Why Rick Santorum Was Wrong About College

Presidential Wannabe Rick Santorum said,

President Obama once said he wants everybody in America to go to college. What a snob. There are good, decent men and women who go out and work hard every day and put their skills to test that aren’t taught by some liberal college professor that (tries) to indoctrinate them.

- Rick Santorum, Campaign Stop, Troy, MI, Feb. 25, 2012

Set aside the pandering to the crowd. Set aside calling a sitting president a “snob.” Set aside the claim about “liberal” college professors. And set aside the mischaracterization of what President Obama actually said.

The reason to go to college is to get a job.

Source: The College Advantage: Weathering the Economic Storm

The chart, from a report by the Georgetown Public Policy Institute, Center on Education and the Workforce, all by itself is a complete answer to ex-Senator Rick Santorum’s derision. Want your kid to have a job? Find a way to get him through college. Not a for-profit college; the jury is very much out on their effectiveness. A public university is perfectly adequate. Spare WC the jokes about Art History majors.

But Senator Santorum doesn’t seem to understand that there are at least 5.8 million reasons to get a 4-year degree. Sure, there’s a risk that being trained in critical thinking – what Santorum called “indoctrination” – might have a lifetime impact. It might even, horror of horrors, cause you to loath someone like Rick Santorum.

But it beats being unemployed.

And before you ask, why pick on the ex-Senator now? Because no one, especially not Rick Santorum, believes he is done wreaking havoc on the American body politic.