With a rising high school junior in the house, my family is increasingly awash in the trappings of a college selection.
Some university or other hits him up via snail mail a few times a week, and still another college seems to find its way to his email inbox daily. This past week, I attended a college night at his high school and took note of the way the counselors spoke about choosing a place to pursue a degree:
Do you want a school with a small enrollment, a medium-size college, or a large university?
Do you want to study in an urban setting, a rural one, or a suburban area?
Do you want a liberal arts college or a research university? Or maybe a technical college where you can learn a lucrative vocation?
Do you want to matriculate in-state, in a neighboring state or across the country?
Do you already know what you want to study, or do you want a place where you can keep more options open?
Do you want a place with lots of school spirit? Big-time athletics? An engaged alumni network to help with internships and job offers? A place where professors are more engaged in teaching or in high-level research?
The range of choices might bewilder some people trying to sort through them – don’t worry, there’s an app for that – but hardly any of it should come as a surprise. The very first part of a student’s college experience is spending time sorting through the options to find the perfect fit.
As I sat through the presentation, the only thing that struck me as odd was that most Georgians don’t get to have these conversations about their child’s education – their K-12 education, that is. They are simply assigned to a school according to their home address, and that’s that.
It is illogical to have hardly any say in the matter from kindergarten through high school, when upon graduation students have virtually unlimited choices.
No one would force prospective college students to attend the institution closest to their home address. Nor would anyone hedge that by saying, “unless you have plenty of money to pay for it all yourself.”
None of the arguments against giving families more K-12 options hold up when you contrast it with college.
Both public K-12 and public postsecondary schools receive direct taxpayer funding.
Taxpayer-funded scholarships – from the federal Pell Grant to Georgia’s HOPE Scholarship – can be spent at public or private colleges. That even includes some religious institutions and colleges outside Georgia.
Colleges and universities have more facilities to maintain, and thus more fixed costs to cover in the face of fluctuating enrollment, than public elementary, middle and high schools.
Competition among colleges doesn’t seem to have had any negative effects on the employability of educators. On the contrary, it offers them a thriving market to find the campus that best suits their needs and ambitions, too.
Often, we contrast the needs of the “student” and the “system” when we debate expanding educational freedom for K-12 pupils. But even a superficial comparison reveals it’s not about preserving “a” system at all, but rather the particular K-12 system we have.
Our higher education system, on the other hand, isn’t threatened by having to compete for students. It thrives on that.
Even if you believe it indulges some excesses in the name of that competition – the proverbial posh dorm rooms and pricey student activity centers – those are preferable to the cost of keeping students in K-12 public schools with appallingly low student achievement.
The higher education system also illustrates how choices we can’t imagine today in K-12 would be practically inevitable if students had more freedom to move about. All of those factors that my son’s college counselor talked about? Those wouldn’t exist in a world where students were simply assigned to colleges.
Changing the way we think about K-12 education is worth more than the old college try.