<p>Beliavsky is always whining about how wasteful it is to let people who are unprepared (and dark-skinned and/or poor) into college. But I have yet to see him be specific about what he thinks an acceptable alternative is, and whether it exists in the real world.</p>
<p>I agree with him this far: In an ideal world, not everyone should go to college at 18. Not every productive job in the world requires a college education, and not every kid is temperamentally suited to going to college. The problem is, there aren’t a lot of good alternatives anymore. Trades unions used to run really good apprenticeship programs, but – ooops! – we don’t really have unions anymore. The for-profit trade school market is fraught with exploitation and fraud, and is almost purely a device for hoovering up government subsidies. High schools do such an inconsistent job with their students that employers who shouldn’t need more than high school graduates (for jobs that 80 years ago went to kids with 8th-grade educations) are requiring AA degrees, or even BAs, in order to ensure themselves of sufficient skill levels.</p>
<p>So, Brandon’s hopes may have been dashed when his criminal justice degree didn’t land him a career-track job fast enough, but what would he have been doing if he hadn’t gone to college? Working variable hours for minimum wage and no benefits in retail, getting paid under the table as a day-laborer, or earning his living in the criminal economy? Or maybe he could have deployed a few tours in Afghanistan and Iraq . . . . (That’s not such a bad option. The military still DOES do a lot of training of non-college-grads. But it’s hardly an option that has never led to dashed hopes, and dashed lots of other things, too.)</p>
<p>The data seems to show that, on average at least, the Brandons of the world are still much better off going to college than not, although of course what is true for a population won’t necessarily be true for every individual in it. That the cost of college is going up faster than the benefits only means that, for increasing numbers of people, a college education may fail to help them out of poverty. But the alternative to a college education is simply that, poverty. </p>
<p>Beliavsky is apparently fine with that; I’m not.</p>