This isn't Lake Wobegon

There has been much talk lately in our pages and elsewhere about vocational education and the need to revive it. Now comes another perspective that's worth absorbing.

Charles Murray, the W.H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, wrote a three-part series published this week in the Wall Street Journal on the subject of " Intelligence in the Classroom." It's a brutally blunt assessment of what Murray regards as a principle flaw in our expectations about American education: "Today's simple truth: Half of all children are below average in intelligence. We do not live in Lake Wobegon."

Murray argues, for example, that "There is no magic point at which a genuine college-level education becomes an option, but anything below an IQ of 110 is problematic. If you want to do well, you should have an IQ of 115 or higher. Put another way, it makes sense for only about 15% of the population, 25% if one stretches it, to get a college education."

And, "Combine those who are unqualified with those who are qualified but not interested, and some large proportion of students on today's college campuses--probably a majority of them--are looking for something that the four-year college was not designed to provide."

He offers an unvarnished look at a big problem in American higher education. Each part is linked separately on the Arts & Letters Daily Web site: Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.

That's a lot to digest, but Mr. Murray has contributed some useful insights, however hard they may be for some to swallow, about higher education's purpose in America.