Gov. Bob McDonnell wants to get a lot of mileage out of higher education in Virginia. He has set the goal of producing 100,000 new college degrees by 2025, an initiative which reflects a national trend. The Lumina Foundation released a report Monday which looks to speed up degree completion to keep McDonnell's and similar plans on track.
Instead of McDonnell's proposal, the Lumina Foundation has what it calls the "Big Goal," which is for 60 percent of Americans to have "high-quality degrees and credentials" by 2025. Lumina released the study "A Stronger Nation through Higher Education" to assess our progress thus far. The report includes aggregated census data and pictures of people flexing. That makes up the first dozen pages. The rest of it is a state-by-state mad lib where specific data are plugged into formulaic sentences.
The numbers for Virginia are a little deflating. Only 43.85 percent of working-age adults 25-64 years old in the state have college degrees, according to the 2010 census. This places Virginia 11th in the country. At this rate, Lumina projects 52.5 percent of the Virginia working-age populace will have degrees in hand by 2025, 7.5 percent below the Big Goal.
The Lumina Foundation wants to achieve the Big Goal, and to do this they present a few options. Fixing high schools will "plug the leaks in the education pipeline," according to the report. Adults who are able should obtain degrees, or finish them if they've started. If these recommendations seems like they would lead to teaching to one Big test, fear not, for Lumina knows this: "Quite frankly, without a sharper focus on the quality of learning, increased degree attainment is meaningless." The foundation has spelled out the skills which should come with degrees, and more generally aims for "actual outcomes" in higher education. But Lumina's model remains two-dimensional.
To Lumina, college degrees are important because they symbolize knowledge. Hence, "in the final analysis, college degrees must represent real learning." Yet by making degrees placeholders to signify skills, Lumina in the same stroke erases the relevance of a degree. Lumina ignores the experience and networking underlining a college degree by emphasizing skills which can be learned off campus. But if students can learn things via other outlets, why bother with a degree? Why, as Lumina proposes, would a horde of working-age adults go back to school to pick up more pieces of paper, when they are already taking home paychecks or have a stack of bills beside them?
Lumina may be interested in the degree-making market because its background is "in the student-loan business," according to The Chronicle of Higher Education. So a private foundation funded from a history of student loans wants more students to go to college.
"Lumina [is] clearly untroubled to be, and to be seen as, players in education policy," according to the Chronicle article, which goes to bemoan private philanthropy. But Lumina is welcome to join the discussion - it interrupts only the status quo. Focusing on degrees, however, again shows diplomas are I.O.U. notes on which foundations or legislators make promises, but without looking at the schools themselves we'll never better education.
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