Naked Credentials: Valuing Sheepskin over Substance
George C. Leef, The John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy

A Wall Street Journal editorial titled Getting Into Harvard repeats one of the most commonplace of all educational statistics -- that people who have college degrees earn significantly more than do people who don't. The statistic isn't erroneous, but misleads people into thinking that there is some necessarily, cause-and-effect relationship between the length of one's formal education and his earnings.

First, the data include those who earned their degrees years ago, prior to the erosion of academic standards and the degradation of the curriculum that has been accelerating over the last few decades. As the recent National Assessment of Adult Literacy shows, the literacy of college graduates has been declining; today, only 31 percent of college graduates reach the "proficient" level with regard to their comprehension of prose, compared with 40 percent in 1992. Not coincidentally, there is evidence that increasing percentages of people who obtain college degrees wind up taking "high school jobs" anyway. Economists Frederic Pryor and David Schaffer reported on that regrettable trend in their 1999 book Who's Not Working and Why. For many marginal students who get their college degrees today, there may be negligible benefit to their costly years in college.

Second, the gap between the earnings of college graduates and non-graduates is in part attributable to credential inflation rather than human capital gains. Due to the large numbers of college graduates these days, many employers have settled upon the BA as a screening device. With a huge pool of grads searching for work, employers have concluded that they can filter out people who ended their formal education with high school -- people who are presumably going to be more difficult to train -- without losing many good prospects. As more and more career ladders are foreclosed to those without degrees, it's inevitable that the earnings gap will widen. That has nothing to do, however, with any intellectual benefit from college work.

Such credential inflation, however, is extremely costly -- four or more years of college merely to be certified as employable in simple, entry level jobs that don't call for any particular mental acuity. As Stanford education professor David Labaree writes in How to Succeed in School Without Really Learning,

when students at all levels see education through the lens of social mobility,they quickly conclude that what matters most is not the knowledge they attain in school but the credentials they acquire there. Grades, credits, degrees these become the objects to be pursued. The end result is to reify the formal markers of education and displace the substantive content . . . .The Payoff for a particular credential is the same no matter how it was acquired, so it is rational behavior to try to strike a good bargain, to work at getting a diploma, like a car, at a substantial discount.

Flooding colleges with students who merely want an easy degree has done a great deal of damage to academic standards.

The trouble with our efforts at making college almost universal is that we encourage many young people to enroll who are not really interested in learning. In order to keep such students in school, institutions water down content, inflate grades, and introduce courses that are more for entertainment than education. As far as our "investment" in higher education goes, it seems that we are well past the point of diminishing returns.

NAS3:08 PM

Star-Crossed Lacrosse at Duke
John E.R.Staddon, Duke University

It happened while I was in Texas -- the lacrosse thing at Duke. Fox News ran the same pictures and almost the same story over and over again. There was an item on the front page -- the front page -- of The New York Times. And what a great story for the drive-by media!

When I returned to Duke, flippant comments to senior administrators were received with stony stares. No one, it seemed, was amused, even though all we had then, and almost all we have now, was an allegation -- horrific, admittedly -- but not yet a fact. The trouble caused by this not-yet-and-perhaps-never fact for Duke, for the lacrosse players, potentially for the complaining woman is pretty amazing.

So why all the fuss? First, lets be clear that the Duke administration has acted thoroughly responsibly. They didnt respond immediately because the facts were unclear. Indeed, the key ones still are. When they did respond, in a statement by President Brodhead that radiates decency, the media calmed down a bit but many still criticize him for not following the practices of Judge Roy Bean (first we hang em, then we try em!). Brodhead acted on those facts that do seem well-established: inexcusably rowdy behavior by the lacrosse team, under-age drinking and a student e-mail that managed to be at once vile, puerile, and sinister.

So is there a systemic problem? If so, what are its sources? Beats me, I have to say, but here are a few possible ingredients.

• Drinking: The legal age is 21; it used to be 18. Why the change? Because the Federal government wont release highway funds unless states pass laws raising the age to 21 (the Feds cannot do this by statute but, as in the recent case of military recruiters access to law schools, they can do it through the power of the purse). It has to do with drunk driving, which is presumed to be more of a problem with younger people. But because these laws are imposed from the center rather than arrived at democratically, state by state, there is no social consensus and 18-year olds feel able to drink if they can. And they do. The largely successful attempt by residential colleges like Duke to control under-age drinking on campus has caused it to move off-campus, which has probably resulted in (you guessed it) more not less drunk driving by the young.
• Political correctness: Duke, like most other elite universities is as anti-racist and anti-sexist as it is possible to be, short of violating students' free-speech rights. Indeed, not a few schools do violate those rights in search of a perfect racism-free campus. Even hinting at well-established facts about race or gender differences can cause trouble, as Harvards ex-president, Larry Summers found to his cost recently. Well, sorry, but there are average differences between men and women and people of different races (Ready for it? Blacks tend to be darker than whites!). What drunken young rebel, when confronted with prohibitions that violate common sense will not be tempted to say -- yell even! -- the unspeakable and, perhaps, do the un-doable? His actions may be wrong, but their cause is not necessarily just white male privilege.
• Feminism: In search of fair treatment for women, some branches of the feminist movement seem to argue that apart from essentially trivial physiological differences, men and women are really the same -- women are not physically weaker, not less impulsive, not more nurturing and not more interested in personal relationships. One by-product of this belief has been the erosion of traditional idea of chivalry: that women are the weaker sex, that men should treat women more respectfully than they treat other men, and so on (see Harvards Harvey Mansfields new book on Manliness!). When the aggression typical of many encounters between young males is directed at women, the weakness of the opponent and the added ingredient of sexual attraction obviously makes a combustible mix.
• Academics and athletics: Many academics like to watch college sport; few academics are really persuaded that big-time inter-collegiate athletics belong on the campus of an elite university. At Duke, the lacrosse incident has unfortunately looked to some of my colleagues like a heaven-sent opportunity to take a whack at college athletics. Most of the faculty support our President and sympathize with him in dealing with a difficult problem made almost impossible by the media frenzy. But a few view it as a great chance to bring the athletics program to heel perhaps even to get rid of a chunk of it entirely. Of course, without an athletic program to monopolize their youthful enthusiasm, our students would have time and energy to engage in the educational street activities we have seen so much in evidence in France in recent days.

NAS9:12 AM