Creative Class

Two conservative intellectuals have recently raised questions about the value of college for most students. While they come from different starting points, they make the same basic point. I find the sources mildly interesting but I think the basic concept is long overdue. Just as high school needs to be reinvented, so does the undergraduate college model.

Charles Murray from the American Enterprise Institute had a piece in the New York Times about a week ago, which is summarized in these first paragraphs.

Barack Obama has two attractive ideas for improving post-secondary education - expanding the use of community colleges and tuition tax credits - but he needs to hitch them to a broader platform. As president, Mr. Obama should use his bully pulpit to undermine the bachelor’s degree as a job qualification. Here’s a suggested battle cry, to be repeated in every speech on the subject: “It’s what you can do that should count when you apply for a job, not where you learned to do it.”

The residential college leading to a bachelor’s degree at the end of four years works fine for the children of parents who have plenty of money. It works fine for top students from all backgrounds who are drawn toward academics. But most 18-year-olds are not from families with plenty of money, not top students, and not drawn toward academics. They want to learn how to get a satisfying job that also pays well. That almost always means education beyond high school, but it need not mean four years on a campus, nor cost a small fortune. It need not mean getting a bachelor’s degree.

Then yesterday George F. Will had a rambling column in the Washington Post about civil rights court cases that included this nugget:

…many employers, fearing endless litigation about multiple uncertainties, threw up their hands and, to avoid legal liability, threw out intelligence and aptitude tests for potential employees. Instead, they began requiring college degrees as indices of applicants’ satisfactory intelligence and diligence.

This is, of course, just one reason college attendance increased from 5.8 million in 1970 to 17.5 million in 2005. But it probably had a, well, disparate impact by making employment more difficult for minorities. O’Keefe and Vedder write:

“Qualified minorities who performed well on an intelligence or aptitude test and would have been offered a job directly 30 or 40 years ago are now compelled to attend a college or university for four years and incur significant costs. For some young people from poorer families, those costs are out of reach.”

Indeed, by turning college degrees into indispensable credentials for many of society’s better jobs, this series of events increased demand for degrees and, O’Keefe and Vedder say, contributed to “an environment of aggressive tuition increases.” Furthermore they reasonably wonder whether this supposed civil rights victory, which erected barriers between high school graduates and high-paying jobs, has exacerbated the widening income disparities between high school and college graduates.

Maybe this rings true to me because it matches my own experience. I never liked school with its emphasis on memorization, and was bored to tears as a college freshman when I dropped out. By the time I went back years later and got a BA, I was able to test out of about two years worth of courses. By then I had started a couple of small businesses, edited and published two newspapers, been a broadcast engineer, managed a radio station, done a lot of political activism, and had many other jobs. None of these required me to have a college degree at the time.

However, I don’t accept Murray’s thesis that this is primarily Obama’s responsibility - everyone under the sun is trying to pile more work on his desk. Instead it should be the basis of a public conversation involving universities, think tanks, unions, and other interested parties.

What do others think?

So says New York Times’ David Brooks:

The 1980s and 1990s made up the era of the great dispersal. Forty-three million people moved every year, and basically they moved outward — from inner-ring suburbs to far-flung exurbs on the metro fringe … If you asked people in that age of go-go suburbia what they wanted in their new housing developments, they often said they wanted a golf course. But the culture has changed. If you ask people today what they want, they’re more likely to say coffee shops, hiking trails and community centers. People overshot the mark. They moved to the exurbs because they wanted space and order. But once there, they found that they were missing community and social bonds. So in the past years there has been a new trend. Meeting places are popping up across the suburban landscape.There are restaurant and entertainment zones, mixed-use streetscape malls, suburban theater districts, farmers’ markets and concert halls. In addition, downtown areas in places like Charlotte and Dallas are reviving as many people move back into the city in search of human contact…

Barack Obama has said that he would start an infrastructure project that will dwarf Dwight Eisenhower’s highway program. If, indeed, we are going to have a once-in-a-half-century infrastructure investment, it would be great if the program would build on today’s emerging patterns. It would be great if Obama’s spending, instead of just dissolving into the maw of construction, would actually encourage the clustering and leave a legacy that would be visible and beloved 50 years from now.

To take advantage of the growing desire for community, the Obama plan would have to do two things. First, it would have to create new transportation patterns. The old metro design was based on a hub-and-spoke system — a series of highways that converged on an urban core. But in an age of multiple downtown nodes and complicated travel routes, it’s better to have a complex web of roads and rail systems.

