations

As I've noted before, I am intrigued by the plans for New Hampshire to move to a curriculum that allows graduation at sixteen for students entering associate degree and trade schools, as well as a more rigorous AP/IB-style schedule for students who stay for junior and senior year before applying to four-year colleges. To that end, I wrote a piece of op-ed commentary which was featured as the cover piece for the Denver Post's Sunday Perspective section yesterday.

Remedial College Classes

The public education critics in Colorado gained more ammunition after the Denver Post reported that one-third of the state's high school grads need remedial classes when they start college. This may seem shocking to many, though it's important to keep in mind that only one-third of the country even has a college degree. Thus, it may be only one third of the country that is shocked and outraged by these statistics. Sadly, the issue is much more complex than a simple statistic on remedial classes in college. Instead, it should generate genuine discussion of the high school curriculum, college prep classes, and the necessity of a college-educated workforce.

Pew Researcher David Connelly has noted there is a fundamental difference between "college eligible" and "college ready," and that distinction is at the heart of this debate - a debate which reveals a lack of understanding of the goals and curriculum of public education in this country. We are sending twice as many students to college as we did in 1950, yet the number of people achieving bachelor degrees has remained virtually unchanged in that time. Clearly, we are sending a large number of students unprepared for college. The questions that need to be asked concern issues of standard versus college-prep curriculum, as well as the performance of the students on standard assessments.

In the United States, students can go to college after graduating high school with a D average, or not even graduating at all. That is true nowhere else in the world, and it reveals much about the need for remedial courses in college. By contrast, students who graduate from AP and IB programs rarely require such courses and are far more likely to achieve a degree. Thus, we should not be shocked by the remedial course issue until we understand who the students are and whether they should have been admitted, or even advised to go, to college.