单选题
Rising College Selectivity
Rising college selectivity doesn"t mean that students are smarter and more serious than in the past, although a few clearly are. It"s a function of excess demand for higher education, occurring at a time of increased financial privatization of the industry.
The recession has only increased demand. The vast majority of students aren"t going to college because of a thirst for knowledge, or even for the cultural and social adventure they hope to have. They"re there because they need a job, and they need to get the credentials—and, one hopes, the knowledge and skills behind the credentials—that will get them into the labor market.
As higher education has become a seller"s market, the institutions in a position to do so are doing what comes naturally: raising their tuitions and their admissions requirements, but at the expense of contributing to the national goal to increase college attainment. The result is that the United States is losing ground in the international race for educational talent, because although we have some of the best institutions in the world, the whole is less than the sum of its parts.
The increasing stratification of higher education is happening on the spending side, as well. As the selective institutions have become more expensive and less attainable, the rest have had to struggle with the responsibility to enroll more students without being paid to do so. Gaps between rich and poor have grown even more dramatically than gaps in entering test scores. While spending is a poor measure of educational quality, we can"t seriously expect to increase educational attainment if we"re not prepared to do something to address these growing inequities in funding.
That said, the educational policy problem in our country is not that the elite institutions are becoming more selective. They are what they are, and they"re getting more like themselves all the time. The problem is on the public policy side. The president and many governors have set a goal to return America to a position of international leadership in educational attainment.
It"s the right goal, we just need a financing strategy to get there. That doesn"t mean just more money, although some more money will be needed. It also means better attention to effectiveness and to efficiency, and to making sure that spending goes to the places that will make a difference in educational attainment. We know how to do it, if we want to.