Santorum: Obama 'A Snob' For Wanting Everyone To Go To College

[Landslide Lyndon]

http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/entries/rick-santorum-obama-wants-to-send-your-kids

Rick Santorum is working hard in Michigan to try and cast himself as the candidate of the working class. At a speech before a tea party audience here Saturday, he made his case by accusing President Obama of trying to turn America's youth into liberal drones by sending them to college. The idea was pretty well received by the crowd here at a rally hosted by the Michigan branch of Americans For Prosperity.

"Not all folks are gifted the same way. Some people have incredible gifts with their hands," Santorum began. "Some people have incredible gifts and want to work out there making things."

Then he went after the president's call for making college easier for Americans to attend.
"President Obama wants everybody in America to go to college. What a snob," Santorum said as the crowd howled with laughter and applause. "There are good, decent men and women who work hard every day and put their skills to the test that aren't taught by some liberal college professor."

Santorum said he knows the real reason Obama wants more Americans on college campuses.

"That's why he wants you to go to college. He wants to remake you in his image," Santorum said to more applause. "I want to create jobs so people can remake their children into their image, not his."

[ajb]

A little bit elitist of Rick Santorum (BA MBA JD) to argue that it's wrong to encourage other people to go to college, no?

[Simfan34]

A little bit elitist of Rick Santorum (BA MBA JD) to argue that it's wrong to encourage other people to go to college, no?

Uh... yeah. While I believe that a four year education is not the best for everyone, it is for about 90% of people; this is just pandering to those who didn't go to college.

But that last bit is just insane. Lots of conservatives went to college. Come on Rick, you're smarter than this. How on earth did these people support Gingrich for being an intellectual, anyway?

[crypto-fascist superhero]

In what country does everyone go to college?

[ajb]

The fact that they supported Newt Gingrich as an intellectual doesn't speak volumes for their intelligence, frankly.

[ajb]

In what country does everyone go to college?

Nowhere. But lots of countries do better than the United States these days.

[crypto-fascist superhero]

In what country does everyone go to college?

Nowhere. But lots of countries do better than the United States these days.

Actually, on the contrary, the US has the second-highest percentage of the population with a college degree in the world: http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/edu_edu_att_ter-education-educational-attainment-tertiary

[ajb]

In what country does everyone go to college?

Nowhere. But lots of countries do better than the United States these days.

Actually, on the contrary, the US has the second-highest percentage of the population with a college degree in the world: http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/edu_edu_att_ter-education-educational-attainment-tertiary

Yes, but if you look only at workers under 35, the US scores 12th.

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Education/2010/0809/Obama-aims-to-lift-college-graduation-rates-but-his-tools-are-few

In other words, the US was in the lead on this issue for decades, but has faltered in the last 20-30 years.

EDITED: "under 45" corrected to "under 35"

[crypto-fascist superhero]

In what country does everyone go to college?

Nowhere. But lots of countries do better than the United States these days.

Actually, on the contrary, the US has the second-highest percentage of the population with a college degree in the world: http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/edu_edu_att_ter-education-educational-attainment-tertiary

Yes, but if you look only at workers under 45, the US scores 12th.

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Education/2010/0809/Obama-aims-to-lift-college-graduation-rates-but-his-tools-are-few

In other words, the US was in the lead on this issue for decades, but has faltered in the last 20-30 years.

Ah, that's not measuring the same thing.  That's measuring the percent of students already enrolled in college who graduate, not the percent of the population who graduate.  In fact, you'd expect that the countries with the least government effort to college educate everyone would score the highest on that metric, as they would be attracting the fewest people who aren't necessarily qualified to do the work.

[ajb]

Read the article. It's not saying what you think it's saying:

"Among today’s American 25- to 34-year olds, slightly more than 40 percent have associate’s degrees or higher, a tad higher than for their parents’ generation. But that rate places the US only 12th of the 36 countries in the College Board study."

For reference, for example, 55% of Canadians in the same age group have the equivalent of an associate's degree or higher.

[crypto-fascist superhero]

Read the article. It's not saying what you think it's saying:

"Among today’s American 25- to 34-year olds, slightly more than 40 percent have associate’s degrees or higher, a tad higher than for their parents’ generation. But that rate places the US only 12th of the 36 countries in the College Board study."

For reference, for example, 55% of Canadians in the same age group have the equivalent of an associate's degree or higher.

