While many of the presidential contenders–including President Obama himself–have shared their view on higher education, Mitt Romney has been comparatively silent. But earlier this week, he answered a question about high tuition:
“Don’t just go to one that has the highest price. Go to one that has a little lower price where you can get a good education,” Romney told the student, according to the newspaper’s report. “And hopefully you’ll find that. And don’t expect the government to forgive the debt that you take on.
“It would be popular for me to stand up and say I’m going to give you government money to pay for your college, but I’m not going to promise that,” the former Massachusetts governor said.
New York Times editorial writer David Firestone was quick to condemn these remarks:
The advice was pretty brutal: if you can’t afford college, look around for a scholarship (good luck with that), try to graduate in less than four years, or join the military if you want a free education.
That’s the face of modern Republican austerity. Don’t talk about the value of higher education to the country’s economic future, and don’t bother to think about ways to make it more accessible to strapped families. Tell students not to take on more debt than they can afford, wish them well, and move on.
I fail to see what’s so brutal about Romney’s advice–or as most people would call it, common sense. Increasingly, students spend too many years in college pursuing majors that don’t yield jobs while racking up piles and piles of debts. Government intervention and funding to students and universities has completely failed at keeping costs down; on the contrary, public money has driven up the cost of obtaining a college degree while the value of the degrees themselves continues to fall.
Firestone faults Romney for not being willing to commit even more taxpayer dollars to the higher education sector. But Firestone’s contention that we can improve the country’s economic prognosis simply by churning out more college graduates is false, and has been rejected by one of the most passionate defenders of government spending and stimulus: his NYT colleague Paul Krugman. In a column from last year, Krugman wrote:
But there are things education can’t do. In particular, the notion that putting more kids through college can restore the middle-class society we used to have is wishful thinking. It’s no longer true that having a college degree guarantees that you’ll get a good job, and it’s becoming less true with each passing decade. …
What we can’t do is get where we need to go just by giving workers college degrees, which may be no more than tickets to jobs that don’t exist or don’t pay middle-class wages.
Brutal, Professor Krugman. Just brutal.
Higher education has been on many candidates’ minds lately. Read more about President Obama’s views here. Read more about Rick Santorum’s views here. And here are Biden’s thoughts, just for the heck of it.
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