“Empowering the New American Worker” on Dec. 15. The book advocates pro-market solutions to economic problems, and policy analyst Neal McCluskey wrote the chapter called “Higher Education.”
McCluskey holds a doctorate in public policy and serves as director for Cato’s Center for Academic Freedom, according to hisHe made the case that the United States’ current higher education policy is “counterproductive for many American workers, producing ballooning college prices, leading employers to demand credentials they don’t need, and failing to provide commensurate increases in knowledge or skills.”McCluskey puts some of the blame on unnecessary degrees.
“The system forces people to get credentials for positions that probably don’t need them,” he said in a telephone interview Jan. 10 with. “If you are reasonably certain that you could go to college and study something that is in demand and finish, you should go. But we should not have a system where you need jump through hoops to get those jobs.”
He also emphasized the dangers of accreditation, entrenched in our system because the government requires it to grant student aid.He advised that accreditation should guide students’ college choices through giving them valuable information rather than simply making some colleges financially off-limits.
While government loans are not advisable, “if [government agencies] are going to be the lenders, they should assess somebody’s ability to enroll in a program and succeed instead of giving out…loans regardless of whether they are going to succeed,” he said.
100% right. The price of anything rises in concert with the amount of money available to pay for it. And government is an unlimited source of money.
Or in the interim, hold the institutions’ endowments responsible for loan defaults and a percentage penalty for low graduation rates. Perhaps, quality of education would improve and non-education employee bloat reduced.