By Richard Lee Colvin, Richard Lee Colvin, a former Times education writer, is director of the Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media, Teachers College, Columbia University.|January 02, 2005
It's the time of year when the well-educated brace for the seasonal whine of high school seniors who didn't get into Harvard early action and the subsequent ululating of parents who for the next four years will annually fork over the price of a midrange BMW to some less prestigious school.
If we were smart, we'd cover our ears and fret about a much more serious dilemma: Nearly six in 10 high school graduates in 2005 will start college in the fall, but half of them -- and more than two-thirds of the African American and Latino students who enroll -- will fail to earn either an associate's or bachelor's degree.
That's bad for them, as they'll be sporadically unemployed and the jobs they do find as clerks, healthcare aides and the like will rarely pay health benefits. It's also bad for the economy, especially at this moment when Canada, Korea, Japan, Spain, Australia, Ireland, Finland, Belgium, France and other competitors have figured out the huge benefits of pumping more and more college graduates into their workforces.
So why do U.S. media, policymakers and university administrators continue to worry more about who gets into elite colleges and how much they pay for that privilege? Why don't they focus on how few students make it through this nation's higher education system with the tools to help keep the society we all share on track?
Probably because most reporters, policymakers and influential educators wouldn't be in the positions they're in if they had to recover from the setback that some public schools inflict. If they had faced that struggle, they might better understand why many of those foundering students find it too difficult to work and go to school at the same time. Why some, especially Latinos and those who live at home, will succumb to the tug of family obligations. Why loneliness will overcome many. Why plenty of motivated, hardworking students will simply be unable to overcome the despair of stepping onto campus and feeling as if they've entered a black-tie ball wearing a thrift-store T-shirt. These are the students who met every high school requirement, scoring higher grades than most of their classmates in courses the academic establishment said would prepare them for the future.
That was a lie.
