Remember back to October 2015. It was the month of the first Democratic primary debate. #Feelthebern was felt by hundreds everywhere as their lord and savior, Bernie Sanders, took up their cause for free public college.
Bernie Sanders took to the stage and made the following statement about college during that first debate, “A college degree today, Dana, is the equivalent of what a high school degree was 50 years ago. And what we said 50 years ago and a hundred years ago is that every kid in this country should be able to get a high school education regardless of the income of their family. I think we have to say that is true for everybody going to college. I think we don’t need a complicated system, which the secretary is talking about, the income goes down, the income goes down, if you’re poor you have to work, and so forth and so on.”
He went on to say how the rich weren’t paying their fair share, but that he was going to ride in on his mighty, armored social justice pegasus and hold them at swordpoint until they grovel and plead for forgiveness at the feet of millennials and offer everything they have to save their overweight, caucasian rear ends.
At least, that’s how it sounded to me.
Ad hominem? Yes, but here’s where we get to the substance. Pay attention to the first sentence,
“A college degree today, Dana, is the equivalent of what a high school degree was 50 years ago.”
You want to know something crazy? I agree with him on this.
Hold on, my conservative friends, I understand Mike Rowe told you there were 5.8 million unfilled jobs that don’t require a college degree in this video. I’m not saying Rowe is wrong, but speaking from personal experience, I see a variation of these three statements on almost every job I look at in my field;
“Must have a bachelor’s degree”
“Must have a degree in X or related degree”
“Must have a 4-year degree and X years experience”
There’s nothing wrong with employers demanding a certain level of expertise when applying for a specialized job, but from where does this expertise come?
Let’s look at some numbers taken from the National Center for Education Statistics, the Council for American Private Education, and the US Department of Labor.
In 2012-2013, there were 98,454 public schools which educate grades K-12 in some way, either elementary, secondary, or some combination of the two. Of those schools, 24,280 were explicitly high schools.
There were 33,619 private institutions.
Around 5,396,000 students attended private schools from K-12 (10% of US students)
69.2% of all high school graduates went on to colleges or universities. Safe to say that the majority of people go on to college.
In 2012-2013, there were 7,253 post-secondary institutions. This number encompasses both public and private.
How many private schools are there as opposed to private colleges? The numbers I found were from 2005, which says that there were 629 public 4-year institutions, 1,845 private 4-year institutions, 1,070 public 2-year institutions, and 596 private 2-year institutions.
What does this matter? The numbers definitely won’t be the same for our present day, but there are roughly three private 4-year colleges for every public 4 year college. At this time, around 2 million more students were enrolled in a public 4-year college.
There are two public 2-year institutions for every private 2-year institutions. Twenty times more students were enrolled in public 2 year institutions than private.
I’m sure you can begin to see the appeal Sanders had for many a young person.
Now, let’s take a look at the history of colleges.
The vast majority of the first colleges were private institutions. These same first colleges continue to be among the most prestigious.
Although more people go to public colleges, higher percentages of people graduate from private colleges. You can check your state. Why? Maybe because private institutions have the privilege of being more selective with their admittance.
Back to our original question, where does the expertise come from which employers demand?
It comes from a largely private sphere.
So, when Sanders says that the college degree of the present is the equivalent of a high school degree of the past, he’s saying that a private education of two to four years is superior than 12 years of, largely, public school education.
So, Mr. Sanders, if you don’t want college degrees to fade into irrelevancy as high school degrees have, then I suggest that you keep colleges private, stop government intervention in higher education to end the game of loans, and keep letting them educate workers you can tax so you can keep your three mansions.