Second, the Obama stimulus plan could help localities create suburban town squares. Many communities are trying to build focal points. The stimulus plan could build charter schools, pre-K centers, national service centers and other such programs around new civic hubs… A stimulus package may be necessary, but unless designed with care, its main effect will be to prop up the drying husks of the fall.

More here.

As I mentioned in a previous post here, I was asked to do a Q&A on the Freakonomics blog in the New York Times. Readers posed their questions about “Best Places” studies, and now I’ve posted my responses.

We had more than 60 questions, and they were all interesting and thoughtful. They covered the quality of life in Scandinavia, the effect of our Best Places studies on cities, Wasilla, boring Dallas, and whether I get offered bribes to influence our rankings. In my responses, I addressed the effect of the creative class and how Richard’s work impacts our research in finding the Best Places to live, work, and play.

People asked if I’m holding a bowling bag in the photo which they used. And the answer is yes - and here’s the full picture. I’m including it because this is my homage to Bob Putnam’s “Bowling Alone.” I saw they were going to remodel this local building with these very cool old bowling illustrations, and I had to capture them in case they were gone forever. And sure enough, weeks later they were just a memory.

In yesterday’s New York Times, I noticed a few separate articles about Latin America and was struck by the impact the U.S. financial crisis/downturn is having in the rest of the hemisphere. In several ways, legal and illegal, we have been supporting economies which will now grow more slowly and needed investment will slow down. What effect it may have on reforms is unclear - Thomas Friedman has argued that huge oil revenues actually slows reform in many countries.

Just looking at Mexico, they’ll be losing money three ways:

• Reduced remittances
• Declining oil sales and prices
• More controversially, possibly declining drug smuggling and sales

I’ve provided the headline, URL link and brief quotes from each article. Do these connections make sense to you? What other impacts going both ways across the border might we see?

“Fewer People Entering U.S. Illegally, Report Says”

“..for the first time in nearly a decade, the number of people entering the country illegally was lower than the number arriving through legal channels.”

“Central banks from Mexico to Brazil have projected the biggest declines in remittances from the United States in more than 10 years.”

“In Mexico, where remittances are the second-largest source of foreign income after oil, officials projected a 12 percent drop this year, the biggest on record.”

“After Financial Crisis, Uncertainty and Lectures From Abroad”

“In only a few days, Latin American leaders have gone from schadenfreude to fear. Despite strong economic growth this decade and some aggressive efforts to break free of the American orbit, there is a growing nervousness that once again Latin America cannot escape the globalized connections in the financial sector that run through the United States.”

“…the financial crisis has exploded far beyond Wall Street. Whipsawing global markets are already having a ripple effect across Latin America. As nervous investors pulled money out of emerging markets, Brazil’s currency, the real, plunged 16 percent against the dollar last month, resulting in hundreds of millions of dollars in losses at large food and eucalyptus-pulp exporters that placed bad bets on the direction of the real.”

“Mexican President Proposes Decriminalizing Some Drugs”

“President Filipe Calderon who has made fighting drug traffickers the centerpiece of his administration, proposed legislation on Thursday that would decriminalize the possession of small quantities of cocaine and other drugs for addicts who agreed to undergo treatment.”

“A recent government survey found that the number of drug addicts in Mexico had almost doubled in the past six years to 307,000, while the number of those who had tried drugs rose to 4.5 million from 3.5 million.”

“Drugs used to flow through Mexico to the United States, and they still do, but an increasing amount of those narcotics now stays in Mexico to feed the habits of domestic consumers.”

I’m just extrapolating, but as smuggling gets harder will less illegal immigration, and U.S. recreational drug users cut back their budgets, the cartels will look at selling more in Latin American countries.

“Falling Oil Price Is a Positive Note Amid Turmoil”

“While consumers welcome the decline, which will reduce the nation’s $1.3 billion daily oil import bill, oil producers are wary. Mexico said it might have to cut its budget next year as petroleum revenue dropped. Countries like Russia and Venezuela, which have been riding a wave of energy-fueled nationalism, could be forced to scale back their ambitions and energy projects that require enormous financing could be delayed.”

Graphic via the New York Times.

What a great map that accompanies a very nice NYT review of Bill Bishop’s The Big Sort.

Bishop cites research suggesting that, contrary to the standard
goo-goo exhortations, the surer route to political comity may be less
civic engagement, less passionate conviction. So let’s hear it for the
indifferent and unsure, whose passivity may provide the national glue
we need.

The full review is here.