Dr. Jill Biden Works with Community Colleges: That Makes Her a Hero
By: Michael Austin
Tags: Politics, Education, Community College, Jill Biden, Sexism

I have been involved in higher education, in one form or another, for 35 years, first as an undergraduate, then as a graduate student, a professor, and now as a senior academic administrator. I am no stranger to debates about who gets to call themselves “Doctor.” Along with parking and office space, it is the issue that most defines us as an industry.

Even by the standards of normal academic posturing, however, the recent dust-up about Jill Biden has been remarkably petty — both in the assertion that people who earn doctorates in things other than Medicine should not call themselves “doctor” in public (which is just silly, as almost everyone with a doctorate uses the title in some public forums) and in the claim that an Ed.D. is not a real doctorate (spoiler alert: it absolutely is, and universities rarely even make distinctions between Education faculty with Ed.D.s and those with other terminal degrees).

The original article by Joseph Epstein in the Wall Street Journal appeared to hit a low-water mark in condescension and gratuitous elitism, but it is weak sauce compared to today’s follow-up in the National Review by Kyle Smith. In “Jill Biden’s Doctorate Is Garbage because Her Dissertation Is Garbage”— a title that would embarrass most imaginative third-graders brawling in the sandbox at recess — Smith lays into Dr. Biden with the sort of invective that one normally expects to hear following an expression like “I know you are but what am I?”:

Jill Biden’s dissertation is not an addition to the sum total of human knowledge. It is not a demonstration of expertise in its specific topic or its broad field. It is a gasping, wheezing, frail little Disney forest creature that begs you to notice the effort it makes to be the thing it is imitating while failing so pathetically that any witnesses to its ineptitude must feel compelled, out of manners alone, to drag it to the nearest podium and give it a participation trophy. Which is more or less what an Ed.D. is. It’s a degree that only deeply unimpressive people feel confers the honorific of “Doctor.”

Smith, of course, is using the language of the disgruntled reviewer to pass judgment on work of academic writing in a field that he knows nothing about. The academic canons of peer review have no place for the opinions of movie critics. I am grateful that Roger Ebert chose not to feature my dissertation on At the Movies, as I have no doubt it would have gotten thumbs way down. Here, Smith is echoing Epstein’s criticism that Biden “earned at the University of Delaware through a dissertation with the unpromising title Student Retention at the Community College Level: Meeting Students’ Needs.”

Let us not suppose that either Smith or Epstein has any interest in evaluating what makes good community college retention research. Tellingly, neither of them ever treated this issue before last week. What they are interested in is suggesting — for fairly transparent partisan reasons — that people who ask questions like, “what makes community college students more likely to stay in school?” are not doing anything that merits respect or praise. They simply could not be more wrong about this. Let me explain why.

Community colleges in the United States are the most important resources we have in providing access to higher education to people who would not normally be able to attend college. Most community colleges are open admission and have very low tuition rates. Mr. Smith’s alma mater, Yale University (which he manages to work into the first paragraph of his screed) has been on the forefront of many things, but providing meaningful educational access to dramatically underserved populations is not one of them. The same is true for the University of Chicago, where Mr. Epstein obtained his degree.

Any student accepted to a prestigious Ivy League or first-tier university has already made it past the considerable barriers that prevent 75% of the American population from ever obtaining a four-year degree. Solving this problem is not why such universities exist. But it is a huge problem that needs to be solved, as nothing is more important to American democracy than ensuring educational access to our entire population.

This, it turns out, is just about the only thing that our Founding Fathers agreed upon. They were a quarrelsome bunch, and they fought about almost all of the things that we fight about now: taxes, immigration, religion, infrastructure, and even “fake news” — but they agreed that the United States had to prevent European-style aristocracy from taking root. As our second president, John Adams, wrote, access to education is the key to not becoming the kind of generational aristocracy that America was founded not to be:

Before any great things are accomplished, a memorable change must be made in the system of education, and knowledge must become so general as to raise the lower ranks of society nearer to the higher. The education of a nation, instead of being confined to a few schools and universities for the instruction of the few, must become the national care and expense for the formation of the many.

This is what is at stake in higher education today, and community colleges are vital to that vision. Community colleges currently enroll more than 8 million people, about a third of all college-going Americans. But this is not an across-the-board statistic. About 55% of students with family incomes below $30,000 a year start at community colleges, as do 39% of African-American students and 46% of Hispanic students.

These colleges are on the front line of one of the most important things we do as a nation, and the most important issue that community colleges face is the low retention rate of their most vulnerable students. For example, only 14% of students with family incomes in the lowest income quartile (less than $30,000) who started at a public two-year college in 2003–04 completed an associate degree by 2009 (Biden wrote her dissertation in 2007). For students in the next quartile ($30,000-$64,999) the figure is 18% (statistics here).

And what did Dr. Biden do to study this problem? She asked students what made them want to stay in school. Through a combination of interviews and surveys, she tried to find out why some of our most vulnerable students choose to stay in their community colleges and why others choose to leave. I can’t imagine a more important question for American academics to ask at the current historical moment.

Yet I am not entirely surprised by the tendency of men who have never had the slightest interest in community-college retention research to gang up on a woman who has been deeply involved in both the research and the practice of creating educational access. This is what bullies do. And the fact that the woman happens to be married to a person they don’t want to be president means that anything they say can be justified by the maxim “all’s fair in love, war, and baselessly maligning political opponents.” The fact that they have found plenty of voices for the choir they are preaching to ties back to the very disturbing fact that students at community colleges are still not considered important enough by much of our society to merit serious attention.

If Dr. Biden had, say, calculated the core temperature of a black hole a few thousand light-years away, she might have been nominated for a Nobel Prize. But the most admired research is not always the most valuable. When we consider the enormous difficulty that our society has in providing meaningful educational access to all of our citizens, a dissertation title like “Student Retention at the Community College Level: Meeting Students’ Needs” does not sound “unpromising” at all. It may in fact be the most urgent public policy concern that we have as a nation.