Niches vs. Competition

I was talking to a student, and I was articulating some of the points that I make on this blog, concerning the folly of trying to send everyone to college or get everyone to succeed equally in the same programs.  He asked me if I believe that in any group of people there will inevitably be a winner and a loser.  I paused, and tried to come up with something less stark, and came up with this:

If everyone tries to succeed at the same thing then there will indeed be a winner and a loser, because it really is that zero-sum and stark when everyone is trying for the same path.  But if people find their niches, then you can avoid that brutal competition because people mostly avoid going head-to-head.  The only time competition really matches econ 101 and really gets at the absolute efficiency limits of the most ideal econ models is when everyone tries to go head-to-head.  When people find niches then you still get a good outcome for consumers via choice, and there's a moderate level of efficiency so they do get the benefit of innovation and (some) cost competition, but it isn't so brutal that everyone's profits go to zero (when opportunity costs are taken into account) and nobody can get ahead and everyone is constantly sweating.  The best growth opportunities come via niches.

If we try to send everyone to a classic 4 year degree program then the world will be a stark place.  Credential inflation will strip away any value from education.  If we recognize that people need a variety of paths, and that no one path is for everyone, then we can develop people to their potential without sacrificing quality and rigor.  I hope we go for sanity and embrace a diverse range of paths for people.  The worst part of US economic and social policy for the past few decades has been the belief that increasing the production of 4 year degrees is the only way forward in a post-industrial economy.

How we got here

There's another, equally priceless article on degree inflation in the Chronicle today:

Decades ago, there were many ways to train for work, good work, and educational tracking played a role. Proponents of the practice said it let instructors focus on the needs of students at specific levels of ability and prevented "teaching to the middle," which didn’t sufficiently challenge advanced students. 

But by the 1970s and ’80s, civil-rights advocates and education researchers were pointing out that minority students were disproportionately set on lower-level tracks, taught by weaker teachers, relegated to rote learning, and burdened with the perception that they were dumb. Studies found that those students scored lower on tests than they would have if they’d been tracked higher. 

The GI Bill and the explosion of community colleges in the 1960s had already expanded the understanding of whom college was for, and in 1983 the presidential report "A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform" was the "educational equivalent of a declaration of war," says Mr. Carnevale, of Georgetown. Comparing students’ performance on standardized tests in the United States and other countries, the Reagan administration sparked an obsession with achievement, the dismantling of vocational tracks, and the mantra of college for all, he says. To remain competitive and stem a moral and economic decline, America needed to raise its standards. 

Schools began to push general education as preparation for college. "In a fit of progressiveness, we threw away vocational education," Mr. Carnevale says. Instead, he says, the curriculum favored "ever higher levels of abstraction in subject matters where it is not clear why you learn them at all until you are ready to go to college."

(Emphasis added.)

As is so often the case in the US, the legacy of our racist original sins is so bitter that even the fixes wound us (as pointed out in the emphasized part.).  As much as I support, at least in principle, some sort of European-style tracking system that gives equal respect to vocational and academic preparation, in the back of my mind there's the nagging acknowledgment that America has never been good about separating its people into different groups and treating them differently.  We have a lot of baggage there.  OK, Europe has the baggage of its class system, anti-Semitism, and countless bloody wars on their soil, but the class system and anti-Semitism both separated their societies into a large group and a fairly small group. Educational tracking, dividing the society into a few groups of roughly comparable size, doesn't really hit the same notes.  OTOH, racial segregation in the US divided society into two groups of comparable size.  (Yes, African Americans are only 12% of the population nationally, but in the areas where most black people live they are a much larger percentage of the population.)  And the other original sin, against the Native Americans, involved expulsions of pretty large groups of people.

And there's more than just ancestral guilt and bad baggage here.  One thing that we Americans have always done well is assimilate immigrants.  We're amazing at it, which is pretty strange when you consider just how much racist baggage we have.  Nonetheless, we're really, really good at it. So good at it that we get scolded for favoring assimilation over diversity.  (This is usually said by somebody using a PC jargon that is itself a distinctively American thing, once more showing just how awesome we are at assimilating people.) Giving people chances to break with the past is what we do and we do it better than anyone else.  So it's woven into our cultural DNA that your fate shouldn't be decided in middle school.

So I can comfortably say that we've gone too far with "College for Everyone", but then I pause and realize that all of the other options, if taken too far (and this is America, the land of Big Gulp sodas--we take everything too far) could put us on some bad paths.

ADDENDUM: Some more choice quotes from the article.

Our economic and social problems stem more from the wide gap between rich and poor, and jobs sent overseas, says Ms. Ravitch, than from too few people pursuing a bachelor’s degree. We’re projecting economic insufficiencies onto the education system, she says. "The college-for-all talk is like fairy dust sprinkled over the conversation."

Yes, as I keep saying, you can't make education the sole fix for economic problems.

Inflation: Not just for currency and balloons

The Chronicle has a fascinating article on South Korea, a country that sends a vast proportion of its students to college:

Seongho Lee, a professor of education at Chung-Ang University, criticizes what he calls "college education inflation." Not all students are suited for college, he says, and across institutions, their experience can be inconsistent. "It’s not higher education anymore," he says. "It’s just an extension of high school." And subpar institutions leave graduates ill prepared for the job market. 

A 2013 study by McKinsey Global Institute, the economic-research arm of the international consulting firm, found that lifetime earnings for graduates of Korean private colleges were less than for workers with just a high-school diploma. In recent years, the unemployment rate for new graduates has topped 30 percent.

The part about earnings makes sense.  I would expect that in a country that trains too few people for vocations you'll see higher earnings for people in vocational paths than people in lower-ranked universities.

Moreover, expanding access to higher education has not decreased the stakes of competition.  If anything, it's raised the stakes:

Because a degree itself isn’t valuable currency, competition has heated up for admission to the handful of elite universities, most of which in Korea are public. Mr. Jho, the Fulbright scholar, says the scramble for limited places can begin in elementary school. Parents who have the money to give their children an edge spend as much as a sixth of their income on hagwon, or private cram schools. Those who cannot afford extra tutoring are at a disadvantage. "It’s a stratified system," says Mr. Jho. "It’s a system that is privileged for the middle and upper class."

This is a point that I made repeatedly in my blogging about Lani Guinier's Tyranny of the Meritocracy: You cannot easily get rid of competition.  You can modulate it to a certain extent, but people are going to compete, one way or another.  Credential inflation is real, and it escalates competition because it makes it harder to distinguish oneself.