Dennis Prager and Higher Education

This morning Dennis Prager had Charles Murray on his show to talk about his new book on Education. Ever since he did a devastating critique of the welfare system, Murray has been a wise and interesting public intellectual.

Prager has a consistent rap which argues that most students should not go on to college. He bases that on a couple of premises. First, he suggests that colleges (and in this case he is not careful in separating the wheat from the chaff) impose values on their students which are antithetical to conservative values. Second, he says colleges cost too much. Third, he argues that colleges don't offer anything of value. I'm tired of Prager's rap here - and most of the time I find him an intelligent commentator.

Murray's argument seems a lot more subtle than Prager's. First, he says there should be no gatekeepers in deciding who should go to college. Second, at least from the interview he seems quite prepared to look at the college experience in a much more balanced way.

We should be talking about college costs and what college offers to American society. But Prager's constant and increasing irrational attacks on the emotional side of the issue belittles the real issues we should be thinking about. Prager seemed to be arguing that we should eliminate all government provided student aid (although he does not seem to understand that the largest source of aid is state subsidies in public institutions).

A good part of the change in college costs over time have come about because of governmental regulation and demands from parents. As parents and students demanded the end to in loco parentis, they demanded to replace it with what college administrators call "helicopter parenting." When I went to college in the 1960s I saw my parents at Thanksgiving and then Christmas and then in June. Today's generation of parents are constantly involved and demand a whole series of amenities that are expensive to maintain. Obviously there are other things which have affected college costs - some of them based on an inattention to costs by administrators.

I was on the National Commission on College Costs which produced a report analyzing where costs come from and how we could change those dynamics. So I am not just a casual observer. I wish I could spend some time with Prager seeing whether he is as irrational as he sounds or whether with some care and thought he could begin to think about this set of issues with the subtlety that he brings to many other issues.