No, it's actually not saying what you think it's saying.  Click on the slideshow.  For example, the third slide:

4. Japan, 53.7 percent

In Japan, only half of people qualified to pursue a college education manage to do so.

You don't need a college education to realize that's mathematically impossible under your interpretation.

[ajb]

So you interpret the sentence, ""Among today’s American 25- to 34-year olds, slightly more than 40 percent have associate’s degrees or higher" as meaning:
"Among those Americans aged 25-34 today who began an associate's degree or higher degree, slightly more than 40 percent completed that degree."

[anvi]

A little bit elitist of Rick Santorum (BA MBA JD) to argue that it's wrong to encourage other people to go to college, no?

Rick basically insinuated, consistent with the bit posted above, on Beck the other day that universities are liberal indoctrination mills.  Listen to the following at around 33:50.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzGPfwBm22M#t=33m51s

If that's the case, how did he manage to emerge from college and law school the "arch-conservative" he is?  Lots of blue avatars on this forum went through college--did you all bribe someone not to make you attend the required "Torture Till You Confess that Marx was Right" class?  As I recall, when Obama headed the Harvard Law Review, he actively recruited conservative colleagues to help him run and edit it and encouraged conservatives to contribute to it.  He was an Indoctrination Fail, or did he make all the real liberals there pretend, or something?

And where, from Obama's policy agenda, did Rick get the idea that he will make "all" kids to go to college?  And, besides, has Rick been talking to employers who complain that they need more skilled and better educated workers lately?

Just goes to show you how mere spitballing can make you a serious contender for a nomination these days.

[crypto-fascist superhero]

So you interpret the sentence, ""Among today’s American 25- to 34-year olds, slightly more than 40 percent have associate’s degrees or higher" as meaning:
"Among those Americans aged 25-34 today who began an associate's degree or higher degree, slightly more than 40 percent completed that degree."

No, that statistic is accurate, just totally unrelated to the study mentioned in the article.

[ajb]

Further qualification from the College Board:

•The United States, which led the world in high school completion rates
throughout the 20th century, ranked just 21st out of 27 advanced economies
in 2005.1
• We rank near the bottom of industrialized countries in graduation rates for
students once enrolled in college.2
• While we are still second among developing nations in the proportion of
workers over the age of 55 with an associate degree or higher, we drop to
number 11 among younger workers (ages 25-34).3

http://advocacy.collegeboard.org/sites/default/files/09_0650_Commission_4pager__WEB_090115.pdf


So the US does badly on both fronts here: a low graduation rate for students who get into college, and a low percentage of workers under 35 who have at least an associate degree. There's obviously a connection between the two, and there are overlapping solutions (chiefly, I think, more and better community colleges, with more remedial programs, not to mention more high schools that prepare people for college).
But the US is definitely beginning to fall behind on the percentage of its population who have completed an associate's degree or higher.

[crypto-fascist superhero]

I suspect if you adjusted it for race (made the other developed countries as black and brown as America, or vice versa), the US would be at or near the top of those rankings too.

Of course, this is all assuming that a college education is, per se, a universal good.  On the contrary, producing a large number of overqualified workers for available positions requiring less qualification and taking large numbers of people out of the labor force for several years both produce significant deadweight losses in the economy (as well as creating a major obstacle to upwards social mobility in the first case).

[I'm JewCon in name only.]

...I support Rick, and all, but this is stupid. I live in a family where almost no one went to college in my family.

Don't tell ME someone is a snob for wanting to go to college, when YOU went to Penn State University, and the University of Pittsburgh.

It's easy to say that college "doesn't matter" or "isn't THAT important" when you went to college.

Senator, you need to word things better.

[ajb]

More data on percentage with degrees, by age group, from the OECD:

http://www.higheredinfo.org/internationalcomparisons.php

You can see that the US was historically very strong in this category, well ahead of most of its OECD rivals. Those rivals played catchup -- and then kept going; in the US, the percentage with degree for those 25-34 is actually slightly lower than for those 45-54.

[Politico]

College is not for everybody, or even most folks for that matter. The evidence: 60% of college entrants do not go on to graduate.

To remain truly competitive, and ensure a college education still means something, we cannot dumb-down college the same way that high school has been dumbed down the past few decades. Doing so would NOT help new college entrants nor previous college graduates. It would actually help nobody other than faculties that want to bring in more revenue.

