Education Next

Education Next is a journal of opinion and research about

education policy.

Supersize My Education? Not in

Singapore
By Chester E. Finn, Jr. 05/11/2012

Boarding my plane from Singapore after a fascinating, whirlwind reacquaintance with that small
nations remarkable education system, I encountered this Wall Street Journal headline:
Education Slows in U.S., Threatening Prosperity. Reading on, I learned that Harvard
economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz have performed a provocativeand seemingly
alarmingset of calculations to answer the question: How much more education are Americans
getting than their parents did?
Theres still an increment, it turns out, but its been shrinking: from two years more schooling
(by age thirty) for those born in 1955 down to just eight months more for those born in 1980. The
implication, quoth the Journal reporters: Without better educated Americans, economists say,
the U.S. wont be able to maintain high-wage jobs and rising living standards in a competitive
global economy.
This isnt exactly news. Nor is the Goldin-Katz analysis the first time we have observed that the
U.S. is no longer leading the planet when it comes to the quantity of education that its population
receives. But is more educationmore hours and days, more years and degreesthe cure for

what ails us? Or are we already pigging out on the educational equivalent of fast foodfattening
but not nutritiousand will supersizing our portions just make matters worse?
If we accept the Goldin-Katz view of whats wrong with U.S. education, we will inevitably
demand more preschool, more full-day Kindergarten, more high school graduations, more
college attendance, more college and postgraduate degrees, etc. Supersizing is the standard
American response. Indeed, its already on the election-year menu with both parties demanding
that student-loan interest rates be made to stay low so that more people can afford more tertiary
education. Not much talk about quality, though.
Singapore is one of those places thats been going a mile a minute in boosting both the quality
and the quantity of formal education that its population receives. For example, the proportion of
Singaporeans aged twenty-five to thirty-nine that completed secondary school (meaning tenth
grade) jumped from 25 percent in 1980 to 96 percent in 2010. At the same time, Singapore
students beat almost everyone else in the world on international assessments of math and science
knowledge.
To an American, however, its surprising how little rush there is to supersize Singaporean
education. Kindergarten is optional. (The primary schools start at age six or seven.) And only
about one in four young Singaporeans currently qualifies for the junior colleges (basically
grades eleven and twelve) that are the usual path into the countrys four universities.
Government policy is headed toward placing 30 percent of the age cohort in public universities;
for now, as many as 40 percent of secondary graduates head into career-oriented polytechnics
that resemble the best of American community colleges and some 20 percent attend the Institute
of Technical Education, which emphasizes hands-on training.
There is, to be sure, public pressure to increase the number who can enter Singapores
universitiesand some private and non-Singaporean institutions have opened to accommodate
some of that demand. (Other students travel overseas for their tertiary education.) But basically
nobody is saying that every young person should go to university. And remember: this in an
education-obsessed country with no other resources to speak of save its highly skilled populace.
Nor are they going to take the easy path (as England and Hong Kong have done in recent
decades and as the U.S. started to do long ago) and put fancier labels onto existing institutions.
They are not, for example, going to pretend that their polytechnics are really universities, as we
have done with hundreds of ex-teachers colleges and quondam normal schools. They regard
that kind of maneuver as both an affront to quality control at the university level and damaging
to the real-world job-preparation work that the polytechnics specialize in.
The United States, of course, tends to reject both the benefits and the detriments of Singaporestyle central planning in the education space, at least when it comes to planning from
Washington. But the new Goldin-Katz data, combined with OECD trend data, make clear that
our system (or non-system) isnt doing a very good job of propelling more people onward to get
more education than their parents got. And we know from plenty of other data (TIMSS, PISA,
etc.) that the quality of much of what theyre getting isnt so great, either, especially when
viewed in international perspective.

Any number of reform initiatives are seeking to tackle one or the other problem. Some are
focused on raising academic standards, others on keeping more people in the education system
longer and seeing that they emerge with credentials. Some insist that the two goals are
complimentaryand the mantra that everyone should emerge from high school both college
and career-ready tends to blur the distinction and terminate the discussion.
But what will we do when we face hard trade-offs, such as the likely discovery that higher
graduation standards will lead to a higher failure (and dropout) rate? Our track record in this
regard leaves much to be desired. Even much-envied Massachusetts, which has done a
commendable job of getting almost all who stay in school over the medium-high bar set by
MCAS, has worrisome dropout rates, particularly among minority youngsters, and has been loath
to raise its high school exit-bar to the level of true college readiness.
Are our presidential candidates crazy to yammer about cheap loans to make college more
affordable for all? I understand that nobody (except maybe Rick Santorum) is going to campaign
for the White House by urging fewer young Americans to go to college. But if more do in fact go
and stay, will they really be getting a good education there? Or just a bigger bag of fries? What
if, instead, more of them simply emerged career ready from our secondary schools, which
already last two years longer than the norm in Singapore? Wouldnt a whole lot of time and
money be saved and a lot of heartache and dashed aspirations avoided?
I dont expect these dilemmas to be resolved in Washingtonthough it would be fascinating to
hear them discussed by Messrs. Obama and Romney in an upcoming debate. But its something
our states had better come to grips withincluding how they finance their P-20 education
systems. Its clear that rising tertiary education costs paid by consumersand heavy debt
burdens on many who enter and persist in collegeare part of the problem. But only part.
Maybe more attention to quality would do greater good.
-Chester E. Finn, Jr.
This post originally appeared in the Fordham Institutes Education Gadfly Weekly.
Retrieved from http://educationnext.org/49648136/ June 26, 2012.