Are Santorum’s comments on higher ed out of step?

JUSTIN POPE, KIMBERLY HEFLING

AP Edu­ca­tion Writers

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — When Repub­li­can pres­i­den­tial hope­ful Rick San­to­rum calls Pres­i­dent Barack Obama “a snob” for want­ing all Amer­i­cans to attend col­lege, he may be out of step with the public’s over­all view of higher education.

Many Amer­i­cans are sus­pi­cious of the cul­ture of acad­e­mia, and most are angry about ris­ing costs. But they over­whelm­ingly — and increas­ingly — agree that higher edu­ca­tion is impor­tant and aspire to it for them­selves and their children.

On the cam­paign trail, San­to­rum has crit­i­cized what he per­ceives as the lib­eral nature of the higher edu­ca­tion com­mu­nity. He upped the ante on his argu­ments lead­ing into Tuesday’s pri­maries in Michi­gan and Arizona.

“Pres­i­dent Obama has said he wants every­body in Amer­ica to go to col­lege. What a snob,” San­to­rum said Sat­ur­day. “There are good, decent men and women who go out and work hard every day, and put their skills to test, who aren’t taught by some lib­eral col­lege pro­fes­sor (who) tries to indoc­tri­nate them. I under­stand why he wants you to go to col­lege. He wants to remake you in his image. I want to cre­ate jobs so peo­ple can remake their chil­dren into their image, not his.”

San­to­rum mis­char­ac­ter­ized Obama’s com­ments. In fact, the pres­i­dent has called for all Amer­i­cans to obtain some form of edu­ca­tion beyond high school, although not nec­es­sar­ily four-year col­leges as San­to­rum has repeat­edly implied, and for the United States to regain the global lead in those with col­lege degrees by 2020. Many of Obama’s higher-education ini­tia­tives, includ­ing a pro­posed $8 bil­lion fund unveiled as part of his bud­get pro­posal ear­lier this month, focus on work­force devel­op­ment at com­mu­nity col­leges that award cer­tifi­cates and degrees of less than four years.

The pres­i­dent, address­ing gov­er­nors at the White House on Mon­day, empha­sized that goal again.

“When I speak about higher edu­ca­tion we’re not just talk­ing about a four-year degree,” he said. “We’re talk­ing about some­body going to a com­mu­nity col­lege and get­ting trained for that man­u­fac­tur­ing job that now is requir­ing some­body walk­ing through the door, han­dling a million-dollar piece of equip­ment. And they can’t go in there unless they’ve got some basic train­ing beyond what they received in high school.”

White House press sec­re­tary Jay Car­ney later said that he didn’t believe Obama was specif­i­cally react­ing to Santorum’s “snob” com­ment. But Car­ney addressed it directly: “I don’t think any par­ent in Amer­i­can who has a child would think it snob­bery to hope for that child the best pos­si­ble edu­ca­tion in the future, and that includes college.”

San­to­rum has three col­lege degrees — a bachelor’s, an MBA and a law degree. Obama has a bachelor’s degree and a law degree.

Inter­viewed Sun­day on ABC’s “This Week,” San­to­rum recalled a sta­tis­tic that sug­gested more than 60 per­cent of kids who enter col­lege com­mit­ted to a faith leave with­out it. He said there are “some real prob­lems at our col­lege cam­puses with polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness, with an ide­ol­ogy that is forced upon peo­ple who, you know, who may not agree with the polit­i­cally cor­rect left doctrine.”

In Decem­ber, at a cam­paign stop in Iowa, San­to­rum attacked the cul­ture of higher edu­ca­tion, telling vot­ers that col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties have become “indoc­tri­na­tion cen­ters for the left.” He also took a swipe at Har­vard University’s motto, “Ver­i­tas,” which is Latin for truth. “They haven’t seen truth at Har­vard in 100 years,” he said.

