When scholars write about the history of higher education they generally refer to a handful of milestones, such as the development of land grant universities, coeducational schools, and the G.I. Bill of Rights. To most authorities the advent of community colleges is important, but we often get the feeling that their historical significance is underplayed.
This may be about to change.
The current recession, as reported here frequently, is propelling a mass movement of students into two-year schools. And national media outlets have noticed. Many commentators are beginning to take note of how the educational landscape is being transformed—perhaps permanently. One of the more thoughtful journalists in this category is the respected economics correspondent David Leonhardt of the New York Times. His most recent article (registration) gets into the tangential issues of how to measure what students actually know when they graduate and whether a college education is actually worth it in economic terms. Community colleges are an important component of such discussions these days and it's hard to escape the impression that an important new era is beginning for opinion leaders.
Here are a couple of passages from Mr. Leonhardt's piece.
Along with all this skepticism, though, economic downturns also create one big countervailing force that pushes people toward college: many of them have nothing better to do. They have lost their jobs, or they find no jobs waiting for them after high school. In economic terms, the opportunity cost of going to school has been reduced. Over the course of the 1930s, the percentage of 17-year-olds who graduated from high school jumped to 50 percent, from less than 30 percent. Boys — many of whom would have been working in better times — made up the bulk of the influx. In our Great Recession, students have surged into community colleges.
And:
Earnings may be a flawed measure of an education’s value, but they’re about the only tangible measure we have. And the work that labor economists have done suggests that colleges do indeed deserve credit for much of the earnings gaps between their graduates and everyone else. The median earnings of full-time workers with bachelor’s degrees was nearly $47,000 in 2007, according to the Census Bureau. The median for someone who had attended college but failed to get a four-year degree was nearly $33,000, and the median for a high-school graduate was nearly $27,000. Compare these numbers with the typical education debt that a college student has on graduation day — $20,000 — and it’s clear that a college education is worth the debt.
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