The president is proposing more higher education (at the community college level) as a cure for our economic woes. Along with some substantial tax increases, of course. But is more college the answer? Or should we, perhaps, be concerned about the quality of the college we already have when, as Douglas Belkin writes at the Wall Street Journal:
Four in 10 U.S. college students graduate without the complex reasoning skills to manage white-collar work, according to the results of a test of nearly 32,000 students.
As with so many policy debates these days, the need is not so much for something new but for competence in the things we already do. As Belkin notes:
On average, [college] students make strides in their ability to reason, but because so many start at such a deficit, many still graduate without the ability to read a scatterplot, construct a cohesive argument or identify a logical fallacy.
So, not more spending to turn out substandard college graduates but remedies for a very expensive educational system that turns out substandard high school graduates.