Philadelphia Fed President Patrick Harker, who once served as a university president himself, has pushed back on the idea that college is the sole path to economic prosperity, writes Nicole Goodkind for Barron’s.
“Now I’m going to say something completely inappropriate,” said Harker during the Economic Mobility Summit, hosted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. “I think college is incredibly important for some people, not for everybody.”
Harker, dean of the Wharton School from 1999 to 2007 and later president of the University of Delaware through 2015, noted that there are many routes to the middle class in the U.S., and not all require a four-year college degree.
“The idea that we told people the only thing you can do to get there is college is problematic to me,” he said.
He recalled students who had no clear reason for being in college and might have found greater success and opportunity by learning a trade.
“But we don’t honor the trades,” he said. “You’ll see opportunity after opportunity where people can have a good middle-class life by doing something different.”
Read more about Patrick Harker and his take on whether college is the only path to economic prosperity in Barron’s.
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