Clinton Should Listen to Kaine on Vocational Schools
Hillary’s proposals on debt-free college education would benefit the wealthy at the expense of the poor.
Before he was Hillary Clinton’s running mate Sen. Tim Kaine introduced a bill this spring that would provide more funding for career and technical education. A high-school diploma should not only prepare students for college, he said, but also for “getting a high-skilled job after graduation.” Mr. Kaine, the son of an ironworker and a home-economics teacher, knows the value of learning a trade. But the idea that not everyone should go to college puts him at odds with his new boss.
“Government has stressed college as the path all students should follow, much to the detriment of vocational and technical education.”
Mrs. Clinton says that “every student should be able to graduate from a public college or university in their state without taking on any student debt.” In addition to refinancing the loans of existing borrowers, the former secretary of state promises that community college will be free, that historically black colleges and other minority-serving institutions will get another $25 billion in public funds to help them out of financial trouble, and that child care will be subsidized for parents in school. This plan would cost about $350 billion, but that figure doesn’t include the additional funds state governments will be required to provide to qualify for federal grants. And this money is in addition to the roughly $75 billion that the federal government already provides to support higher education.
No doubt the Democratic ticket would say that college and technical education aren’t mutually exclusive—that every student can choose whichever path best suits his aspirations. But in reality, government has stressed college as the path all students should follow, much to the detriment of vocational and technical education. The U.S.’s drive toward universal higher education has mainly succeeded in dumbing down high-school curricula, creating useless college degrees, indebting students, and leaving far too many young people unprepared for the jobs already available to them.
The high dropout rate is one sign that too many people attend higher-education institutions. Only 56% of college students completed four-year degrees within six years, according to a 2011 report...
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James Piereson is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal