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.
