Rock Island, IL. In 1932 Yale accepted seventy-two per cent of its applicants. In 1940 Harvard accepted eighty-five per cent. Of the four hundred and five boys from Groton who applied to Harvard between the years 1906 and 1932 only three were turned down.
So reports Louis Menand in the most recent New Yorker (“What is College Good For?”).
But, he says, when standardized testing came on the scene in 1948, things began to change. Harvard president James Bryant Conant “regarded higher education as a limited social resource, and he wanted to make more straight the gate. Testing insured that only people who deserved to go to college did.”
So by 1970 Harvard’s acceptance rate was only twenty per cent. Now it is six. (Oxford and Cambridge didn’t get the memo: they are currently at twenty-one and eighteen per cent respectively.)
But even as private colleges were learning the joys of saying “no,” public colleges were doing the opposite. “In 1950, there were about 1.14 million students in public colleges and universities and about the same number in private ones. Today, public colleges enroll almost fifteen million students, private colleges fewer than six million.” California alone has 3.3 million students on its university, state college, and community college campuses. Menand says that six percent of Americans are enrolled in college or graduate school, whereas in Great Britain and France “the figure is about three per cent.”
Because I’m in the racket mistakenly called “higher” education, I pay a little bit of attention to such figures whenever they swim into my ken. (“Deeper” education would be a better moniker—if the education on offer were actually deeper.) But the figures interest me only because they flatter a certain conviction I have: namely, that there are way too many people in college.
I hope the reader will be generous enough to believe that I don’t make this remark out of snobbishness. Much as I would sometimes like to be a snob, I can never quite convince myself that what I do is important enough to merit snobbery. I say it, rather, out of a firm belief that college has essentially become a training ground for vandals.
That it has been fairly successful so far is due in large measure to the fact that it is also run by vandals. The life and health of the world—that one value of which Wendell Berry wrote long ago in “Discipline and Hope”—have not improved since the advent of standardized testing or the opening of universities to everyone with a pulse. And still every year hordes of credulous young people are told to part with good money, most of it borrowed, that for many of them could be better spent in other endeavors. In most cases the result of all that spending is not an educated person; it is a graduated person (about which, more presently).
I will be told—indeed, Menand tells us—that “in 2008 the average income for someone with an advanced degree (master’s, professional, or doctoral) was $83,144; for someone with a bachelor’s degree, it was $58,613; for someone with only a high school education, it was $31,283.”
So, given the configuration of our economy, there is a link between education and earning potential. Someone stop the press.
But a question worth asking is: what do highly educated people do with that average annual salary?
The evidence suggests that, by and large, they use it to live peripatetic lives—lives, that is, that are inimical to the health of any given place. And, not surprisingly, the places that, by and large, they inhabit are hardly worth caring about. We have generated and facilitated an immense amount of despair by building vinyl-lined cul-de-sacs on old corn fields for these “successful” people to commute from and briefly reside in until they move to another one. We’ve also had to provide their children with massive infusions of Prozac.
I don’t know the source of the problem I am describing, if indeed there is a single source, but I do know that we have seriously polluted education by making it a minor league for the job market. And I’m quite sure that, having done that, we have made it acceptable for the wealthy to be the worst sorts of vandals. College graduates know less and less of the things truly worth knowing, and the life and health of the world continue their precipitous decline, thanks to the certified vandals.
Or, to put it another way, we have no real interest in education; all we’re really interested in is figuring out the fastest way to bankroll our favorite pastime: shitting in our own nest.
I wouldn’t misrepresent Menand, whose purpose isn’t to talk about the vandalism I’m saying a college education sanctions. He wants to talk about a couple of books that have ruffled the feathers of not a few academic birds. One, Academically Adrift, argues that an alarming percentage of American college students do not learn what their institutions claim to be teaching. The other, In the Basement of the Ivory Tower, claims that most students are not only unqualified for college; they are unteachable as well.
But Menand’s purpose and mine are not unrelated.
Consider that the largest major in American higher education is business—twenty-two per cent of bachelor’s degrees are awarded to business students—and that business majors are the students “who score the lowest and improve the least.” Could this have something to do with the claims of the two books Menand mentions? Has the pre-professionalization of American higher education ruined it?
