Former President Barack Obama said it at the Democratic Convention in August. Vice President Kamala Harris has been saying it in her recent speeches. And in a speech to the Economic Club of Washington last Thursday, while extolling his initiatives to bring chip manufacturing back to the United States, President Joe Biden described building new massive factories (“fabs”) “bigger than football fields” employing thousands of workers in jobs paying “over $100,000”, and he said with passion and emphasis, “…and you don’t need a college degree!”
The gleeful, emphatic retreat from college degrees has been a thing for a while for our state and national leaders, perhaps first exemplified by former President Donald Trump’s 2016 rallying cry, “I love the poorly educated!” and carried forward by many states (first Maryland under then-Republican Governor Larry Hogan) that have eliminated degree requirements for state jobs. Now the Democrats seem to be trying to out-trump-Trump as an election maneuver and people are cheering them on.
Patricia McGuire
What gives? Seriously, don’t look away from the irony of a scene in which a well-educated and powerful man deliberately downgrades a college education in front of a room full of people who have reaped huge economic and social benefits from the pedigree of elite colleges and universities — with many of them cheering him on.
What are our leaders saying to the millions of young Americans — millions of Black and Brown and low-income white Americans — who will never find a doorway into that prestigious room of power and privilege without college degrees?
Let’s not kid ourselves about this issue. Yes, “workforce education” is important — we do quite a lot of that at Trinity these days — and getting a leg up into good jobs (meaning well-paying jobs) with fewer barriers is great. But what happens five and ten and twenty years from now when that factory worker is still a cog in the wheel, when the pathways to management and executive suites are foreclosed because the worker was told — repeatedly — that “you don’t need a college degree.”
The “workforce over college” movement is a cruel betrayal of the once-fervent aspirations of a nation that believed in the importance of higher learning to educate citizen leaders capable of advancing our Democracy. We as a nation have retreated rapidly from understanding the worth of a college education NOT as a salary line on a PayScale chart but as a means to develop in succeeding generations the intellectual range and depth needed for self-governance in a free nation, the curiosity and ability to engage in research and discovery to foster the power of invention, the broad world view that builds respect and openness to people and cultures unlike ourselves, all talents and characteristics that are essential for a healthy free society to thrive.
True, there is almost no way to quantify the values I just described, and that is a serious problem in our data-obsessed culture that wants to reduce all academic values to a few numerical scores, rating and rankings that sell magazines but have little to do with the actual enlargement of minds and souls for the future of the communities our students will inhabit and, we hope, change for the better.
In the same speech, President Biden asked, rhetorically, “How can we be the strongest nation in the world without leading the world in science and technology?”
How can we possibly do that as a nation if we continue to trash the importance of college?
President Biden then segued from that his question to bragging about building factories for tens of thousands of Americans to work on chip manufacturing.
With all due respect, Mr. President, while those jobs are fine, what we really need are the next generations of scientists and inventors, those with the ability to imagine and design the future chips or whatever will power our technologies a century hence. We can’t get from here to there without a great system of higher education and deep respect for the importance of advanced degrees to keep expanding the research and discovery that leads to civilization-changing innovation.
Sadly — shockingly — for the sake of winning votes, our politicians on both sides of the aisle are dumbing-down America’s future, promising dubious economic security for some workers while robbing many other citizens of their potential to rise into public and private leadership in the future. A higher education is essential for our future leaders to have the knowledge, perspectives, skills and intellectual range to govern well.
We’ve known this for many decades — Harry Truman was the last president without a college degree, and since President Eisenhower in 1953, every president has had a college degree. In fact, of 45 presidents since George Washington, 33 have had college degrees and most others had some advanced education. Pew research tells us that almost all members of Congress have bachelor’s degrees, and a majority have master’s degrees.
Our political leaders need to stop making workforce education a binary choice against attainment of college degrees. BOTH are important to shape the future of our nation.
As we look toward the second half of the 21st Century, we know that the population will be composed of a non-white majority — and already we confront the bitterly divisive backlash to this plain sociological fact in too many states. The drive to eliminate Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) considerations throughout educational institutions is an example of the backlash — and yet, the need for DEI education is even more urgent in light of what we know about the sociological trends of the future. Colleges and universities are the places that, almost uniquely in our society, are structured to explore and open up understanding of human differences, to learn about the history and psychology and language and beliefs of many different populations, to teach our future leaders how to lead communities from tension to harmony despite differences. Relegating large numbers of Americans to factory work alone, instead of inspiring them to pursue higher learning even while they take those jobs, jeopardizes the ability of this nation — the most diverse in history — to find pathways to peace and productivity amid huge diversity.
True, higher education has brought some of this disparagement upon ourselves. We have been entirely too preoccupied with our own competitive postures against each other, allowing big time sports to drain resources and attention from academic excellence and true intellectual achievement, indulging pointless races to the top of magazine charts that cause some institutions to reduce their commitments to low-income students because of a fear that such students will lower retention and graduation rates needed to be #1 on some chart. At some — not all — universities, tuition prices and cost of attendance are ridiculous, keeping those schools very elite because only the wealthy can afford them. Money becomes a surrogate for quality — and so it should be no surprise that the society also makes money in the form of the earnings of our graduates the surrogate measure of our worth as intellectual endeavors.
Perhaps most infuriating for some of us, the most elite institutions have caused national shame for our industry. They have had no good responses to the insidious influence of mega-donors whose agendas have improperly warped the purpose of the university. They have had no good responses to the affirmative action decision of the Supreme Court; hence, their enrollment of Black students has declined precipitously this year. Their voices seem silent on some of the most important issues of our times — indeed, they have accepted the idea of “neutrality” as a convenient scrim to avoid articulating the most fundamental moral principles for a good society to flourish.
Higher education is — or should be — the great counterweight to government in a free society. We are — or should be — a pillar for Democracy to thrive. We are — or should be — the places that create solutions to some of the most difficult problems of our communities and nation, starting with how we turn down the noise and hate and raise up the idea of equal justice for all.
Workforce education has its place, yes. But a job in a factory should not be the end. We need to raise up those workers as future leaders through insisting that they keep learning, that college degrees are attainable for them at many points throughout their professional lives.
Let’s imagine a future in which those factory workers of this era earn the credentials they will need to move up into management, to enter the C-suite, to populate that room full of power and influence in the future. Let’s demand an end to the political dumbing-down of American potential. Let’s restore the expectation of high intellectual attainment through fulfilling America’s once-unyielding promise to make college degrees possible for all in our rising generations. It’s a matter of simple justice for our students today and tomorrow, and responsible planning for the future of this society.
Patricia McGuire is the President of Trinity Washington University located in Washington, D.C.
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