Don’t get me wrong: There are some people who would enjoy and benefit from school, who have trouble getting and staying there because of their family backgrounds. I’m all for a program that helps identify those people, and gives them the supports they need to make it all the way. But blanket tuition subsidies for community colleges that offer minimal student support are not that program; they are simultaneously too much and too little. Indiscriminately subsidizing anyone who is enrolled in a community-college class offers inadequate support for academically gifted students who are having trouble navigating the system. Meanwhile, it acts as if anyone sitting in a classroom–any classroom, with any teacher, lecturing about any subject–is engaging in a valuable activity deserving of thousands of dollars worth of annual subsidy.
Higher education is becoming the ginseng of the policy world: a sort of all-purpose snake oil for solving any problem you’d care to name, as long as we consume enough of it. Education is a very good thing, but it is not the only good thing. An indiscriminate focus on pushing more people into the system is no cure for society’s ills–and indeed, often functions as a substitute for helping the people who are struggling in the current system.
What if people in the policy elite stopped assuming that the ideal was to make everyone more like them, and started thinking about making society more hospitable to those who aren’t?
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