Open letter to the Wall Street Journal

Editor:

Your claim that the Pell Grant program “flunks” (WSJ, June 18) is twice wrong and insults the millions of grant recipients who thank Pell for making their careers possible. The Pell Grant has not flunked, but is steadily reproving itself in raising women to the majority of college enrollment and degree completions, among other positive outcomes. Nor has it strayed from its original intent. It is higher education that is failing to do its part, and do it well.

In working closely with Senator Pell in passage of the Basic Educational Opportunity Grant – its original name – I know his twin aims were to give the less advantaged access to college and thereby make Americans generally better prepared to work. Higher education has come up short on both counts. Abetted in varying degree by governors and the legislatures, the colleges have put self interest ahead of the national interest, through tuition increases that steadily outpace inflation and undermine college access. This insidious trend has left Pell recipients with less bang for the buck and saddled them with student loans that put their futures at risk.

Colleges undermine their own worth to society and their contribution to national progress by offsetting their tuition increases with too many student loans. As the late chairman of the House Education Committee, Rep. William Ford of Michigan, often said, “Loans only make poor people poorer.” The trillion-dollar loan debt now riding on college graduates and students is no less a threat to the nation’s future than the national debt, because it handicaps the promising talents on whose shoulders that future rides.

The institutions remain slow too at fitting their curricula to domestic job markets and global competition. Six months after the 2011  commencements one fourth of new BA and BS graduates were still looking for jobs, and half of those who were employed were doings jobs that required less than four years of college.

The bachelor’s degree is as antiquated as its name. Both the institutions and the White House need to face realities that demand something else. Higher and faster output of the BA and BS won’t make the American workforce competitive, when our schools trail the world badly in pupil performance in math and science. This failing falls squarely at the doors of higher education, which prepares the math and science teachers. It should come as a challenge to the university as whole, and not be left to the typically underfunded and isolated college of education.

A prime example of the antiquated degree is the bachelor of science in nursing (BSN). Universities keep peddling the aim that every registered nurse should the BSN. Yet for two generations the associate degree in nursing (ADN) programs in community colleges have been delivering the main supply of RNs and bedside nurses, who consistently do as well or better than BSNs on state licensure exams. National competitiveness can ill-afford for universities to track false demand.

The market has proven that universities should chuck the BSN, and build a master-degree nurse (MN) program, tied to a higher exam for licensure, that enables ADNs to complete training in the advanced specializations, from surgery to pediatrics.  It would give the rest of the university a model on fitting other disciplines more closely to the market realities facing Americans in global competition.

Frank Mensel, June 2012