RECOMMENDED READING
The countless ceremonies playing out across America this month are called ācommencements,ā supposedly, because they celebrate not the conclusion of an education but rather the start of whatever comes next: after high school, heading away to college; after college, the exciting new life of a young 20-something pursuing a career. This is the pathway idealized in the American imagination, and the one we spend hundreds of billions of dollars each year to pave. Yet it is not one that most young people follow.
Having belatedly discovered this fiction, progressives are now demanding widespread forgiveness of the student debt many young people accumulated as they stumbled along and then off the path. But this too misunderstands the typical experience of young Americans and only reinforces the obsession with college students as the population to be served.
Recommended Reading
After Student-Debt Relief, America Must Move Beyond ‘College for All’
American Compass research director Wells King argues for building real alternatives to the ācollege-for-allā education pipeline in the wake of Bidenās misguided student loan forgiveness.
Making Young Men Marriageable
With few āmarriageableā men employed in the kinds of decent-paying occupations that make them attractive as potential husbands, marriage has slipped out of reach for far too many poor and working-class Americans.
Where Have All the Young Men Gone?
The question of who would pursue non-college pathways, if they were offered, is one that has bedeviled education reform debates for decades.
