The
2016 election has forced me to reflect on the many ideals that both our major
parties—and my own generation--have abandoned. Last time I reflected on Transportation.
This time: Education.
My generation, children of the ‘60s, invented the “generation
gap” by committing ourselves to fundamental change. We expected that when our
turn came, we would change the world. And we knew “the whole world is
watching.” And now our time HAS come, and the whole world IS watching. What do
they see?
Now, so many
years later, it seems to me that our generation has lost the capacity for
idealism.
Far from fulfilling our mission to change the world,
we have betrayed our mission by failing to even sustain the ideals of our
past. On issue after issue, our baby boomer leadership (in national
office since 1992) has discredited new initiatives as “too idealistic”--meaning
impossible to achieve--while allowing other nations to pass America by. We now
risk leaving our country less idealistic than we found it!
Ironically, this does not mean that idealism is dead.
In many fields, our allies in Europe and Asia and Canada and elsewhere have
been inspired by our pioneering efforts. As I watch other nations embrace
American innovations and build better futures on them, I ask myself over and over,
“Why can’t we?”
This post is the second in a series that surveys such
issues. In each case, I reflect on our past embrace of idealistic change.
I observe how we have fallen behind our allies as we have quit on that ideal
while they have taken our place and sustained such idealism. In each case I ask
“Why can’t we?”
This time I look at education.
Perhaps my idealism derives from where I live, since Massachusetts
has in many ways been a land of idealism since its founding.
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| Boston Latin School Then.... |
My three children are graduates of the Boston Latin School,
the first public school in America, founded in 1635. It was designed for Boston’s elite, and
funded mainly by donations, but was followed in 1644 in Dedham Massachusetts by
the first public school supported completely by taxes. In 1820, Boston English School became the
first public high school in America, offering a publicly funded 12th
grade education to all. And an 1827, a
Massachusetts law required that all grades of public school be open to all
students free of charge in every town and city in the Commonwealth. This means that, for nearly 300 years,
publicly funded universal education has been the law in Massachusetts.
This ideal soon spread across America, which became
the first country in the world to establish universal public education for its
people. And for most of our history as a
nation, we have led the world in literacy and the educational attainments of
our population.
By the period immediately following World War II, the
majority of Americans were achieving a high school education in schools that
were free of tuition. In addition, many
others had access to professional training programs (such as the apprentice
program in which my father trained during a 39 year career at General Electric).
Of course, over the last 50 years, a high school
diploma has been losing its career value, as increasing numbers of Americans
have gone to college.
In most high schools across America, the majority of
graduates are now going on to some college study. Soon the majority of the working age
population will have received a college education. College is now the rule, not
the exception as it was for my father’s generation.
By now, for many careers, a high school diploma is no
longer competitive in the workplace.
This means that, for most Americans, a K-12 education cannot provide the
career benefits that it used to. Yet the
United States has not extended publicly funded, tuition-free education beyond
high school.
This means that our world-pioneering ideal of public
education, providing free schooling for all, has been frozen in place since
1821!
The result is that the United States is no longer the
leader in providing public education for its people. Instead, our allies are bypassing us by
establishing free (or heavily subsidized) higher education. For more than a generation, this has been
happening in Canada, France, Germany, and throughout much of Europe. The result is that most young people in those
countries can acquire a college education without acquiring any debt.
American students, by contrast, face the daunting
prospect of assuming levels of debt comparable to the mortgage on a house. I remember my shock when, as my oldest child entered
college, the chief financial officer of her school predicted the day when
entering freshmen would sign a 50-year loan to pay for their education! The very image of an 18-year-old committing to
debt that would last past retirement age boggled my mind. To this day, my
European friends are horrified to hear of U.S. college costs.
So we should not be surprised, as our allies pass us,
that more and more American students are leaving the U.S. to study abroad. In 2012, 46,500 Americans were enrolled in
degree programs in 14 countries. (NOTE: These are NOT “semester abroad” students
who return to their U.S. schools; these students are receiving foreign diplomas).
68% of these were in the United Kingdom and Canada, with France and Germany
close behind.
Germany has become especially popular because
university study there, even for international students, is tuition-free.
Jeffrey Peck, the Dean of the Weissman School of Arts
and Sciences at Baruch College, City University of New York, described the “ideal-gap”
between Germany and the U.S.:
"College education in the US is seen as a privilege
and expected to cost money and in Germany it is seen as an extension of a free
high school education where one expects it to be provided,"
The Germans are not simply altruistic in this regard. The
hope is to attract skilled foreign students who will stay in Germany. Sebastian
Fohrbeck, of the German Academic Exchange, reports that 50% of foreign students
stay in Germany.
Other US allies are nearly as generous. Public universities in France, including the Sorbonne,
cost approximately $250 per year of study.
Belgian universities cost $960.
Finnish universities cost $1500.
Italian universities cost of $1000, Spanish universities cost
$1500. And Norway, like Germany, is
totally free.
Back home, the average cost of public universities for
out-of-state students is $23,800 per year.
The average cost of private universities is $31,231 per year. The old idea of "working your way through college" has become a bad joke.
The results of such astronomical fees should not
surprise us. Americans have accumulated $1.2 trillion nationwide in college-related
debt. 300,000 Waiters and
waitresses in the United States are working to pay off such debt. 30% of such Americans are indebted
despite having dropped out of school.
Altogether, 40 million Americans--more than the population of 200 countries--are
burdened by college debts.
We’re now looking at an entire generation of Americans who are forced to choose between 3 unhappy options. First: they may go without college and suffer
the competitive disadvantage for the rest of their careers. Second: they may get a college degree and
carry lifelong debt for up to 50 years.
Third: they may go to a foreign country for less costly or even free
study--and many of them will remain there, draining away the brainpower of our
country.
Do not be surprised if the numbers who choose option
#3 keep growing—many after dropping out of an American university due to its
cost. (Ironically, the colleges rich enough to guarantee students they will
have no debt are largely reserved for the highest-achieving high school students.
In other words, we are back to Boston Latin’s model of school for the privileged
elite).
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| .......and now: Boston Latin School today |
So while we were once first in education, first in
publicly funded schools, first in educational attainment, first in literacy--now
our allies have bypassed us, and we face the challenge of catching up.
Yet in our political life, in our public policy, the
idea of “free college” is regarded as an impossible ideal--something it is
unrealistic to expect or even campaign for.
We seem to be a people no longer willing to fund what the public needs. We seem to be a people no longer capable of
maintaining our own ideals.
And so, as I observed with transportation, so with
education: I look around the world, I observe what our allies have been doing
to pursue the very ideals that we originally inspired in them. In so many countries where education was once
a privilege reserved to a tiny elite of the population, our American experiment
in public education inspired them to see education as a human right (as the Catholic
Church teaches) and to invest in the spread of free education for all. And they
have kept that ideal alive as times changed.
So as I observe what they have accomplished, and
compare that with our failure to keep our own educational ideals alive, and
hear so many fellow Americans proclaim that such a goal is romantic, naive, and
unrealistic, I feel compelled to point to our allies’ real-life experience, their
success at making the ideal a reality, and I ask the sad question that keeps
coming to my mind: “Why Can’t We?”
NEXT time: Employment
© Bernard F. Swain PhD 2016
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