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An alert reader sent me the link to this piece by Michael Petrilli. It’s a self-consciously contrarian take on the upside of the pandemic-driven enrollment decline in higher education enrollments, particularly at community colleges.
Without meaning to, it actually does a nice job of defeating its own premise. It makes a mistake that’s both far too common and inadvertently revealing. Those of us who advocate for community colleges—a group in which I proudly include myself—should be aware of the sleight of hand that his argument needs in order to work.
Petrilli makes a three-part argument. The first is that “there’s a good chance that the young men and women making the decision not to go to college right now are doing what’s in their own best interest.” While he concedes that college graduates typically go on to make more money, have lower divorce rates and accrue other forms of social capital at higher levels, he notes that most of those benefits accrue to those who graduate as opposed to those who attend. Students who attend but don’t graduate may not wind up better off than if they hadn’t attended, especially accounting for opportunity cost.
This point strikes me as individually true, but it is missing some key context. Yes, of course, some people who have the option of going to college choose not to for reasons of their own, and they should have that option. But to assume that every outcome reflects individual, rational calculations doesn’t explain why, for instance, students of color vanished at much higher rates than white students, or why male students vanished at much higher rates than female students. If choices are entirely idiosyncratic, I’d expect them to be randomly distributed. They are not. The article doesn’t address why Black men disappeared from college at much higher rates than women or white men. Petrilli suggests that “most students fail to complete college because they were not prepared to succeed in the first place,” citing an article that doesn’t make this point. (In fact, economic pressures are much more predictive of attrition than academic skills.) It’s the kind of blanket assertion that only survives by studiously avoiding any mention of race or class.
The second silver lining, according to Petrilli, is that the recent enrollment drop may help deflate the “cultural elites” whose arrogance presumably kindled enthusiasm for a populist backlash.
To which, two points. First, community colleges are not staffed by “cultural elites.” The “elite” colleges have actually seen their applications increase. Enrollment declines have been concentrated among nonelite places. Tour Harvard, then tour Bunker Hill Community College, and then explain to me how the second is the one that manifests elitism. I’d love to watch that argument unfold. Second, the idea that extending opportunity and fairness is risky because it might trigger a backlash raises the obvious question: As opposed to what? Should the lower orders know their place? Spell it out.
The final silver lining, though, is why I bothered to respond at all. I’ll quote Petrilli directly:
“No doubt the dramatic drop in enrollment is causing pain for institutions of higher education, especially community colleges, where most of the students have gone missing. But—frankly—these institutions have had it coming. These are the very places that for years have gladly taken students’ tuition checks and Pell grants, only to watch them fail courses and drift away.”
I’ll admit seeing such a straightforward embrace of social Darwinism at this point in history is a bit jarring. But a few paragraphs earlier, in hailing the brave autodidacts liberated from the education for which generations fought, he offered this as a concession:
“No doubt, there may be some students opting out of college who would have done well there and may someday regret not getting a degree. But one good thing about the American education system is that it allows for second, third, and fourth chances. It’s never too late to head back to school …”
(Record scratch)
Exactly where are those “second, third, and fourth chances” found?
Community colleges. The ones who “had it coming” when enrollment declined.
It’s a similar move to the one that many critics make when they juxtapose colleges with “trade schools.” Outside of for-profits, the largest programs in the trades are at community colleges.
I’ll put it simply: institutions that serve people at higher risk serve a purpose. Starve those institutions out, and one of two things will happen—either more predatory providers will fill the gap, or nobody will. In the former case, the cost to taxpayers will be higher. In the latter case, the cost to everyone will be higher.
If we want to talk about demographics, let’s talk about demographics. The largest generation in American history is heading toward retirement. The Gen X’ers, heading into their peak earning years, are a much smaller group. The millennials are saddled with student debt of the sort that could have been prevented with more progressive public policy, and Gen Z is much smaller.
In that context, with smaller and more indebted generations set to support the largest generation in retirement, do you want a more productive workforce or a less productive workforce?
If a smaller cohort is going to support a larger one, it needs to be as productive as it can be. It needs to offer options for folks who stumbled out of the gate or whose lives got complicated at inopportune times.
We know how to improve college completion rates. The ASAP program at CUNY, for example, showed that they could be doubled in a short time with the same levels of high school preparation. But it costs money. There’s no free lunch.
So, yes, public and especially community colleges have their challenges. Longtime readers have seen me write about them in some detail. But any argument for getting rid of them has to answer one basic question before I can take it seriously: As opposed to what?