I am not necessarily advocating this, but one idea that is not the worst in the world is having the federal government subsidize college education for intelligent/high-GPA/high-SAT applicants from poor families assuming the students go into one of the STEM (science/technology/engineering/mathematics) fields and maintain a high GPA. That could potentially lead to positive spillover effects.

[True Federalist]

We have a considerable trend to over-credentialing in this country (and others).  To some degree, that's because in our desire to give every kid the opportunity to go to college, we've downplayed vocational education severely, so that even when it is possible for an 18-year old secondary school graduate to have learned the necessary skills to qualify for a skilled position, they usually haven't have the opportunity and thus must go on to tertiary education.

We need to get our secondary education system back to being useful, and in order to do that, we need to abandon the folly of one-curriculum-serves-all and return to having non-college track curricula being a respectable part of secondary education.

[Torie]

Yes, Rick, higher education, and learning more abstract concepts, and how to parse abstractions, and read more complex text, is very subversive to traditional American values. That is why the Founders were so great. They were suspicious of that kind of book learning, and just let God inspire them to write the founding documents, including that closet atheist Jefferson, and not so closeted atheist Franklin.

Just why is it that you can discern such obvious truths that escape those with lesser insight than yourself?  You have a gift.

Why didn't Rick just say that besides the lack of motivation in some, perhaps not all those out there on the Fruited Plain have the tools to benefit from college due to our failed secondary educational system or something?   Why do you  need to personalize things the way you do, dissing Obama as a "snob" because he believes in the benefits of higher education for more young people?  Rick, on a personal level, Obama is probably better liked than you are at the moment. Lashing out at him personally will merely diminish yourself. Deal with it.

And is this one of the reasons why GOP performance among the more educated is tanking - the anti-intellectual tone of chaps like yourself? Hey Rick, do you think the theory of evolution is fundamentally flawed, resting on thin to no evidence, just like global warming, concocted by a bunch of those darn eggheads working 24/7 to sever America from its glorious?  Just asking.

[King]

Santorum's position is correct, but his reasoning is dumb.

College shouldn't be the requirement for a half-decent job that its become. High schools need to become less systematic and more relevant. There should be an option for immediate career paths for HS freshman.  It would reduce the dropout rate, be overall less expensive than HS + CC funding, and give us a stronger work force.

[Politico]

I suspect if you adjusted it for race (made the other developed countries as black and brown as America, or vice versa), the US would be at or near the top of those rankings too.

Of course, this is all assuming that a college education is, per se, a universal good.  On the contrary, producing a large number of overqualified workers for available positions requiring less qualification and taking large numbers of people out of the labor force for several years both produce significant deadweight losses in the economy (as well as creating a major obstacle to upwards social mobility in the first case).

This is something else to consider.

If everybody had a college degree, are we going to have college graduates who are janitors? College graduates working the front-lines at Target? We already have quite a few who work at Starbucks...

[Torie]

I suspect if you adjusted it for race (made the other developed countries as black and brown as America, or vice versa), the US would be at or near the top of those rankings too.

Of course, this is all assuming that a college education is, per se, a universal good.  On the contrary, producing a large number of overqualified workers for available positions requiring less qualification and taking large numbers of people out of the labor force for several years both produce significant deadweight losses in the economy (as well as creating a major obstacle to upwards social mobility in the first case).

This is something else to consider.

If everybody had a college degree, are we going to have college graduates who are janitors? College graduates working the front-lines at Target? We already have quite a few who work at Starbucks...

In a more perfect world, with more resources, or if you can afford it, a college degree is more about enriching your whole life, and savoring more the stimuli your little senses perceive, and the joy of learning itself, and less about economics. I was fortunate enough to have that focus for my undergraduate time in college, rather than thinking about return on investment. But then I could afford to go to graduate school, well schools, so yes, we don't live in a more perfect world, because for most the economics do not accommodate that.

[True Federalist]

If everybody had a college degree, are we going to have college graduates who are janitors? College graduates working the front-lines at Target? We already have quite a few who work at Starbucks...

Perhaps we could get a workforce where being a janitor was a job rather than a career?  While it came out sounding very silly, Gingrich's proposal to have kids doing the bulk of the janitorial work at their schools made some sense because you don't need even a kindergarten diploma to do most janitorial tasks.