San­to­rum, a for­mer two-term U.S. sen­a­tor from Penn­syl­va­nia who lost re-election in 2006, has often crit­i­cized what he views as elit­ist. Some of his great­est lev­els of sup­port have come from vot­ers with­out a col­lege edu­ca­tion, said Chris Borick, direc­tor of the Insti­tute of Pub­lic Opin­ion at Muh­len­berg Col­lege in Allen­town, Pa.

Santorum’s more recent com­ments on edu­ca­tion appear part of an effort to ener­gize blue-collar Repub­li­cans, and the topic pro­vides a back­drop for him to define his con­ser­vatism, Borick said.

Elite col­leges have long faced accu­sa­tions they are out of touch polit­i­cally with ordi­nary Amer­i­cans. And in recent years, polls show erod­ing con­fi­dence in the integrity of col­leges and that they have stu­dents’ inter­ests ahead of their own bot­tom lines.

How­ever, in the last decade the pro­por­tion of Amer­i­cans say­ing higher edu­ca­tion is essen­tial for suc­cess has roughly dou­bled from about 30 per­cent to roughly 60 per­cent, said Patrick Callan, pres­i­dent of the California-based Higher Edu­ca­tion Pol­icy Institute.

“There’s a strong Amer­i­can sense … that every­body ought to have a chance, and if they don’t it’s not a fair sys­tem,” Callan said. While resent­ment and frus­tra­tion over afford­abil­ity are build­ing, “I’ve never seen any­body elected to gov­er­nor or state leg­is­la­ture by say­ing, ‘We’re let­ting too many peo­ple go to col­lege,’” he said.

Accord­ing to a Pew poll from last March, 94 per­cent of par­ents with at least one child under the age of 18 think their child will go to college.

In a 2010 Phi Delta Kappa poll con­ducted by Gallup, 75 per­cent of Amer­i­cans called a col­lege edu­ca­tion “very impor­tant” and 21 per­cent called it “fairly impor­tant,” with just 4 per­cent call­ing it not important.

“Nobody in any of (our) focus groups ever said, ‘I’m so sus­pi­cious of those col­leges, my kids not going. I’m going to home-school my kids for col­lege,’” Callan said.

In Jan­u­ary, the national unem­ploy­ment rate stood at 4.2 per­cent for work­ers with at least a bachelor’s degree, com­pared to 7.2 per­cent for work­ers with some col­lege. The rate was 8.4 per­cent for peo­ple with just a high school degree, and 13.1 per­cent for those with­out a high school diploma.

Kath­leen Hall Jamieson, an author­ity on polit­i­cal com­mu­ni­ca­tions at the Uni­ver­sity of Pennsylvania’s Annen­berg Cen­ter, said Santorum’s com­ments are sim­ply a “strate­gic misstep.”

“You don’t ever attack the aspi­ra­tions of the Amer­i­can peo­ple, and the Amer­i­can peo­ple aspire to have chil­dren and grand­chil­dren get a col­lege or uni­ver­sity degree, and they do it on sim­ple eco­nomic grounds,” she said.

Even con­ser­v­a­tive leader Ronald Rea­gan, who cam­paigned for gov­er­nor in the 1960s against stu­dent protests at the Uni­ver­sity of Cal­i­for­nia, Berke­ley, was sup­port­ive of higher edu­ca­tion once elected, said John The­lin, pro­fes­sor of higher edu­ca­tion at the Uni­ver­sity of Ken­tucky and author of a his­tory of Amer­i­can colleges.

While it’s true on bal­ance that col­lege fac­ulty prob­a­bly lean left, gen­er­ally col­leges are fairly con­ser­v­a­tive insti­tu­tions turn­ing out stu­dents who “aim to be employ­able, to fit into exist­ing orga­ni­za­tions,” The­lin said.

“I think a can­di­date pos­si­bly in des­per­a­tion will look for some­thing to latch onto. Once in a while it may be con­ve­nient to cite a cam­pus or col­leges in gen­eral as a fall guy for some­thing,” he said. “It’s never the full basis of a campaign.”

Posted by AP News on Feb 27 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.