Tag: education

We’ve Muffed Post-Secondary Education

By Mike Koetting January 18, 2026

This is the second in a series of posts on how we are bungling the preparation of young people for their lives. Today’s post considers post-secondary education. As noted in the previous post, college student debt is one of the most salient features of young adult society in 2026 America. While this is fueled by the precipitous rise in the cost of college, the bigger problem is that as a society we have misunderstood the economic relationship between college and a good life. This is part of a much bigger problem—what gets taught in college and how—but those are for a different day.

How We Got Here

The problem starts with the fact that historically there was a significant “wage premium” (to use economic jargon) for graduating from college. In the great economic expansion following WWII college graduates did much better economically…and were less likely to wind up in Vietnam.

At the same time, the official US, locked in a geopolitical struggle with Russia, began to worry about the efficacy of American scientific and technical training and engaged in many programs to increase the number of people going to college. It was also a period of starting to address historical divisions in society and one of the politically safest ways to do something was to promote increased educational opportunities as a way of equalizing major income discrepancies.

Then, starting during the Reagan administration, income differentials in the US started to take off. This was due to a series of policy decisions that facilitated exactly such differentials. These policies followed from a set of assumptions about the primacy of capital over labor that led to a significant reconceptualization of how corporations should behave in our society. There should have been a much greater fight over the resulting policy changes since they did not necessarily speak to the well-being of the whole society. Unfortunately, the Democratic Party, the logical–indeed only–group capable of forcing such a reconsideration, itself flirted so heavily with that ideology that no effective opposition was raised.

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Educational Reform and Teachers

By Mike Koetting May 7,2024

I’m a religious reader of the articles published by Bob Melville in The Civic Way, a much more disciplined look at policy issues than my own scattershot set of interests. He has recently undertaken an excellent multi-part series on the challenges facing public education. It’s not a cheery read because public education is facing crises from multiple directions.

His piece on “The Public Teaching Crisis,” however, touched on a couple of my hot buttons, so I thought I would offer some suggestions as to how I would explicate and implement some of his thoughts. These proposals reflect my fundamental beliefs not only about teachers, principals, and educational quality, but also underline broader sentiments on doing the public business, which is much more complicated than people want to accept. These, however, are my own ideas and you can’t blame Bob for them.

Defining Educational Quality

Americans are generally unhappy with the direction of our educational system. However, descriptions of what is wrong vary so much by political ideology, one must assume a fair amount of this dissatisfaction is simply another refection of the broader societal malaise. People would like to imagine that education could fix whatever it is they think wrong with society—around which there is little agreement and much passion. But it will be hard to get public acceptance of education until we figure out how to address the broader disentrancement with our society.

In the meantime, this malaise combines with factors more specific to the educational environment to create a high level of teacher dissatisfaction.

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