WHICH EXCESS CAPACITY SHOULD BE SHAKEN OUT?

Matt "Dean Dad" Reed reacts to a recent Jay Mathews column in a way that Emery Troxel's observation about people hiding their economic demands under a political cover manifests itself.

Ostensibly, the Mathews column and the Reed response are about the more effective way to expand college opportunities.  As far as I know, the U.S. News problem is still a real thing.  I don't know whether there are more applicants for slots at the hundred or so institutions claiming to be in the top twenty, or not.  If there aren't enough matriculants for those institutions to make payroll, "I suspect we'll manage without Hampshire or Macalester or Evergreen State."  From that perspective, the subprime party schools ought to go.  That might be "advantage New Jersey," as the Mathews column misperceives the role of community college.  "[W]hat Biden’s [cheaper or free community college] plan does is lower expectations for millions of students in poverty across the nation. Why should our goal for low-income students be community college? The goal for all students should be college."  No, the goal for all students should not be college, and there might be more effective ways for the aspirants to college to identify themselves, which is the Reed counterpoint.  "Starting at a place that specializes in the first two years, and does so at low cost, serves many students well -- the ones who go on outperform 'native' freshmen. For others who choose to jump into the workforce sooner -- entirely absent from Mathews’s piece -- two years of community college can be just the thing."  The transfers-outperforming-native students in upper division courses manifested itself at Northern Illinois.  Whether that's because community colleges don't offer the beer-'n-circus distractions that wreck many a collegian's aspirations at the residential campuses is for future research.

Where the two columnists appear to be talking to cross purposes is in their misapprehension of what causes the divide in education.  "Making community colleges free while not increasing aid to pay for four-year colleges will intensify the socioeconomic divide in America. Low-income students will be relegated to attend community colleges, while more affluent families will send their children directly to four-year colleges."  That's only a problem if the community colleges don't serve students well.  Dean Dad notes, "If you screen out anyone without a track record of being good at school, you will have high success rates. If those students went to community college instead, they’d graduate at remarkably high rates. It’s what they do. Our students look much more like America. To pretend that those variables don’t matter is absurd."

Those variables matter.  So, too, does the level of academic rigor.  I don't know enough about the institutional performance at various public campuses of the Official Region to be able to evaluate the "dropout factory" claims that come up in the Mathews column.  I do know that the City Colleges of New York used to produce high performance graduates at those remarkably high rates, as did the City College of Detroit (now Wayne State.)  Somewhere, though, those high standards went away.  There's an anonymous whinge on Quillette about how far the erosion went.  Take that at face value, dear reader, the tale reads like a collage of all the things participants in the old College Misery or Rate Your Students weblogs enumerated, or perhaps from those long-gone weblogs of the Anonymous Neurotic Humanities Types with Cats.  There is, however, enough of the story that rings true, or that had me nodding my head, yes, could well have happened.  "We hammer on Middlebury in order that Northern Illinois (or Delaware, or Nebraska) not enable snowflakes."

Perhaps there is enough capacity in the existing community college system to provide the kind of access and preparation Dean Dad asserts is already in place in New Jersey.  That does not preclude shaking out the dropout factories (not necessarily the community colleges) elsewhere.  Let alone the excess capacity in graduate degrees.  "Defund Columbia and other elite institutions guilty of this practice. End the federal loans for graduate schools that have enabled the Ivy League master’s-degree racket to go on for so long."

It might be that the New Jersey version of the 2+2 plan is a more productive use of resources than keeping the branch campuses of Rutgers open, in the same way that keeping the Williamstown to Albany bus and a dependable connection for and from Rochester and Buffalo might have been.  And yet, the challenge facing higher education remains the challenge facing the railroads of the 1960s, which is to say retrenching, even with those grants and tax subsidies for the Ivies playing the roles of the Highway Trust Fund and the Army Corps of Engineers.  I repeat myself, because repeat myself I must.  "It's a blessing to have a prosperous enough society in which young people can spend some time figuring out what to do next, but the access-assessment-remediation-retention model of higher education stacked on top of the lax K-12 system contributes to depriving young people of the framework from which to commence figuring."