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1/ This essay is what happens when someone of middling intellect with an axe to grind writes about a subject -- community colleges -- that they know absolutely nothing about. It's an embarrassment for the author and @NRO. https://twitter.com/rkylesmith/status/1339912941441839104
2/ Smith begins by critiquing Dr. Biden as "not scholarly" for not considering whether money spent on student retention would be better spent on...anything else. That's idiotic. All research has context!
3/ He continues by asserting that student non-retention is solely a matter of "motivation," which anyone who's spent 10 minutes with the research, or talked to a single community college student, knows is completely absurd.
4/ A great many community college students are *highly motivated* -- but they need financial aid, good teachers, high-quality advising, and a supportive campus environment. Just ask an expert, like Dr. Jill Biden.
5/ Smith then says that "Unlike a bachelor’s degree, a degree from a community college is not a particularly valuable credential." Incorrect! You clearly have no idea what you're talking about!
6/ Many two-year degrees have *more* value in the labor market than many bachelor's degrees, see for example this research from Mark Schneider, current director of the Institutes for Education Research: https://www.air.org/page/publications-college-measures
7/ Also, many community college students are earning credits with the plan to transfer and earn a bachelor's degree. The kind of full-spectrum ignorance required to not understand this also leads to describing NoVA, which enrolls more than 50,000 students, as a "small college."
8/ Smith continues with what he thinks is a statistical gotcha, only to reveal--once again--his spectacular lack of even basic knowledge about American higher education.
9/ First, a sizable percentage of minority students in community colleges does *not* mean those colleges are therefore diverse. Perhaps he thought it said a sizable percentage of CC students are minorities? Which is not the same thing? Do they teach logic at Yale?
10/ So if only 100 Black students went to college in America, and 42 of them went to a community college, 42 percent would be in a community college system that would in no way be diverse. See how that works? Would a picture help?
11/ In fact the percentage of African-Americans who enroll in community colleges is about the same as the percentage of *all* students who enroll in community colleges, another elementary fact of which Smith is unaware.
12/ And that's it. The rest of this short, ignoble "takedown" is just a bunch of tired insults from the latest entrant in the Idiot Man Relay that began with Joseph Epstein and will no doubt continue, idiot men not exactly being in short supply.
