Giving Everyone a College Degree?

In one of his later novels, Friday, Robert Heinlein tells us that, after the recognition that people with bachelor's degree made on average 30 percent more than non-degree holders a referendum in California granted all of the state's high school graduates a bachelor's degree in the name of eliminating "undemocratic advantage."

The protagonist and narrator of that novel tells us she "can't see anything wrong with it," but, while Heinlein's politics changed through the course of his life, and were at times idiosyncratic or even ambiguous (in part because he was not above backing away from an opinion he gave in the face of backlash), given the period of Heinlein's life in which he published the book, and what he had to say about American education elsewhere, this bit seemed to me obviously satirical--an elitist right-winger's sneer at the ruin of education by a bunch of hare-brained "liberals" with egalitarian notions.

Still, there seems to me a basis for criticizing the proposal from other standpoints--the more obvious for something vaguely reminiscent of that having happened not just in California but the whole country in recent decades. After all, consider what the ultimate object of the California legislation was in Heinlein's story--helping those who are socioeconomically less well-off. As American history itself shows there are many ways to do that--for example, with laws regarding wages and benefits, broadening the room for maneuver enjoyed by organized labor, the improvement of public services, transfer payments, etc., all of which those broadly identifying as liberals once championed. However, instead those who passed for "liberals" in America (reflecting their meritocracy-mindedness, and their accommodation of themselves to a neoliberal outlook in which the other measures were less acceptable than before) increasingly fixated on "sending everyone to college" what they presented as a vision of uplift of the underprivileged.

Not everyone went, of course. But the percentage of people with degrees expanded enormously--nearly four in ten American adults now having a B.A.. By contrast incomes did not expand in the same manner. This was, of course, partly a matter of the consistently lousy growth record of this period--but even relative to growth workers' incomes simply did not move up, with, in spite of the notion that a degree is a magical amulet protecting the bearer against a global economy that is dark and full of terrors, the majority of B.A.-holding college graduates suffering from the same trend as everyone else. Of course, some of this was a matter of students getting degrees unlikely to be remunerative (thus the horror story of Columbia University film school graduates with which the Wall Street Journal regaled the country not so long ago), but even that can seem a matter of the fetish of which some have made college--and the broader reality of a credentialing crisis in which degrees are requiring larger investments and delivering diminishing returns as a growing number of B.A.-holders competed for a much less rapidly growing number of jobs actually requiring B.A.s; in which "sending everyone to college," far from helping resolve the Social Question, worsened it with a credentialing crisis and the burdening of graduates with trillions of dollars worth of student debt, such that the supposed uplift, as might be expected given its unbelievably half-baked nature, has in itself become a source of crisis for all involved.