Nice idea, but the final effect will be higher prices across the higher-ed system.
At the same time, more and more people have gone to college and the value of a college degree has declined, as more people enter the marketplace with them.
Anecdotally, it appears (from the college graduates I've interviewed) that the quality of a college education has also declined noticeably in the past 30 years.
All of these are unintended consequences, but not surprising results when you look at the situation from the perspective of economics.
It's hard to argue that the quality of a college education has declined when its purpose has changed. So many folks just need a college degree to remain competitive, at least on paper, and not much else. I think this is a much more modern trend.
Perhaps one could make the case that the low cost of a college education somehow spurred this irrational demand for it. So many people have set off to set themselves apart with a degree that now only substandard prospective workers don't have them.
http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_chart_001.htm
It would be nice if we could change the fundamental problems underlying that irrational demand (pre-college schooling which doesn't prepare students for work, a national obsession with white collar jobs, etc.). However, if I was staring down a big wealth gap and decided to propose a concrete policy shift to resolve some of it, I think that it's not a bad idea to get people moved from the 7-11% unemployment category to the 5.4% unemployment category.
Sure, as long as the categories have no content other than an employment rating, this makes sense. According to the same logic, you could have huge effects on unemployment by giving black people cosmetic surgery and calling them white.
As an aside, it's a bit simplified and inflammatory to cast this as a black/white thing. If you insist on boiling this down to only being about race (a stance I would disagree with), the comparison is much starker when cast as hispanic/asian[1] or black/asian[2].
[1] http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_caa.asp [2] http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2012/tables/12s0691.p... [3] Any contemporary news story about the police in dense urban areas.
I agree in a limited way. I was originally going to use forced religious conversion as my example instead of cosmetic surgery, but I discovered that while it's easy to find unemployment statistics by race, it's not so easy to find unemployment statistics by religion.
Regardless -- as far as I can see, you've completely missed the point that being in a bucket labeled "5.4% unemployment" doesn't necessarily cause people to personally experience 5.4% unemployment. If it sounds strange to you that a group of people might develop better employment statistics by having cosmetic surgery en masse, or by all converting from voodoo to judaism, that should give you pause before concluding that forced education would have any more effect than forced conversion.
Looking at a trend and making a pretty fair assumption about it having cause/effect tendencies is not "missing the point" of statistics about employment and education. As far as I can tell, it's the whole reason we collect them. One does not become employed to become educated, it's the other way around. Similarly, one does not fail to become educated because one failed to be employed. There might be less of a connection than some would claim, but the link is there.
Further, I would be eager to hear about a __practical__ alternative to improved education for reducing inequality. I'm sure there are some, but I'm also sure that making sweeping assumptions about the economic viability of being {religion}/{race}/{insert difference here} doesn't really help anyone unless there's a magical way to make the human brain more tolerant of difference. Surely the real solutions to inequality will come from assessing our weakest points and shoring them up -- education is a pretty weak point in the US right now.
Sources? The "you don't need college" meme is quite popular with VC of late, and I think is often true in the technology field. But is this true in other white collar job sectors? I'm honestly asking.
Do you happen to have links to data that supports that? I was unable to find historical tuition rates for more than a handful of schools when I looked several months ago, but for the few I did find last it appeared to not be true. They were rising much faster than inflation long before the government stepped in, and did not show much if any change after that...maybe just a slight increase.
You might expect this to be true, but the data actually shows the highest gap between college and highschool graduates in half a century[1], meaning the value of a college degree has increased.
[1] http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2014/02/11/the-rising-cost-of...
Unless you care about education for education's sake and nothing of jobs or career prospects, then a well motivated individual could learn a ton at a community college.
The classes are absolutely equivalent to the Fresh and Sophomore classes and an A.S. degree from a CC should start you as a Junior at the big-kid school.
And a lot of trades come up through community colleges. The one here has two year degrees for auto mechanics, aircraft mechanics, HVAC, welders, CAD, CNC, plumbing, electricians, and so on. My bet is Obama is more concerned about that aspect of the program than people transferring to four year schools.
I wish I'd taken classes like Organic Chemistry in CC. There is no way anyone could convince me that my quality of learning would be worse considering that class at University of Texas had hundreds of people in it.
But if it were free, it'd be a no-brainer.
So, either the quality of these classes will have to get tons better at University or their prices will have to come down.
People are squawking about how third party payments will cause prices to rise but I just don't see how that can happen in this case.
So it will be performance based, rewarding only those students who have a good grade, incentivizing studying.
Maybe that would force universities to cut costs. But would that be so bad? I feel like a lot of university spending is trying to be fancy to attract more students not because it's valuable to student learning or well-being.