Offering four year degrees at two year institutions will hurt the economy

The California legislature approved a bill last week allowing junior colleges to grant four-year degrees to students.

Without regulation, this could spell disaster for California’s economy.

Multiple Supreme Court cases have been fought and won to guarantee an education to every American. Brown v. The Board of Education ended school segregation and Plyler v. Doe made clear that no matter a person’s social standing or citizenship status they must be educated.

Every time education has been guaranteed it has been for the good of the country; an uneducated public cannot vote or govern itself.  Education is a fundamental part of democracy and everything else America stands for.

While education is a constitutional right in America supported by the Master Plan for Education in this state, degrees are a commodity.

The master plan was supposed to make education free through the 14th grade, but has only succeeded in making the last two years of public education more affordable at community colleges. This means while a student’s kindergarten through senior years are publicly funded, they must pay their own way through college.

The problems with allowing a two year institution to bestow four-year degrees are multi-layered.

If the highest education an instructor has is a four-year degree, they cannot teach enough rigor to create a well-rounded individual. Professors at four-year institutions are required to have at least a master’s degree and usually a Ph.D.  If a teacher is not at least one level above a student, they are inadequately prepared to teach that caliber.

If the bachelor’s is in a technical field, such as journalism or photography, it could be more feasible.

However, flooding the job market with freshly minted four-year degrees will further depress their value.

Research has made it apparent that in many fields a bachelor’s is no longer enough; adding more where they are already minimized, can further hurt an economy that is still trying to dig out from the 2008 recession.

Removing the need to attend a four-year university may make more seats available to students in impacted majors but it would, in effect, dumb down the population.  The thought process behind the Master Plan was to make CSUs the place to receive a technical baccalaureate degree while a student would attend a UC to become a doctor or engineer.  Reversing that will dilute the meaning of a degree and the force of will to complete four years of intensive instruction.

If professors are not required to hold higher degrees in order to teach, they could stop publishing-an integral part of the Ph.D. and research process. Without new research fueling academia, the information students study will become stale and eventually obsolete.  This would result in a choice between under-educated students who have received four-year degrees from a junior college, or students who have an intimate knowledge of information that no longer matters but have more prestiges degrees from four-year institutions.

The new law would make a four-year degree as valuable as an associate degree. That is to say this is of great value to the receiver but not marketable as part of a resume.

Community colleges are meant to provide an affordable stop on the way through higher education and they have managed, despite other industries losing money during the recession.  Not only have two-year colleges managed, but they have offered a haven outside of the job market for students to start new careers or continue training. These colleges are doing their jobs well; to burden them with more would not benefit students or instructors.

While the premise this legislation is based on means well, it can do little to help the students or the economy it had in mind. If the governor does decide to sign the bill into law without requiring exhaustive regulations, he would be signing the state into another economic crisis.