A bunch of baloney about the problems of higher education

Usually the Spectator applies critical thinking -- with conclusions that I don't always accept as correct -- but in this case, Christopher J. Scalia lets Will Bunch write nonsense, without offering a serious analysis of the anti-Trump political polemic, his method for gathering non-random data, or the illogic of Bunch's recommendations.

The faulty towers of higher education - The Spectator World.pdf

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Here is the introductory overview Scalia offers:

In After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics — and How to Fix It, Will Bunch, a columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer, argues that the cause of the higher-education crisis is conceptual: we see higher education as a personal privilege rather than a public good, something to be earned rather than a right that is owed. Bunch sees a straight line connecting the increase in college tuition and student debt to America’s growing social, cultural and political divisions.

To make his case, Bunch interviews people from various demographics (almost all from his home state of Pennsylvania) as illustrations of the different ways higher education — or its lack — affects everyday Americans. He also provides a history of American higher education from the end of World War Two to the present day. This history begins with the idealism of the G.I. Bill and President Truman’s Commission on Higher Education in the 1940s, both of which expressed optimism about the role of college in strengthening American democracy. But in the 1960s, students realized the flaws in this democracy — the ways that America fell short of its ideals — and pro- tested accordingly.

"To make his case," Bunch is off and flying with a pretty lame method for understanding the problem. But he does worse.

Bunch’s blind spots are especially evident in his account of Donald Trump’s rise to power. Although he rightly criticizes the Republican push against liberal education, particularly during the 2010s, he omits episodes that demonstrate why conservatives have been so questioning of campus culture more generally. At the University of Missouri in the fall of 2015, major protests over the school’s handling of racial issues drew national coverage — especially video of a professor ordering a student journalist to leave a student encampment: “Who wants to help me get this reporter out of here? I need some muscle over here!” Later that semester Yale undergraduates harassed a professor and a lecturer for daring to disagree with them about Halloween costumes.

How do we get out of this quagmire? Bunch’s proposals include forgiving student debt, emphasizing a broad education rather than career development and instituting a national-service program for high-school graduates. He acknowledges that these are difficult political propositions but assures us that we can pay for them by bringing “our Pentagon budget in line with our rivals.” It doesn’t take a rabid anti-communist to recognize the flaw in that plan.

Scalia deserves some credit for pointing out that Bunch is wrong; he just doesn't really say how or why, nor does he offer a constructive alternative. I often told my students, "Don't criticize without offering a better (reasoned) alternative." Here is my alternative:

1. Abolish direct funding of state-run ("public") schools and replace the process with providing individual student vouchers funded at the level at which public school are funded today, creating new schools designed to serve and educate the public, i.e., truly 'public' schools.

2. Abolish/defund colleges of "education." They exist only to provide the certification that public schools demand, without offering any evidence as to the effectiveness or the content of the education these colleges provide.

3. Abolish the U.S. Department of Education.

4. Abolish unvalidated certification methods, programs and processes.

5. Create valid, externally applied measures of learning, achievement and accountability for students and schools. Use #3 to fund the development of these efforts.

6. Confirm the idea of college as a privilege and a purpose for furthering knowledge. doing research and providing productive citizens for the future.

7. Assign unpaid, "forgiven" debt to the colleges that benefitted from the loan proceeds.

8. Apply a 5-10% annual wealth tax on university endowments.

9. Tax tuition benefits offered to university employees.

10. Provide charitable deductions for tuition paid above the full-discounted rate of the college's tuition. E.g., if a university offers a 70% discount rate on tuition, the amount paid in excess of 30% of the liminal tuition should be treated as a charitable deduction.