Pro-Standards Arguments

Aronowitz writes that “underlying the controversy” over who should get into college “is the sometimes tacit, and often overt argument that college is not for everybody and should not be a ‘right.’ In the public institutions where tuition is much lower than in private schools, although it still provides as much as 80 percent of school budgets, only those who have achieved academic competence should be afforded the privilege of higher education” (103). Furthermore, “The pro-standards arguments” by which those on the right justify excluding poorer students from higher education “are directed, almost exclusively, to public colleges and universities, which account for nearly 70 percent of all enrollments. Unstated, but implied, is that if students and their families can afford elevated tuition fees, and if private schools choose to provide remedial services, as most of them do for the less well prepared, these are not appropriate matters of public concern and should not be objects of public inquiry” (103). Those “pro-standards arguments” rest on the assumption that, since taxes pay for a significant component of public education, public education belongs to the voting public, which should decide who gets to benefit from public education: they are, at heart, economic arguments. When we understand the economic nature of the arguments, Aronowitz’s observation that “The classical expectation — enunciated eloquently by Thomas Jefferson, Frederick Douglass, John Dewey, and more recently, by the civil rights and feminist movements — that in addition to economic opportunity, education may help usher in a more democratic society has, for the time being, vanished from the debate” to the point where “knowledge production and transmission must now justify itself in terms of its economic value or risk oblivion” (123) becomes even more disturbing. Basically, the argument is that (1) higher education is useful only for the economic benefits it offers and (2) those who pay for public higher education ought to be able to exclude poorer people from the economic benefits ostensibly offered by higher education. It’s suddenly much easier to see how we got to the set of circumstances Paul Krugman describes in “The Death of Horatio Alger”: the arguments of those on the right move us towards exacerbating class differences, perhaps because “higher education is an economic and cultural marker that retains its value only if it is a scarce commodity” (Aronowitz 118). We need to see a different form of value for higher education: not as a marker, and perhaps not even as a tool — but as something good even in and of itself, and good for communities of people.