In a recent blog entry, I argued that affordable post-secondary education is vital to a healthy economy. It is also important to people who need to be able to support themselves and their families, given that education can be very expensive. There is one obvious objection that I did not address. Is it really reasonable to expect everyone to pursue an education beyond high school? Shouldn’t it be possible to support a family with a reasonable living standard without earning a college degree? The answer to this question is evidently yes. It is simply not possible or reasonable to expect that everyone would have the time or ability to earn a college degree. There are also circumstances under which attending college might not be reasonable, traditions (religious or otherwise) that need to be respected and, yes, people with families to support who might not have the time or opportunity to attend college – at least immediately.
A little reflection suggests that the essential problem is not actually that not everyone attends college, but that a high school education is generally not adequate preparation for entering the workforce. There is a simple reason why most jobs require advanced training (or experience in positions that do): a person with only a high school education will not posess the skills necessary to do the job..
Now, the answer is not simply to introduce new skills like computer programming into the high school curriculum. Many people have proposes this, and the idea does have its merits. But preparation for entry to the workforce really isn’t one of them. I remember that when I was a freshman at UC Santa Cruz, many of my friends were computer science students, and I picked up the textbooks for the courses they were taking and read them on the side. I well rembember one day that I was sitting in the computer lab asking a friend of mine about a program he wrote for a homework assignment. “How long is it?” I asked. “About a hundred lines” was his answer. I didn’t say so, but I thought that sounded kind of long (and complicated). Little did I know that I would one day work as a computer programmer (I still do, in fact) and that these school exercises would be tiny by comparison to real world applications, both in scope and complexity. I was hired, in part, because I had earned a masters degree in mathematics and had demonstrated both creativity and an ability to learn.
You see, that’s the big secret. Technology is a moving target, and the rate at which it changes is only going to accelerate over time. There is no way that a high school education, or a college education, for that matter, is going to be adequate preparation for most jobs. What students need to learn are not individual “bits of information” but how to be good learners. And, of course, as a society, we need a workforce prepared to deal with the challenges the future brings.
[I'm trying something new here: writing a blog entry directly from the iPhone using the WordPress application. I tried this once before and lost what I wrote (one hopes due to operator error!) so I'll try to be brief.]
There has been a lot of talk about how American students are not being prepared to compete in the global economy and, unfortunately, there is a lot of truth to that. There’s no single reason for this, but the different issues or problems are not entirely unrelated.
Let’s start out with something simple. My parents always emphasized to me that a college education was essential to being successful in life (at least insofar as such mundane details as earning a living go). Fortunately for me, I was a good student and was motivated to go to school (the University of California at Santa Cruz). In addition, back in the 1980′s, the University of California was much more affordable than it is today, at least for a family of modest means. It’s easy to forget that a college education (and I’m not just thinking of major universities here!) is a significant financial sacrifice. It is not uncommon for students to work longer hours than they really ought to, and still incure significant debts. It’s easy to write this all off as the “cost” of a college education. Should we?
At one time, it was expected that one need only stay in school, earn a high school diploma, get a job, marry and raise a family. We all know, on some level, that this just isn’t practical any more. Yet it remains part of the American myth. We want to believe it. Maybe we even have to, on some level.
Leaving aside the question of whether everyone should go to college, let’s consider what would be reasonable for us as a society to do if it really is essential. We have concluded that certain things are really essential to a functioning society: clean air, clean water, a power grid, telecommunications (including telephone and data services), transportation infrastructure, police and fire services, and more. Without these basic services, society as we know it simply could not function. Accordingly, we have come to regard making these basic services available at a reasonable cost part of our basic social contract. So far, so good.
But what about education? Isn’t an educated workforce essential to a functioning society? Does it not follow that we ought to make education available to all as part of our basic social contract? Alas, no. Yes, we do have public schools and, in principle, shouldn’t the public school system make a high school education available to any child? Well, that’s the idea, but in today’s world, we are increasingly coming to find that high school is just not enough. If nothing else, the increasing importance of technology even in very basic jobs is a good reason for this. The rate of technological transition is another important factor: we just can’t reasonably expect to do the same work throughout our careers.