Discredit the methodology (such as it is—that’s the best way to ignore the plain facts), but I think the answer is “yes.”
That business should attract so many undergraduates means that education really has become a kind of Single-A farm system for the job market. It also means that many rising college students—and probably their parents as well—lack imagination. It means, further, that vandalism is what colleges and universities are preparing their students for. And they’re accepting everyone who applies these days.
It should go without saying that there are good people teaching and majoring in pre-professional disciplines. I am speaking generally and must therefore generalize. But let’s face it: there is no serious talk anywhere of education as, say, Cardinal Newman understood it. We all know what the official line is. We all know that one’s tuition is not its own reward—not at the current cost.
That is why we graduate rather than educate students. A graduate can hope, maybe, to pay back the loans. An educate can’t. (And it is telling—isn’t it?—that we have the noun “graduate” but not the noun “educate.”)
It would be a mistake to say the “highly selective,” which is to say highly expensive, liberal arts colleges are innocent in all this. Not one of them has the guts to uncouple education from earning potential. None that I know of sends out brochures to high school students promising to teach them to live poorer and better and less like vandals than their parents.
When my kids get “literature” in the mail from a college claiming that it will help them enter into the fullness of their humanity and teach them to ensure in perpetuity the life and health of the world, I will stop using the word “racket” to describe “higher” education. But until that time I’m afraid I will be an accomplice to something I cannot wholly admire—if also, I hope, an enemy within it, a kind of Trojan horse.
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{ 34 comments… read them below or add one }
Back when I was looking at graduate programs, I think it was the brochure from Duke’s Religious Studies Department that included a stern warning about the likelihood of actually making any money off of one’s investment. Granted, it was not an undergraduate program, and its business was probably still the training of vandals. Perhaps it’s just a snobbery unique to humanities graduate departments that they know they are not producing anything useful and take pride in that fact.
there are way too many people in college
You have written many true things on this site, Jason, but this thoughtful (even, by lights of your usual writings, somewhat moderate) screed against pre-professional “education” is perhaps the truest thing you’ve written yet. I’m saving this one, and maybe putting it up on my office wall.
The problem starts before college. When there are local school board elections, I read the little advertising blurbs from the candidates. Sometimes I go to the meetings where I can listen to them. If any candidate says anything about wanting the students to learn stuff, s/he gets my vote automatically. I don’t care if it’s a socialist, libertarian, tory, communist, whig, anarchist, federalist, natural lawist or what. Even a Republican would be acceptable. But it hardly ever happens. It’s rare to find anyone speaking of schools as a place for learning. The administrators don’t. “Preparing” maybe, but not learning.
Don’t worry, it will all implode soon enough when the next debt bubble bursts (the student loan bubble, that is). Of course your essay is true enough, but can we (“higher” education) not help but reflect the society we are caught up in? In committee I have helped draft all those nice mission, vision, and values statements for our college of arts and sciences, and they say all the right things about what our purpose should be, but mostly it just feels that, like Dorothy, we are caught up in the tornado of society and can only watch all the debris spin around us, as we spin with it.
Your Single-A analogy is good. I used to be an IT director for a medium-sized financial services company. We would get the freshly minted MBA sons and daughters (mostly sons) of CEO’s to train in our accounting, risk management, and marketing departments. We were sort of like Double-A.
I question the “unteachables” part. The ones I knew — and I usually had quite a bit of contact since I provided a lot of their data, were mostly very bright people who appreciated art and literature and truth. When they could find it. The son of a CEO of a major airline was going to a Bob Dylan concert. When I joked about Dylan, he replied very seriously that he loved the poetry.
Business degrees are more like vocational education. Nobody expects the person who got his network training at DeVry to be “educated”, just trained. I don’t know why you’d expect anything different from an MBA.
Honestly, these sorts of posts just baffle me.
You acknowledge that “in 2008 the average income for someone with an advanced degree (master’s, professional, or doctoral) was $83,144; for someone with a bachelor’s degree, it was $58,613; for someone with only a high school education, it was $31,283.”
Is it a reasonable expectation of human nature that such incentives will (generally speaking as you say) be ignored? It is almost incredulous that a person of your education would (given the tenor of your post) expect some other outcome.
