Is college worth it?

I had great students in my senior English classes this year — kids accepted to Yale, Columbia, the University of Virginia, Wesleyan and other highly competitive colleges and universities. But I also had other seniors whom I still feel guilty about passing, and they, too, are among the 80% whom we boast about going to college.

In fact, it seemed to me that many of our staff beat the bushes to send as many warm bodies as they could on to higher education regardless of whether the students had the skills or motivation to do rudimentary high school work. T.C. Williams is not alone in this drive to move everyone on to college. A new study from the Pew Research Center reports that "freshman enrollment at the nation's 6,100 post-secondary institutions surged by 144,000 students from the fall of 2007 to the fall of 2008. This 6% increase was the largest in 40 years, and almost three-quarters of it came from minority freshman."

Paying customers

The trend is certainly a boon to the education establishment. High schools like mine, always eager for good press, can boast that they have prepared an ever greater percentage of their charges to move on to the halls of academe. And though colleges blame us in the high schools for sending them kids who are woefully unprepared, they blithely pocket the tuition from such students lest they have to downsize and lay off professors and administrators.

But how much students with low skills, little motivation and lousy study habits are going to profit from going to college is not so clear. Over the past five years, I have seen students who didn't have the skills one would expect of a ninth-grader going off to four-year colleges where fewer than 30% of entering freshman graduate.

That means that 70% of the freshman class is likely to end up not with a diploma but a pile of debt. In these days of tight budgets at every level of government, it's also hard to ignore that these schools are heavily subsidized by the federal government.

While T.C. Williams boasts about the 80% going on to college, it makes no effort to track what happens to these kids. Nor does it ask another important question — which is not how many make it through to a traditional college diploma, but how many need to? In a paper about to be released by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, Arnold Packer, co-director of the landmark study "Workforce 2000: Work and Workers for the 21st Century," points out that in 2018 — as is the case today — two of three jobs in America will not require either a bachelor's degree from a four-year college or an associate degree from a community college.

More......