Now, people have recognized this for a number of years, and we’ve long had systems of public colleges and universities. Except…except that schools like the University of California are no longer affordable. Against all reason, we’ve once again come to regard higher education as a luxury item, and jobs are increasingly being outsourced to other countries. It’s easy to blame “cheap labor” but is that really the problem? Or is it that we’ve been negligent at the public policy level by not supporting the level of educational infrastructure our society needs to function?
I leave this question as an exercise to the reader.
Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME) has compared being a moderate Republican to being a member of the cast of a reality show, bemoaning the fact that, after three decades, Sen. Arlen Specter (D-PA) felt obliged to leave the Republican party. More recently, as reported in Talking Points Memo, she said “I haven’t changed, my party has”, emphasizing that the reason she has always been a Republican is its traditional emphasis on limited government and national defense. Regardless of your political views, it is difficult not to sympathize with Olympia Snowe here. I know I do not always agree with her, and find it both puzzling and disappointing that she is being such a holdout on healthcare reform. But that is okay, we do not always have to agree. A healthy democracy is one in which people who may not always agree with one another are able to engage in honest, civil dialog, and work together to find solutions to the problems we all face.
Over breakfast this morning, I was thinking about the concept of limited government (or small government, as some people say). I happen to believe that we desperately need universal affordable healthcare in the United States, yet I find the concept of limited government intellectually appealing. Why? Aren’t these two goals completely irreconcilable? The American physicist Albert Einstein once said “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler”. Of course, he had in mind physical theory, but since it was Einstein, I’m sure he had in mind the broader, more philosophical implications, too.
In order to appreciate what Einstein had in mind, it is important to realize that a unifying theme in the history of physics (or, indeed, of science) is the discovery of simpler, conceptually clearer, ways of accounting for the same observations. A good example is the motion of the stars and planets in the night sky. It was once believed that the earth stood at the center of the universe. But when astrologers and, later, astronomers began to study the motions of the stars, the noticed two obvious patterns. First, in a single night, the stars would move in a circular pattern around a central point (close to Polaris, or the North Star). Second, from day to day, stars would rise and set at a slightly different point. But this, too, was a regular motion. What was perplexing was five “stars” which would move in highly irregular ways (again, this is the day to day, or night to night, motion, not the path followed around the North Star each night). We now know that these were not stars at all, but planets, shining by reflecting light from the Sun. In fact, the word planet derives from a Greek word meaning wanderer. It was not easy accounting for these strange motions, but a model involving planets set within crystalline spheres moving within spheres was developed by Claudius Ptolemy in second century C.E. This approach worked (sort of), but it was by no means simple.
Over the years, the Ptolemaic geocentric (“earth-centered”) model was gradually improved, at least in the sense that it could account more accurately for observations, but only by adding more and more ad hoc assumptions. You may recognize this as a violation of a principle known as Occam’s razor, the idea that arbitrary assumptions should not be introduced just to account for a single phenomenon or, as many people say, that the simplest solution to a problem should be the preferred one. Gradually, people came to realize that these problems could be solved more simply by placing the Sun at the center of the universe (or what was thought to be the universe at the time), with the earth and other planets moving around the sun. In this model, the apparent motions of the planets can easily be understood in terms of the relative speeds at which they orbit the sun. Much simpler! Unfortunately, ecclesiastical opposition to the heliocentric (“sun-centered”) model was strong, and it was only published when Nicholas Copernicus arranged to have his manuscript left on his death bed in 1543.
But this is only half of the story. Sometimes, simple, elegant accounts of physical systems simply do not work. It was a huge advance in the theory of light when the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell showed that light can be accounted for as a particular type of electromagnetic wave, providing a simple, unified, account of all that was then known about light. In fact, this is universally acknowledged as one of the most important developments in the history of physics. Unfortunately, it does not account for all properties of light. It was not long before it was discovered that shining ultraviolet light on a certain kind of vacuum tube could produce an electric current. This is now known as the photoelectric effect, and it’s a real puzzle. Shining red light on the vacuum tube will produce no current, no matter how intense the light, but dimmest ultraviolet light (if ultraviolet light can indeed be called dim, perhaps least intense is better) will produce current. Actually, that’s not quite accurate: it does need to be strong enough to jar loose a single electron, but that’s all. This is where we get back to Einstein, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics in 1921 for explaining the photoelectric effect in terms of quantum mechanics (and not, incidentally, for relativity, even though this was also a huge contribution to physics). The idea is basically simple: quanta of ultraviolet light have much more energy than quanta of red light, and what matters in not how many quanta (or photons) there are, but how much energy each one has. If the individual photons are not sufficiently energetic to jar loose an electron, increasing the number of photons by turning up the intensity of the light will do no good. Sometimes, there is no choice but to make a physical theory more complicated.