Change the incentives and you’ll change the behavior. I think I learned that in a business class somewhere along the way…
“… there are way too many people in college.”
Yes, three times yes. But there is also a related problem: There are far too few people in trade schools and apprentice programs.
A lot of times, people take shots at the kids, which is fair enough. But most of the ones I taught were victims of a sort. They had absolutely no interest in reading Foucault or Said–or Shakespeare or Milton for that matter. What they really, desperately wanted out of college was job training. It’s what their parents wanted, too. Only they’ve all been convinced that only an idiot becomes a carpenter or a welder. So they suffer through it and get drunk. As far as I can tell, that’s their best option.
Studying Foucault and Milton is–I hate to use this word because of all the baggage involved, but I lack any other–elitist. Meaning few people are built for it, and even fewer are interested in it anyway.
It’s a terrible racket for sure.
Ginger,
Fair enough. But the incentives hide a huge selection bias. Right now, there are really, really bright kids who would be naturally inclined to pursue, say, plumbing or carpentry or die setting. OUr society tells these people that if they choose those fields, they are idiots and failures. Quite naturally, these kids go to college, major in business and get drunk.
Later, though, having good a decent head on their shoulders and an otherwise good education, they end up doing well for themselves. Not because of the education that they never use, but in spite of it. But the statistics you mention attribute all of this financial success to the college degree.
GingerMan, yes it’d be great to change the incentives, and others writing on this website have indicated what that might look like in other posts.
The problem this post is addressing is that people don’t really see the current results of higher education as scandalous and destructive. So it describes these problems, since if it isn’t all that bad then why change the incentives?
And I do think that popular opinion of the current results of higher education is still very, very favorable. This needs to change first before people will be willing to change the incentive structure. Hence, this post.
Let’s start with for profit universities. The very fact they can exist gets to idiocy that’s infecting our approach to education. Why we defund established and respected flagship state universities while subsidizing the profits of these uber-vandals is beyond me.
Oh and while we are at it how about doing away with state-of-the-art rec centers, all you can eat dining halls, the net-loss sports programs (the majority), and this whole idea of a university “experience”. When you get a better education by ignoring the “experience” something is wrong with the model.
Prof. Peters is right on the money when he talks about universities training vandals:
“we have no real interest in education; all we’re really interested in is figuring out the fastest way to bankroll our favorite pastime: shitting in our own nest.”
For prophetic punch, this is high poetry; and I write this from a cozy pub in Grasmere – Wordsworth and Coleridge country.
Agreed with Koefoed, except maybe with the sports programs in some instances. I don’t know that most college symphonies or glee clubs pay for themselves. Granted, these do not require a hundred million dollar stadium, but neither do sports if properly considered. I certainly think they are overvalued, but I don’t think the college is doing anything wrong by providing athletic facilities to keep students fit and engender a bit of esprit de corps.
Woe is the college town that gathers thousands of 18-year-old kids from hither and yon and doesn’t find them something to do. It’s my understanding that long ago, an annual pastime in State College, PA, was a gathering and burning of all the local farmers’ wagons. In New haven, Yale students would regularly beat and occassionally murder a local fireman until the locals turned a cannon on the walls of Old Campus. (It didn’t work, but they got the picture.) Kids these days are actually pretty good.
No, Joe Paterno doesn’t need to get paid as much as he does. But a volleyball court or two would be nice gesture, even if a purely defensive one.
Not perfect, but much, much better than the rest: http://www.uchicago.edu (or at least it was when I was there).
I think materialism is much to blame for over-schooling and under-educating. Not just consumerism, although that’s a big part of it, but philosophical materialism. We’ve largely rendered God and transcendent meaning irrelevant to learning, so there’s really nothing left to focus on except gaming the system and getting what you can while you can. Schools maximize profits by hauling students in indiscriminately with the promise of marketability. Students fork over the money in hopes of jumping through the hoops needed to get a better job. No time for studious reflection when you have a limited lifespan in which to maximize your hoardings.
@Sam M
I haven’t seen any stats on this point, but my instinct is that you may be correct about the selection bias. It probably depends upon the major and the ultimate career though.
I’d say that someone who majors in accounting and becomes a CPA (like my cousin) probably got some training during his/her BA that is applicable and useful. Someone who majored in English and ends up working as a bookkeeper (my sister), probably less so.
