Have You Heard of the National College Advising Corps?
Here’s how it works. Take college kids who can’t find jobs and put them to work in high schools where they can advise more kids to go to college. Government efficiency at its finest!
Jay Schalin of See Thru Edu reports.
Uncle Sam Wants You—To Go To College
There’s a program that’s run in conjunction with Americorps, the Bill Clinton-inspired domestic counterpart to the Peace Corps. It’s called the National College Advising Corps and, right now, it’s in 13 states, including such biggies as Texas, California, New York, and Pennsylvania. It essentially hires recent college graduates who can’t find real jobs and trains them to “advise” high school seniors at schools with low rates of college attendance to go to college. Most likely, the recruited high school students (the minority of them who don’t drop out) also get dubious degrees and enter programs where they will be trained to counsel high school students to go to college … and so on, and on and on.
A bit cynical, you say? Perhaps, but after years of perusing statistics about admissions and completion rates, listening to self-interested bureaucrats and crony capitalists press for higher rates of college attendance, and knowing that almost half of recent college graduates either don’t work or work in jobs that don’t require college-level skills, I’ve developed a highly sensitive nose for sniffing out higher education boondoggles.
In North Carolina, two of the main goals listed on the North Carolina College Advising Corps’s website are: to “increase post-secondary enrollment rates of the schools served” and to “create a college-going culture within the schools served.” That is right in line with a terrible policy in the University of North Carolina system’s latest strategic plan: to aggressively push up the percentage of state residents who have four-year degrees from 27 percent to 32 percent in a few years, despite a serious ongoing problem of underemployment in the state.
Given such mandates, it is likely that the Corps’s advisors are convincing students who would be better off starting off their adult lives doing something else to instead attend academic colleges and universities.