Now, returning to the political arena, there are many problems that can be effectively addressed by simple, inexpensive, small government solutions. But that does not always work. One area where I think we all acknowledge this to be the case is national defense. But other problems, such as healthcare reform, seem to fall into the same category. Most of the industrialized world has recognized this problem and introduced universal healthcare. It would have perhaps been better if government involvement were not needed here, but there are good reasons to believe that a government based approach is needed. The U.S. approach of introducing a patchwork of programs which generally address only a small part of the problem is in many ways reminiscent of the geocentric universe of Ptolemy and others. A proper, and effective, solution means making the transition from Ptolemy to Copernicus, difficult as that might be.
As an undergraduate studying mathematics, I naturally wondered what I would end up doing with my life. One option, of course, was to be a professional mathematician (which we usually take to mean being a university professor). Outside of that option, it wasn’t so obvious – or was it? It was commonly understood that a common career path for mathematics students was in actuarial science. That’s a term that may be more familiar today, with the healthcare debate being as heated as it is. Basically, an actuary studies uncertainty from a business perspective, and how decisions and policies affect a firm in the long run. Well, that’s the brochure version of something we called something else: counting dead people. The allusion here is to the life insurance industry, and to mortality rates. Now, don’t get me wrong. I am not saying that I think the insurance does not play an important role in our society, or that there is anything inherently wrong with applying the mathematical discipline of stochastic processes (something, incidentally, that I’ve come to study for a very different reason) to the insurance or financial industry is wrong. No, as students we just found the whole idea rather morbid, and to tell you the truth, it is a bit morbid.
Today, I think back to those days with some amusement, and maybe laugh a little at my pronouncement that “I don’t want to spend my life counting dead people.” (For what it’s worth, I completed a Masters degree, also in mathematics, and then went on to become a computer programmer.) Ryan Grim’s column in The Hufffington Post may have changed all of that. In his column, Grim recounts the case of a woman who found out that being physically assaulted by her husband was a pre-existing condition. Let me say that again: being physically assaulted by one’s husband is a pre-existing condition. That is outrageous. Of course, it makes sense from an actuarial point of view. Statistically speaking, people who are assaulted by their spouses or partners are likely to be victims again. And that’s what pre-existing conditions are: known factors that significantly increase the likelihood (risk) that a person will require healthcare (in the case of health insurance). But under our current system, it is permissible to deny health coverage to people (most likely), or charge them considerably higher premiums, due to pre-existing conditions. There is a related, equally reprehensible practice known as rescission in which people having health insurance policies can lose those policies due to illness or injury. So, if she had a policy she could have lost it! Incidentally, have you noticed that the public debate has focused on making it illegal to deny coverage due to pre-existing conditions, but no one is talking about the rates that insurance companies will be allowed to charge. People who have been seriously injured, or suffer from diseases or conditions they did not choose and cannot change are routinely denied health coverage, often making even basic healthcare unaffordable for them. The tragedy here is that this woman was attacked, and that is enough in our society to effectively cut her out of the healthcare system. That is simply unconscionable. It is wrong on so many levels. It is also something that no moral society should ever accept.
The problem here is not the idea of self-interest or making decisions that maximize profits. That is a fundamental principle in capitalism. It serves us well in most cases, and when it works, it works very well. The reason why a policy of allowing market players to pursue their own self-interest fails so miserably here is perhaps a topic for another time. But if any one example could be taken as proof that a pure market based solution involving no regulation, publicly funded programs, or other government involvement simply cannot work, this is it.
