On Higher Education

I just read an interesting news article from US News and World Report. If you care to read it, you can find it here. The gist of the article, for those who wish to skip reading it, is that there are a select few factors that affect a high school graduate completing a 4-year college degree, and there are a lot of factors that people have thought were important that may not be.

Of all the things in the article, I was most shocked by the claim that males from low-income backgrounds, whose parents are both non-college graduates, are least likely to finish a 4-year degree. I suppose this is shocking because all of my older brothers and myself are college graduates. Our family was not particularly well-off as we were growing up and, due to various circumstances, neither of our parents completed college, although both started. So we are apparently glaring exceptions to the new expectations.

The researchers also thumb their noses at community colleges, claiming that they are not useful in providing a stepping-stone toward a Bachelor's Degree. This, too, shocks me, as I have several friends who did just that: they went to a community college, earned an Associate's Degree, and then went on to earn Bachelors' Degrees. Some of them are currently enrolled in either Master's Degree programs or law school or med school. So, apparently we are all exceptions. Of course, the article doesn't seem to give any credit to the value of earning an Associate's Degree in Applied Science, which is what Gretch is working on completing now. This is a degree that qualifies her to go directly into the work force, and is accepted in many professions.

Overall, I was left with a bad taste in my mouth, wondering if such research is truly useful. As one commenter on the article said, though, it seems that the research was funded by private four-year institutions, so, really, can we be surprised that they found evidence that community colleges are not worthwhile? It is akin to the researchers hired by RJ Reynolds and Phillip Morris USA who somehow discovered that there were no long-term risks associated with smoking tobacco. Uh huh. Right. Oh, and Mr. Researcher? You seem to have a brown smudge of some sort on your nose there...

In my experience, there is only one factor that truly matters when it comes to pursuing higher education: the individual motive. Remove all the other data points, all the demographics, all the nonsense that so many researchers so dearly love, and you'll find that those who successfully complete education programs past high school are those who wanted to do so. Whether it is my friend who wanted an Associate's Degree in English from Illinois Central College or my friend who is in a post-doctoral program in Biochemistry, all of them had a desire to succeed and to learn more than they knew before. Compare them to my lazy room-mate who spent wasted away his freshman year playing Diablo II and failed most of his classes. He wasn't at school to learn. He wasn't at school to succeed. He was at school because he was expected to be there. He just didn't understand that he was also expected to excel.

So stop dissing the community colleges, even though we all know that the only requires for entering ICC is to be able to successfully interpret the four meanings of ICC: Illinois Central College - I can count, I can colour, I can spell. And stop making excuses for lazy kids. Start supporting higher education, and start making programs that make sense.