Government IS Innovative After All!
Tim Craig reported earlier this week for the Washington Post (H/T Nathan Hardan and The College Fix) that D.C. Council Chairman Kwame R. Brown (D) is sponsoring a bill (evidently it was introduced to the D.C. Council this past Wednesday), which would, among other things, require all students at D.C. public and charter schools “to apply to ‘at least one post-secondary institution,’ even if they do not plan on continuing their education.”
When I read this story, two things came to mind. First, given the current fixation at the White House with the “goal of having the highest proportion of college graduates in the world by 2020,” it almost seems that Council Chairman Brown is trying to ensure that the federal government’s completion agenda becomes something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. (Of course, we have to be careful here because college enrollment–let alone application–hardly translates into college completion, but it is true that one cannot complete college without first applying for admission.) What better way to encourage college enrollment than by legally mandating college applications for high school student? Come to think of it, perhaps the way Brown could improve the idea is to force all colleges and universities to be open-enrollment and then mandate all persons apply to college and finally require all colleges to graduate any and all students who enroll. Voilà! Completion problem solved! It all reminds me of the joke that the best way to cure unemployment is to make it illegal to be unemployed.
Second, my inner Edububble alert went off: isn’t a mandate like this exactly what (as Edububble so irreverently calls it) “the college industrial complex“ would love to have? After all, colleges often charge something around $40 a pop for students to have the privilege of applying for admission. I suppose there aren’t too many better things that can happen to colleges if all high school students were legally required to submit an application and fork over 40 bucks along with the piece of paper. Making everyone have to apply will both provide a revenue boost (albeit perhaps a very modest one at that) from application fees but also make colleges look even more selective, which is what a lot of them want because that’s one of the keys to the prestige so many colleges desperately seek.
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This isn’t innovation, but its very opposite: institutional isomorphism — the extension of compulsory education to post-secondary levels. Unfortunately, this is in keeping with rampant credentialism that the federal agenda in higher education has created.
The skeptic in me views this as an expensive form of welfare because it removes workers from the labor force, workers that would otherwise be unemployed — but without the stigma. It is, for that reason, welfare for the middle-class.
This has the benefit (for policy makers and politicians) of driving down the unemployment rate — and these are very large numbers that are not now included among the unemployed, but are invisible.
It should be obvious that the US Dept of Education’s accessibility agenda (a key mission of the Department of Education Organization Act of 1979) has run amok. Perhaps, too, what is happening is that supply is now creating its own demand (Says law) — thus maintaining middle-class jobs in the post-secondary sector. But the really sad thing about this is that for every new degree produced, the value of existing degrees declines, creating incentives for obtaining advanced degrees that are perceived as more competitive — advanced degrees that are more ceremonial than any thing else. This, of course, is what we call credential inflation.