Jim Geraghty writes,
In recent years, it’s become somewhat more fashionable to say “college isn’t for everyone,” although I notice you don’t often hear it followed by, “and that’s why I don’t want my children to go to college.” I suspect the more accurate sentiment is, “college isn’t for everyone; someone else’s kids shouldn’t bother applying, but I still think of it as the entry ticket to white-collar work, so I’m making sure my kid gets in, no matter what.”
I’d say that in recent years, the evidence has accumulated that our governmental and cultural push to maximize college enrollment is failing large numbers of young people. Consider, as Oren Cass notes, that our system is designed to usher high-schoolers to college enrollment, then to graduation, and finally to a career that requires a college degree, yet achieves this outcome for only one out of six people.
It is true that our debates about education, like our debates about other public-policy issues, are dominated by people who have college degrees and expect their kids to earn them as well. In those debates people who got their degrees from the most selective colleges have vastly disproportionate influence. These facts distort our debates, and especially distort them when it comes to education.
It does not help us achieve greater clarity in these matters to attribute the view that “college isn’t for everyone” to elitism, especially when the opposite assumption — “everyone should follow the same course to success that I did, or be a loser for life” — is vulnerable to the same objection.