A modest proposal to reverse the educational decline of the US

In his Sept. 5, 2023 article in the New York Times, “Americans Are Losing Faith in the Value of College. Whose Fault Is That?”, Paul Tough makes a series of worrying points:

?https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/05/magazine/college-worth-price.html

Having finished my degrees (BS and Masters) in Spain at a cost of maybe $1,000 for the entire thing, I’m deeply worried that the US is falling behind on education. What follows is a realistic proposal on how to jump-start the entire educational process here.

Worrisome Statistics & Data

In only a decade: Americans’ feelings about higher education have turned sharply negative. The percentage of young adults who said that a college degree is very important fell to 41 percent from 74 percent. Only about a third of Americans now say they have a lot of confidence in higher education. Among young Americans in Generation Z, 45 percent say that a high school diploma is all you need today to “ensure financial security.” And in contrast to the college-focused parents of a decade ago, now almost half of American parents say they’d prefer that their children not enroll in a four-year college.

People not going to college?

As recently as 2016, 70 percent of high school graduates were still going straight to college; now the figure is 62 percent.

Lagging behind the rest of the world

Outside the United States, meanwhile, higher education is more popular than ever.

• In Britain, the number of current undergraduates has risen since 2016 by 12 percent. (Over the same period, the American figure fell by 8 percent.)
• In Canada, 67 percent of adults between 25 and 34 are graduates of a two- or four-year college, about 15 percentage points higher than the current American attainment rate.
• On average, countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development have increased their college-degree attainment rate among young adults by more than 20 percentage points since 2000, and 11 of those countries now have better-educated labor forces than we do

No crushing costs or debt?

In Canada and Japan, public-university tuition is now about $5,000 a year. In Italy, Spain and Israel, it’s about $2,000. In France, Denmark and Germany, it’s essentially zero.

In the US, the average total cost of attending a private college, including living expenses, is about $58,000 a year. After financial aid, the average net price for private-college students is about $33,000 a year; at public institutions, it is about $19,000.

Does college still create wealth in the US??

Wealth –and you should read the original to see the new way of analyzing the worthiness of college—is not assured at all due to these prices and high debt loads most students carry to finish their education.

But... I don't need no stinking college parchment! Not!

What about jobs with NO college degree? After all, 45% of Gen Z students believe that a high school diploma is all you need.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that fewer than 10,000 new plumbing jobs (an example of a great paying job that requires no college degree), will be created in the United States between now and 2031.

The fastest-growing jobs available to those with only a high school diploma, meanwhile, are mostly low-wage service jobs: home health aides (924,000 new jobs by 2031), food-service workers and waiters (570,000 new jobs), restaurant cooks (419,000 new jobs) and warehouse workers (358,000 new jobs). None of these jobs have a median salary above $31,000 a year.

At the same time, economists expect demand for American college graduates to keep rising faster than colleges can keep up, which means the college wage premium is likely to increase as well.

A $1.2 trillion hit?

Tough also mentions that there is a larger cost when millions of students do so — especially as other nations keep charging ahead. Holtz-Eakin and Lee calculated the price to the American economy of the millions of missing college grads they are projecting: $1.2 trillion in lost economic output by the end of the decade.

My proposal

1. Offer every graduating student with grades in the upper 25% of their graduating class ONE completely free year in a certified trade school or their community college (their choice) to study anything they want. The upper 25% will assure the US of getting the best students and will create a healthy competition for grades.

2. If the student gets a grade of 3.7 or better (out of 4) the government will then give them a second year for free and so on until they graduate. This way, if a student makes an effort, their country rewards them. If a student gets a grade below 3.7, they can remain in school, but the government doesn’t pay for it.

3. The government also creates an educational channel in YouTube, specifically for trades, where students can turn (via a nominal subscription fee of $10 or $15/month) to learn and/or freshen their learning with videos.

4. The government also creates an AI driven educational platform where students can register at will: either because they got less than a 3.7 in college, or as supplementary learning. Again, this would be a nominal subscription of perhaps $10 or $15/month.

In short:

1. Education on demand but against strict qualifying rules.

2. Education on demand accessible to everyone using inexpensive and scalable platforms

Funding

At the scale we are talking about $10 or $15/month should make it self-funding within 2 or 3 years. But the seed and some of the operational money comes from the armed forces. Today, we have 5 distinct arms (Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, Space) which get about $800 billion in funding yearly. Reduce funding by 5% by rationalizing expenditures and probably merging some back-office operations. Most of us in the private industry were often hit by demands of 20% in savings on more, so a 5% should be absolutely doable. The resulting $4 billion is enough to create a pilot program targeting the top students in the country. As the program grows, it also cascades down.

The US is in real danger of lagging behind other countries in tech. This situation is exacerbated not only by diminishing higher education, but also by the reaction against higher education. We need to recuperate the competitiveness that built the nation.

If you are a college or university interested in exploring the idea, or an investor who would like to explore creating a pilot, let's discuss. I have done the numbers on payouts, costs, content creation, use of AI and more to discuss in depth.