Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Severe Critique of Goldin and Katz Book   [George Leef]

I just came across an article by Arnold Kling and John Merrifield, "Goldin and Katz and Education Policy Failings in Historical Perspective," published last January in Econ Journal Watch. (Hat tip to Dan Klein!)

The book has been widely cited as showing a need for the U.S. to push for increasing college attendance and graduation rates. Kling and Merrifield give it some rough treatment. They point out, inter alia, that Goldin and Katz are much to eager to blame a slowdown in college-graduation rates for increasing income inequality when the deterioration in basic education is a much better explanation.

Also, the authors cast doubt on the implicit assumption G and K make that simply going through college does much to increase a student's human capital. As I have been arguing, the degradation of rigor in many college programs (a.k.a. dumbing down) to keep mediocre to weak students happy and enrolled means that those students can get through their college "studies" without having to improve upon the human capital they had at the end of high school.

Golden and Katz completely miss the harmful changes that governmentalization (as Kling and Merrifield put it) has brought to education — and yet they prescribe more governmentalization.

10/28 04:06 PMShare