Last Friday President Obama called for the United States to have "the highest percentage of college graduates" of anywhere in the world. But in more recent remarks, Obama seems to harbor some skepticism of what today's college grads can do.
In an interview with the New York Times' David Leonhardt published Wednesday, the president said that his grandmother, whose education ended after high school, could write a better letter than some of today's college graduates.
"[S]he was able to become a vice president at a bank partly because her high-school education was rigorous enough that she could communicate and analyze information in a way that, frankly, a bunch of college kids in many parts of the country can't," the president said. "She could write a better letter than many of my -- I won't say 'many,' but a number of my former students at the University of Chicago Law School."
The problem, Obama seemed to be saying, is a slippage of standards: "[W]hat it means to have graduated from high school, what it means to have graduated from a two-year college or a four-year college is not always as clear as it was several years ago."
Obama said that high-school grads do fare much worse in the job market than college grads and that a solid liberal arts education is still worthwhile ("That's what I got," he said). But the president argued that more people should pursue a post-secondary education that will give them tangible skills, like engineering.
In discussing the fate of the financial sector, Obama offered a subtle jab at finance workers of a certain post-college age who churned out "illusory" profits. Asked if all that profit will be missed, the president said:
We will miss it in the sense that as a consequence of 25-year-olds getting million-dollar bonuses, they were willing to pay $100 for a steak dinner and that waiter was getting the kinds of tips that would make a college professor envious. And so some of the dynamic of the financial sector will have some trickle-down effects, particularly in a place like Manhattan.
Maybe this is the president's way of getting back at Arizona State University for not giving him an honorary degree.