The Value of College: It’s Not Just Correlation – NYTimes.com.
In the above column, David Leonhardt, continues to point out that a college degree is, on average, valuable. I tried to explain (again) in my comment why the fact that today’s college degree is more valuable than today’s high school degree, doesn’t mean that today’s college degrees aren’t much less valuable than yesterday’s college degrees.
(As a matter of fact, data that Mr. Leonhardt uses in this piece to support his argument, may well support my argument even more. I will explain that in my next post.)
Here is my comment:
“There are two big problems with this argument.
First, a college education could currently pay more than a high school education simply because high school has been dumbed down at a higher rate than college. As a professor, I have seen how the dumbing down of college dumbs down high school. I explain that on my blog, and I gave a demonstration of how it happens in my comment on yesterday’s column. (For anyone who wants to read it, It’s on about page 2 or 3 of the reader’s choices and on my blog.)
The second problem here is that it focuses light away from the real problem of charlatan’s in our universities taking advantage of how diffucult it is to understand how colleges work. If you don’t trust my perspective, here is David Riesman from 1980,
“…advantage can still be taken of [students] by unscrupulous instructors and institutions..Like any other interest group, the student estate often does not grasp its own interests, and those who speak in its name are not always its friends.’ “
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