It's time to debunk one of the enduring myths about American education: that while our elementary and
secondary schools are generally lousy, our colleges and universities are the best in the world.
The reason usually given to explain this supposed difference in quality is that colleges are subject to competition and choice while elementary and secondary schools are not. We've been hearing this from President Bush, Education Secretary Lamar Alexander, former Yale University president Benno Schmidt, who is now promoting a chain of for-profit schools, and right-wing economist Walter Williams, among others.
But where's the proof that our postsecondary schools are the best in the world? Some point to colleges and universities with outstanding departments in various fields, like Harvard, Yale and Stanford -- and it's true these places are tops. But if we follow that line of reasoning, we could decide the same thing about our high schools. Bronx High School of Science and Stuyvesant High School in New York City also are among the best anywhere. However, as with the top-level colleges and universities, there are few such high schools, and the students who attend them are carefully selected.
U.S. colleges could also be considered the best because their graduates outperformed those in other countries, but this claim would be difficult to substantiate. There are no tests administered, here or abroad, to establish the value added by earning a college degree. The closest thing for U.S. students is Literacy: Profiles of America's Young Adults, a 1985 study by The National Assessment of Educational Progress. It provides information about the basic skills of young people 21 to 25 years old, including college graduates and people with a high school diploma only.
The study shows that college graduates scored a lot higher than high school graduates - though it's impossible to tell how much of this difference was a result of what college added and how much reflected the fact that kids who went to college already had better skills than kids who did not. The shocking thing is what these college graduates were not able to do. For example, 40 percent were unable to look at a simple restaurant menu and figure out how much change they would get from $3. 00 if they ordered soup and a salad and left a 10 percent tip.
By contrast, what students in some other industrialized countries have to know just to get into college is impressive. As National Tests: What Other Countries Expect Their Students to Know (Washington, DC: National Endowment for the Humanities, 1991) tells us, French students have to write lengthy essays in subjects such as philosophy and history and geography. One of the questions in a recent four-hour history exam asked students to write an essay on Soviet domestic policy from 1953 to the present time. A four-hour philosophy exam offered topics like "Is experimental result the test of scientific proof?" Exam questions for German and Japanese students are at a comparable level of difficulty.
We know that only a minuscule number of American students entering college would be able to handle questions like these. But what we should ask here is how many students graduating from college could? Is it possible that students in other developed countries know more when they enter college than most of our students do when they leave?
The U.S. has some excellent colleges and universities where a relatively few students get a postsecondary education that may be the best anywhere. But there is no basis for talk about the excellence of our entire higher education system. Students do not have to know much to get into most of our colleges, and there is no evidence that they have to know much to get out.
The standards in all but our best schools are determined by the hunt for students (read: tuition) -- and that is where the competition comes in. Schools that cannot attract top-level students compete for students in the second and third or fourth levels or below. The goal is not to maintain excellence but to get the warm bodies needed to fill the freshman class. (And this willingness on the part of colleges to take what they can get is a major reason why the standards in our high schools are so low.)
There's a lot to be said for an open system that gives students a second or even a third chance to succeed, but we shouldn't confuse openness with excellence. And contrary to what voucher supporters say, colleges with low standards do not go out of business. As long as young people and their families consider a college degree important -- and as long as there are government grants and loans to help finance the education of students going to colleges with the most minimal of standards - such schools can survive and even flourish.
I'm not suggesting that we go back to the time when a college education was something very few people could aspire to. But we need to do something to bring the standards in our colleges and universities up to the extravagant claims that are made for them. And we need to recognize that, if choice and competition have made American higher education what it is today, they are not solutions for what's wrong with our public schools.