The Occasional Observer

So sayeth Charles Murray at the WSJ. I've been meaning to get to this column for a few days now, and I'm not going to have the chance to seriously address this very serious column. So I'll give a couple quick thoughts on the topic after I set the tone with a quote from the beginning of the column:

Imagine that America had no system of post-secondary education, and you were a member of a task force assigned to create one from scratch. One of your colleagues submits this proposal:

First, we will set up a single goal to represent educational success, which will take four years to achieve no matter what is being taught. We will attach an economic reward to it that seldom has anything to do with what has been learned. We will urge large numbers of people who do not possess adequate ability to try to achieve the goal, wait until they have spent a lot of time and money, and then deny it to them. We will stigmatize everyone who doesn't meet the goal. We will call the goal a "BA."

You would conclude that your colleague was cruel, not to say insane. But that's the system we have in place.

His proposed solution?

...not better degrees, but no degrees. Young people entering the job market should have a known, trusted measure of their qualifications they can carry into job interviews. That measure should express what they know, not where they learned it or how long it took them. They need a certification, not a degree.

The model is the CPA exam that qualifies certified public accountants. The same test is used nationwide. It is thorough -- four sections, timed, totaling 14 hours. A passing score indicates authentic competence (the pass rate is below 50%). Actual scores are reported in addition to pass/fail, so that employers can assess where the applicant falls in the distribution of accounting competence. You may have learned accounting at an anonymous online university, but your CPA score gives you a way to show employers you're a stronger applicant than someone from an Ivy League school.

I agree with this column in a number of ways:

1) There is no reason anyone should have to shell out 100K for the privelege of starting to work. The BA degree is a poor proxy for actual knowledge and work habits.

2) This is an issue that ties in directly with school choice at the primary and secondary school levels. It's a political winner for the GOP. By opening the post-secondary education environment to free market ideas, and allowing for programs that we would today think of as non-traditional, young people could establish their employability in ways other than having a degree. For the average middle class family, this could mean saving tons of debt, being able to buy a home sooner, being in a better situation to afford child rearing, etc. As I'm reading this article, the only thing that keeps going through my head is, "if this isn't an issue made for Pawlenty's 'Sam's Club Republicans,' I don't know what is." This is a populist issue, where the GOP can apply the free-market to help the average guy out--a total home run for the country, a total home run politically.

3) I'm not convinced that the traditional college situation doesn't make the average student less prepared to enter the workplace than when they graduated high school. With a few excpetions (like science and engineering, as he noted), most people spend little time learning material that will ultimately apply to their jobs. But many, if not most, college kids, pick up life habits that probably undermine their ultimate productivity.