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

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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?

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

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In what country does everyone go to college?

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

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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"

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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.

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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."

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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.

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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.

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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.

I'd say that college (including community college) is only partly about training people to do a specific job. It's also about improving peoples' capacities to do many different kinds of jobs.
One of the problems with specifically vocational kinds of training is that vocational skills do become obsolete rather quickly these days. Whatever level people reach in the education should be aimed at expanding their opportunities generally, even if they're also getting training for a specific occupation.



Just as an aside, Santorum used to think that promoting access to college was a good thing:

http://2012.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/02/flashback-in-2006-rick-santorum-wanted-to-send-all-paians-to-college.php

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The thing is, nobody ever said everyone has to go to college.  No one.  And no one ever said that labor jobs, and careers, that required no college are not important for everyone in society.  They are, and the people who work at such jobs have, as far as I'm concerned, just as much dignity, and are worthy of just as much respect, as everyone else.

The problem here is that Rick is claiming that Obama believes everyone should go to college, which isn't true to begin with.  He believes everyone who wants to go, and who can qualify, should have a chance to go.  Secondly, Rick constantly insinuates that universities and colleges are liberal indoctrination mills.   I've taught in colleges and universities full-time for twelve years, and for five years part-time before that, and I've had just as many conservative and/or Republican colleagues as I've had colleagues of other political persuasions.  The "liberal indoctrination" charge is bs, and Rick, who has been through as much college as he has, knows it's bs.    

This. Nobody's saying that everybody should have 2 or 4 years of college to be an auto mechanic. But they should have that opportunity.
There are interesting statistics out there that show that below-average students who come from richer-than-average families are more likely to go to college than kids in the top quartile in terms of test scores who come from poor families. In other words, there are actually lots of people out there who are clearly qualified to go to college, and don't go.

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Here' some data to support what I was saying, though I've seen more complete data out there.

College attendance by Parental Income Quartile and Child's Math Test Scores:

Top quartile for income
Top third, math test scores:  84% go to college
Middle third, math test scores: 59%
Bottom third, math test scores: 27%

Bottom quartile for income
Top third, math test scores: 68% go to college
Middle third, math test scores: 33%
Bottom third, math test scores: 15%

http://www.pewtrusts.org/uploadedFiles/wwwpewtrustsorg/Reports/Economic_Mobility/PEW_EM_Haskins%207.pdf

So students from well-off families of about average intellectual ability are almost as likely to go to college as students from poor families with above-average abilities. And average-ability kids from poor families are half as likely to go to college as average-ability kids from well-off families (and go to college at about the rate of the bottom-third of well-off kids).

College isn't for everyone, and we'd be crazy to insist that it was. But it's pretty clear that there are lots of kids out there who'd benefit from going to college who aren't getting the chance.

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Folks, the British have a saying: "Horses for courses." It comes from the fact that certain horses run better on certain courses. Similarly, what is suitable for one person may not be suitable for another. There is no one-size-fits-all solution for everybody. For better or worse, market forces pick horses for courses. Let the markets operate, and we will be more competitive, and resources will be allocated more efficiently, than any entity could possibly hope to achieve via planning/manipulation.

To sum up what I say below: market forces already determine a lot about who goes to college -- and they favor, not the smartest kids, but the ones with richer parents.
Conservatives used to say they believed in "equality of opportunity." This would be a good place to do something about that.

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College seems not to make people more secular, FWIW:

http://2012.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/02/studies-refute-santorums-claim-that-attending-college-reduces-religiosity.php?ref=fpblg

If college works as it's supposed to, it encourages people to ask more questions, and to think more critically. That doesn't guarantee that it makes people more liberal.

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I would argue that university steers people away from critical thinking. There's very little reward for questioning a prof and when folks have scholarships on the line - considerable pressure to conform with the prof. Given the fact that you have a 10-1 chance of getting a democrat vs republican - it's not hard to guess which way people end up going.

Even if what you're saying were true (and I don't believe for a minute that it is), and even if every course that students took in university was on a subject where the controversies neatly aligned with the Democratic-Republican, or conservative-liberal divide (and that's definitely not the case), wouldn't it also be true that hearing a new, less conservative, point of view from your professors -- and figuring out both how to write in support of that position, even though you didn't share it, and how to maintain your own convictions in the face of this new intellectual challenge -- would be wonderful training for your critical thinking skills?

