Imagine you are attending a top ranked college. You are nearing graduation and are about to be named Valedictorian of your class. You have a grade point average of 3.95. It wasn’t easy. For four years of college, while many others spent more time on parties than studies, you stuck with it. You went to all your classes and you studied for 10 hours every day, counting class time. On weekends, you slept in until 8:00 a.m. but then you hit the books for most of the day. You did take time to run errands, take a walk in a local park, and write a couple of quick emails to parents and friends. But, in your mind, school was your job and you were doing the best you could.
In the frenzy of fairness and political correctness, your college, just a month before graduation, decides that grades are potentially demeaning to students. In fact, there is a body of work that suggests that minorities are discriminated against and end up with lower grade point averages than majority students. Grading and graduation honors smack of class, and, they hurt the self esteem of those who do not score well on exams. The college makes the decision to eliminate grades and honors at graduation. You find that your diploma will read the same as every other member of your class who has completed the requirements for a degree. An employer who asks for a transcript of your work will learn only that you passed all your courses. All your work will not pay off in better job opportunities. If you had it to do over again, you might have just partied more. What sense would it make to work harder if you could receive no external advantage from all that work?
The intended consequence is that kids feel less pressure and tend to have fewer self esteem problems, at least until they get out of school and meet a world where people compete for jobs, raises, and most other things. Professors need only track students enough to ensure they have met minimum requirements to get credit for the courses they teach. This takes stress from the professors and in the short term they are happy with the change.
The unintended consequence, after a few years, is that the college has a reputation as a party school and employers look elsewhere for talent. Fewer students with ambition and drive consider the school since it will not provide them with the education they want, nor the opportunity to show future employers that they can compete well with others. Professors are no longer stimulated by bright students since those students have all chosen to go to other schools. Soon they don’t care about their classes or students and just resign to hold their tenure and benefits until they retire. Ivy League Brown University, in the 60s and 70s was repeatedly ranked in the top 50 schools in the nation. Since Brown’s 1969 decision to make grades for classes an option for students, Brown has steadily dropped in academic rating. Today it is nowhere near the top 50 and is bested by almost every Ivy League school.
The same ‘progressive’ mentality that creates mediocrity in colleges like in the above example, aims to always make most people feel good. (Brown does claim to have the happiest students.) This is what is behind a desire to GIVE everyone healthcare of equal value whether earned or not. This is the attitude that says that excelling is being mean to those who do not excel. And the attitude that says the rich should pay for the poor and the hard workers should carry the weak, by law, not by choice.
When healthcare is dumbed down by government control, we will lose much of the health and medical innovation we have now. We will lose many of the brightest minds who will find other ways to be challenged than medicine. And for what? So that everyone can have the same healthcare (except the politicians, of course). Or so that we can cover a few more people than have ‘regular healthcare plans’ now? Many progressives will not quit until everyone is dragged screaming and shouting into a program that they will not use properly, if at all.
In nature for the past few million years, survival of the fittest has served the earth well. Why do “Progressives” think they are so much smarter than nature and markets? I hope that the politicians look carefully at all of the consequences of the current reform proposals. They may succeed in gaining more political power and control, but I doubt they will accomplish many, if any, of the lofty goals they promise. And I hope that what they do accomplish will not be at the cost of creating a mediocracy and losing freedom.
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October 20, 2009 at 11:12 pm
pmv
Interesting analogy. My impression of Brown (from many acquaintances who were rejected) is that it is perhaps the most highly desired college out there, much more than its academics would suggest. Out of curiosity I looked at the acceptance rates of colleges – Brown’s is indeed still higher than Harvard, Yale, etc., but it is lower than the service academies, Penn, Cornell, etc. But then even lower still is the College of the Ozarks, in the news recently, which strictly prohibits homosexual conduct (I guess people choose a college for all sorts of reasons). Also of note in the ranking you linked to – Berkeley is in fact one spot below Brown at #73, several spots below George Fox University (58). No word on what their criteria are…
Anyway, back to the analogy – had I been slated for college Valedictorian, yes, I certainly would have been frustrated that my accomplishments were being ignored and those who didn’t work as hard were getting perhaps a better result than they deserve. I don’t think this translates to healthcare, though. I can see being annoyed if I worked hard to earn enough money to afford the best healthcare that money can buy only to see that healthcare become “mediocre,” but I don’t think I would be annoyed if other people got healthcare of a higher quality than they could afford, given their amount/level of work. The job market is zero-sum – my chances go up when others’ chances go down. Healthcare is different. Even if there is mediocre healthcare available for all, I will still be able to work harder to afford better healthcare.
October 21, 2009 at 10:47 am
ttoes
PMV,
Points well taken. As with most analogies, there are parts that don’t fit. I would disagree with you, however, about two things: 1. job market being a zero sum game; 2. “I will still be able to work harder to afford better healthcare.”
As to Number 1 – I think the job market is like any market in that it expands and contracts based on a myriad of conditions, only one of which is others taking available jobs. I would argue that growing markets expand job possibilities and contracting markets withdraw opportunities for employment. A problem with bureaucratic endeavors is that they rarely contract. This continually increases overheads that can only be supported in the end by further growth. It also creates jobs to fill time, but I digress.
Number 2 is a fallacy that I think many believe. As we see in Canada and a few other advanced nations with Government Controlled Health care, in order to retain control and limit competition, private options are legislated against. In Canada, though private markets are pushing back, I believe it is illegal to seek or provide private health care. Even if you do work harder, you may not have the option to buy better health care. It has also been shown that our government is already pushing many costs for programs like Medicare off onto private insurance payers. That may indicate that even if it were legal to work harder and buy private insurance that it will increase in price to where it is prohibitive to all but the richest.
The dilemma, of course, is that today we have a system that makes health care unaffordable to a very large group (estimated at between 20 and 47 million people). I have written a number of posts as to why I feel that is, but, suffice it to say that my belief is that more government intervention will drive costs even higher with little result as to providing more or better healthcare than we have today. The studies, facts, and anecdotes I have read convince me that, long term, the government control of health care will result in something akin to our public education system – a system that soaks up huge piles of resources and produces an inferior product.