If Wick Sloane ‘76 were to meet with Bill and Melinda gates on the topic of education, here is what he would say.

No one has done better than Gates with a plan for “The Problem Too Big To Be Seen,” the crisis of the work force and community colleges, than the February 2008 Gates Foundation paper “Post-Secondary Education+: An initiative to dramatically expand social mobility in America.” A friend at Gates sent (not leaked) the paper to me a few of weeks ago. The paper, at Gates’s now-familiar New Deal scale and ambition, offers two key conclusions.

“First, our research revealed that a high-leverage intervention point in breaking the intergenerational transmission of poverty is to focus on young people in the critical decade between ages 16 and 26, as they make the transition to adulthood and as (or before) they become parents themselves. Second, our research showed that if one were to choose the single most important lever for improving the life prospects of these young people and their children, it would be to help young adults earn educational credentials beyond a high school diploma.”

Right on, Bill and Melinda.

If you really want to know the effect of providing more schooling, you would run a randomized experiment. Take 1,000 students, randomly offer 500 of them free tuition (or income support or whatever goo-goo intervention you like) and then, a few years later, compare the 500 who received the intervention with the 500 who didn’t. Odds are, you won’t see much/any effect. But that is an empirical question that the Gates Foundation ought to investigate.