Bail Out the Education System!

Recently, a lot of discussion has taken place about Wall Street and automotive company bailouts. Another bailout, a worthy one, is beginning to finally get some press. It is not breaking news that the education system in the United States has struggled for some time now, particularly when compared to the education systems of other nations around the world. According to a Washington Post article published late last year, as the cost of college soars, the United States is lagging behind much of the world in terms of providing access to higher education.

During the past two decades, some other nations have made the kind of effort to improve access to higher education that the United States undertook in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, said Patrick Callan, president of the research group.

In the United States, by contrast, college costs keep rising; more students are dropping out of high school; and large gaps remain in the success rates of students of different races, incomes and states. “We’re one of the few countries where our older population is better educated than the younger population,” Callan said.

The study gives a failing grade for college affordability to every state but California, which received a C because of the relatively low cost of its community colleges. Researchers said the percentage of an average family’s income needed to pay for a public four-year college has risen from 20 to 28 percent, after financial aid. For community colleges, the burden has risen from nearly 20 percent to nearly 25 percent.

…In the past decade, student borrowing has more than doubled, and as the economy worsens, the researchers warned, many states have predicted cuts in higher education funding.

Since the early 1980s, college tuition and fees have jumped nearly 440 percent, far more than health-care, food, housing and transportation costs. The median family income rose less than 150 percent.

So, while we can pour as much money as we want into the current economic crises, the failure to fund and improve our education systems means one thing: our future generations will be grossly unprepared to compete with their better-educated, better-trained, and overall superior peers from around the world. What does that mean? The financial “crisis” we are experiencing today may be nothing compared to the crises we may face a generation or two down the road. Imagine unemployment soaring as Americans can’t get jobs because they can’t compete with superior foreign applicants. Imagine our economy crumbling as companies leave our shores for better opportunities in Europe or Asia.

To some degree, this is already happening, particularly in the sciences. A recent UK study revealed that only 28% of British 16-18-year-olds believe that science is a relevant career choice, and no survey is needed to see that similar attitudes prevail in the United States. The majority of Postdocs and Graduate Students I work with on a daily basis and interact with at meetings are Asian, mostly from India, China and Korea. The reason is simple: science is still perceived as a meaningful, dignified, and, perhaps most importantly, well-paid career choice in these countries, while the negative stigmas that are associated with science in much of the western world are nowhere to be found. A lot could be said about the lack of funding for science in the US and the poor salaries scientists endure compared to the enormous time we put into our education and careers. What I want to talk about here is the education process. The negative stigmas associated with science are ingrained in our youth early: science is too hard, not interesting, not fun…. It is true that science is hard, but it most certainly is interesting and fun! We can change these perceptions with early education. Science is all too often presented as boring and stuffy, and the image of a scientist is the disheveled, lab coat-wearing Einstein look-alike. Who can blame kids for immediately coming to negative conclusions. When taught properly, science can be seen as an interesting series of puzzles, in many ways like a game, but potentially a game of life and death. Depending on the field of science, of course, there may be good guys and bad guys (the good guys being the scientists and the bad guys being, for example, deadly diseases the scientists are trying to cure). There is a great deal of strategy involved in defeating the villains, as there is in the most popular video games of today, which kids (and many scientists I know) devote almost all of their free time to playing. In the end, if presented properly, the difficulty involved in science can actually be a good thing because it provides a challenge, and we all know that kids are quickly bored by easy games. This analogy may be tedious, but it makes sense to me.

But all of this is for nothing if our education system continues to fail our youth. Therefore, the bailout of the education system is a bailout I can firmly stand behind. Of course, simply throwing money at a problem never actually solves the problem. Our education system needs an overhaul on a variety of fronts, but an affordable education must be a top priority.

Robert Reich provides more justification for bailing out the education system:

It’s absurd. We’re bailing out every major bank to get financial capital flowing again. But we’re squeezing the main sources of our nation’s human capital. Yet America’s future competitiveness and the standard of living of our people depend largely our peoples’ skills, and our capacities to communicate and solve problems and innovate – not on our ability to borrow money.

What’s more, our human capital is rooted here, while financial capital moves around the globe at the speed of an electronic blip. Right now global capital markets are frozen, but the big money — mostly in Asia and the Middle East — and will come here, bailout or no bailout. At this point it’s coming back as purchases of dollars or in the form of T-bills that are financing the Wall Street bailout. Eventually American assets will become so cheap that the money will come rushing here to buy up the bargains.

It’s our human capital that’s in short supply. And without adequate public funding, the supply will shrink further. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying funding is everything when it comes to education. Obviously, accountability is important. But without adequate funding we can’t attract talented people into teaching, or keep class sizes small enough to give kids a real chance to learn, or provide them with a well-rounded curriculum, and ensure that every qualified young person can go to college.

So why are we bailing out Wall Street and not our nation’s public schools and colleges? Partly because the crisis in financial capital is immediate while our human capital crisis is unfolding gradually. But maybe it’s also because we don’t have a central banker for America’s human capital – someone who warns us as loudly as Ben Bernanke did a few months ago when he was talking about Wall Street’s meltdown, of the dire consequences that will follow if we don’t come up with the dough.

Dire consequences, indeed.