Incentivizing education: going down the wrong road
Colin Hannifin
Columnist
After the considerable success of President Obama’s “Race to the Top” program of incentives for primary schooling in grades K-12, he is pushing for a new, similar program for institutions of higher learning.
These institutions, particularly sensitive to funding in these tough economic times, are likely to respond exactly how the administration hopes they will – by increasing their retention and graduation rates.
However, this will only encourage a disturbing trend in the world of higher education, as bachelor degrees come to mean less and less to potential employees while the cost of education continues to increase.
The program, coined the less-catchy “First in the World,” is an incentive-based program designed to lead to an increase in completion rates.
There are only benefits in this program and no penalties for failure to increase completion rates. The administration has proposed $123 million to be committed to this initiative, with the hopes that not only will this increase the amount of college graduates, but help spur on the economy as companies seek to take advantage of a job market flooded with well-qualified degree-holders.
Therein lies the paradox of such a proposal, one that already has begun to take effect. As the job market is flooded with new graduates: starting salaries drop, and the incentive to get a bachelor’s degree – a minimum for a large number of jobs – declines as well. Many students have to go deeply into debt merely to get a bachelor’s degree, but also with years of debt repayment staring them in the face – not to mention no promise of a job. In an economy such as this, there are plenty in the job market that have already graduated and have years of experience. Those years of experience make all the difference in the working world.
When they’re willing to work for a comparable salary as a new graduate just to put food on the table, the new graduate doesn’t stand a chance.
Recently, a bachelor’s degree has become not enough for many jobs. As there is a push for higher graduation rates, the standards for achieving those degrees continue to drop.
Consequently, many companies and industries don’t perceive a bachelor’s degree as representing a qualifying education and desire to see a master’s or sometimes an even higher degree.
For many jobs, such as doctors or lawyers, this is unsurprising. But many jobs that once required just passion and a degree now require that same passion – if a student can maintain it through years of tedious schooling – and multiple degrees.
The Obama administration is right to put emphasis not only on education, but on higher education, but the administration is wrong to put the emphasis on quantity.
I realize the political pressure to try to work significantly toward goals Obama himself set (adding 8 million graduates by 2020), but the quality of our educational system is more important than pushing reluctant students through more years of mind-numbing schooling.
We may have, by 2020, the most college graduates in the world – but it’ll all be for naught when it comes to light that our degrees mean less with each passing year.