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That study btw argues that those who do not attend college show a steeper decline.

Do I really have to explain why this doesn't actually prove Santorum's point is wrong?

But Santorum was citing this very study to show that he was right. And you'd have to agree that the study doesn't do that.

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College seems not to make people more secular, FWIW:

http://2012.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/02/studies-refute-santorums-claim-that-attending-college-reduces-religiosity.php?ref=fpblg

If college works as it's supposed to, it encourages people to ask more questions, and to think more critically. That doesn't guarantee that it makes people more liberal.

Actually, that's the definition of encouraging liberal thought. And that's not a bad thing at all.

Oh, absolutely. It's just that it's perfectly possible, in my opinion, for that liberal process to lead individuals to become conservative. And that's OK, too.

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This kind of talk would be inconceivable 20 years ago. Now Rick doesn't want our population to be educated, and if they are, they are snobs?

Believing that wanting 100% of our population going to college is undesirable does not equate to wanting 0% of our population to go to college.

And wanting everyone in the country to
"commit to at least one year or more of higher education or career training. This can be community college or a four-year school; vocational training or an apprenticeship"
is not the same thing as wanting 100% of our population to go to college. Santorum was fighting a straw man here.

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I'll change that to:

Every young person in america should commit to one year serving in the armed forces.

Is that policy so great now?

No. For one thing, the armed forces wouldn't like it one bit.

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We might want to look at some data here:
Employment status of the civilian population 25 years and over by educational attainment, Jan 2012:
Less than a High School Diploma: 15.0
High School Diploma, No College: 9.5
Some College/Associate Degree: 7.5
Bachelor's Degree or Higher: 4.4

The labor force participation rates for these same for groups are:
Less than a High School Diploma: 45.3
High School Diploma, No College: 59.8
Some College/Associate Degree: 69.3
Bachelor's Degree or Higher: 75.7

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t04.htm
Yes, there are lots of people who didn't finish high school, or who finished high school but didn't get any further education, who've done well for themselves, because they've worked hard and made good choices. There are also people who have advanced university degrees who don't do well. But averages matter, too.

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We might want to look at some data here:
Employment status of the civilian population 25 years and over by educational attainment, Jan 2012:
Less than a High School Diploma: 15.0
High School Diploma, No College: 9.5
Some College/Associate Degree: 7.5
Bachelor's Degree or Higher: 4.4

The labor force participation rates for these same for groups are:
Less than a High School Diploma: 45.3
High School Diploma, No College: 59.8
Some College/Associate Degree: 69.3
Bachelor's Degree or Higher: 75.7

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t04.htm
Yes, there are lots of people who didn't finish high school, or who finished high school but didn't get any further education, who've done well for themselves, because they've worked hard and made good choices. There are also people who have advanced university degrees who don't do well. But averages matter, too.

This is true but if everyone has a college degree and competes for high salaried jobs, then what happens to jobs that produce products and other services? Alot of why our manufacturing sector is gone is because people go to college instead of trade school. This is what happens when everyone goes to college. Again, college is good if you end up doing something that requires a degree.

The reason those jobs in manufacturing are going overseas is because it's possible to pay people in other countries a tenth as much money as American workers cost. They're often much less productive workers than Americans would be, but if wages are low enough, that's not a problem.

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I've seen studies showing that effectively - Harvard, Yale and the Ivies in general do not substantially ouperform their colleagues at much smaller universities. Granted - the spread is much larger, but the differences are negligible. Is it worth paying the 150k or whatever it is for the Ivies now? For some, sure, but if you can get 80-90 percent of the benefit on 10 percent of the cost then who's ahead here?

The "fraction of the cost" thing isn't as true as it used to be. Over the past decade, the Ivies moved in the direction of making admissions needs-blind, and financial aid needs-based. At the same time, state legislatures across the country made the choice to shift more of the cost of undergraduate education away from taxpayers, and towards students.  As a result, for lots of kids from lower or middle-income households, it can actually be cheaper to attend an Ivy League school than a flagship state university.