Education, Citizenship and Need

I spent the middle of this week in Colorado at an Aspen Institute conference on higher education. It was great (the conference and Aspen both) and a couple of ideas really stuck with me.

One came from economist (and ES non-resident senior fellow) Tony Carnevale, who made the point that in America, work is the essential obligation of citizenship. Not (as is often said) voting--lots of people don't vote and there are few policies or social norms that penalize non-voting. Work, on the other hand--you're expected to work, and the consquences of not working are severe, more so (often much more so) than in other societies. And given that the ability to work productively is increasingly tied to education, preparation for work--education--is increasingly a non-negotiable obligation of citizenship too.

People understand this, which is why the percentage of beginning high schools students (and their parents) who expect to go to college now hovers near 90 percent, with similar numbers for students of differing race/ethnicity. As public opinion researcher Daniel Yankelovich noted, this puts consumers in an interesting relationship with higher education. They generally admire colleges and universities, for good reasons. But they also understand that they need higher education, because they can't go anywhere else for the training and credentials that open the door to economic opportunity. They feel like they have a right to be able to enroll in an affordable college that meets their needs. They're increasingly frustrated by the fact that college costs more and more--and they see those rising costs as stemming from the fact that higher education essentially has them over a barrel. This creates a danger of growing public resentment that could undermine the good will on which so much of higher education's elevated standing is based.

Yankelovich drew a parallel to research he conducted for AT&T back in the 70s, when it was Ma Bell. People would get enraged over problems with their phone service, he said, not because the problems were so terrible in an absolute sense, but because they couldn't not have phone service and they couldn't buy phone service from anyone else. They felt powerless, and people really don't like to feel powerless. While I grew up in the post-Bell breakup era, I've certainly had the same reaction to various cable television providers over the years--those %#%&*!s made me wait five hours to turn my service on and they still jack up prices by eight percent every year. In the grand scheme of things it didn't matter much--what's a few hours and a few bucks a month? But--particularly in the pre-satellite dish era--it was the fact that I had no choice that got my goat.

All of which makes me think that if higher education doesn't come to grips with the problem of runaway cost increases, a combination of growing public resentment and new organizations clamoring to get into the market will change the post-secondary landscape more quickly than some might imagine, in ways that are unforseeable and with consequences that society would do well to avoid.