College Exodus & Academic Promise

With more Americans than ever before attending college, proportionally fewer graduates seem to emerge from those campuses.

“We have a 28-percent college-completion rate in the United States,” Harvard economist Benjamin Friedman said last month at the American Enterprise Institute. Accuracy in Media’s chairman, Don Irvine, found that the NCAA put the graduation rate at closer to 70 percent, although the association did so in a barely decipherable statistical fashion.

This information comes on the heels of survey results from the American Council of Trustees and Alumni showing that many students allege they receive political messages in classes. Half of the students in the ACTA survey say that their classrooms are tilted to the left.

Dr. Friedman himself leans in this direction but he is a brilliant economist whose respect for hard data borders on veneration. In other words, he approaches his work in a manner that we expect a genuine intellectual to display. That approach has led him to make pronouncements not frequently heard from Cambridge.

“At the time of the partition of Korea, the North was rich and the South was poor,” Dr. Friedman told the Washington, D. C. audience at AEI. “Since that time, South Korea has gone from negligible income to 40 percent of the U. S. standard.” A comparison of communist North Korea with its capitalist southern neighbor which favors the latter is a study that most academics are loathe to make, particularly in the Bay State.

Dr. Friedman also admits that tax cuts lead to capital formation. Still, in his book, The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, he lauds the Clintonian 1990s and rues the Reaganite 1980s, AEI president Christopher DeMuth pointed out.

“Market mechanisms left to their own devices will underprovide economic growth,” Dr. Friedman said. He indicated that this is a hypothesis which he frequently shares with students. But unlike many left-leaning economists, he will entertain doubt.

“When was the last time that we had a purely market-driven economy?,” I asked him. “In the United States, probably never,” he answered.

“Let me address what I think is your unspoken subtext,” he said. “There are government policies that retard economic growth.”

Dr. Friedman sees peril even in these apparently flush economic times. “Two thousand four was the sixth consecutive year in which the median family income failed to keep pace with inflation,” he noted. “What happens when output grows but the standard of living does not?

He fears a resurgence of the anti-immigrant violence that marked the 1850s and 1890s. But what of the anti-American violence at the hands of illegal aliens that is occurring in the United States today?

Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.