It could be that, from an employer’s point of view, the BA serves primarily as a signaling device (someone who was smart enough to get into college and earn some level of GPA, irrespective of content of the coursework) that is harder to assess for someone lacking a degree, but again it depends, doesn’t it?
I’d say that some bare bones “pre-professional” training in double-entry account, balance sheets, financial discounting/amortization, basic statistics, etc. is perceived as useful if one is trying to hire someone for an entry level position in a business field. It probably shouldn’t take 4 years to acquire such pre-professionalization, but that’s another story.
There is no doubt many people enter college simply because it is the “thing to do to become financially successful” and lack a clear image of what training they want and what career they desire. But I’m not sure it is realistic to expect different from 18 year olds. I know it sure wouldn’t have been for me.
re: “Our society tells these people that if they choose those fields, they are idiots and failures.”
I guess this is the kind of sentiment that I have trouble with. Yes, there is some general denigration of blue-collar, manual work. I don’t condone such sentiments, nor parrot them myself, but I also don’t feel (as your quote above implies) that this is the only (or even primary) driver of education/career choices young students make.
From Salary.com:
The median expected salary for a typical Plumber III in the United States is $50,790.
The median expected salary for a typical Software Developer III in the United States is $92,096.
As long as that disparity exists, which is not simply a function of cultural norms (unless you define culture as the baseline functioning of the modern economy), you are going to get an increased demand for pre-professional education in the IT field that outstrips traditional blue-collar trades (just as a for instance).
This then rolls up into the very broad stats quoted in the article, which is that (taken as a general statement) obtaining a college degree increases your earning potential.
The broader critique, which @mushroom summaries well, is that such pre-professional coursework is not the same as education, in the small-l classic liberal sense. I’m not sure anybody really expects that it is, do they?
Pre-professionalization and liberal education of the type that Peters is flogging are two different animals. The challenge is to get people to pay $30K+ per year for the latter. Good luck with that…
GingerMan,
I think that if you run plumber (or, better, bricklayer or stone mason) against accountant you will find the disparity you noted is much less or non-existent. At least when I was in college (late 90s), there were a lot more future accountants than software developers. This may have changed.
Sam M:
Thanks of the comment. I think the university does well to provide very basic facilities for athletics as well as music groups etc. I’m just saying that all of these should function as club sports rather than intercollegiate sports. In the latter case millions of dollars go into exclusive-use manicured fields, coaching salaries, and 3 pairs of shoes for sports like women’s soccer (the men are generally cut out by Title IX), golf, etc.
The only argument for net-loss sports in the curriculum is the idea that it forms the body as well as the mind, promotes fair play and teamwork, etc. This can all be accomplished through much cheaper club sports and the revenue from money makers can go where it belongs – back to the academic mission of the university. As far as the espirit de corps for the non-athletes (fans) this only rallies around money making sports anyway.
Joe Paterno is actually a shining example of how things should be done. He’s donated tons of his money to the academic programs and library, is outspoken that that is the primary mission of the university, and graduates his players well beyond the national average. He’s one of the few coaches who would rather have the library named after him than the stadium.
Accountant III is listed as $63,242. Higher, but obviously less dramatic than the example I choose (randomly) above.
I’ve never seen the underlying data that supports the raw summary figures in Peters article (insert Mark Twain quote on statistics here), but if I had to guess, it’s possible that the #’s may be skewed due to presence of outliers in the college graduate figures (i.e. extremely high earners tending to be college or professional grads).
More interesting (if one wanted to contest my point of view) would be to look at the median, not the mean (average). It could be that for the median college student the payoff is far less evident. But since we all think we’re “above average” that might not translate into differing behavior anyway :)
Median earnings here:
http://www.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/06/09/aoun.college.benefits/index.html?hpt=hp_c2
GingerMan:
The espirit de corps generated by intercollegiate competition is real. Intramural competition (while valuable in its own, separate right) does nothing like it.
I played varsity sports at the jr. high, high school and intercollegiate levels, all at very small (non-athletic scholarship) schools. The experience for members of the team and for the campus as a whole, in engendering institutional pride, is irreplaceable.
I thoroughly enjoyed this piece and thought it provided a thoughtful, accurate, and provactive analysis. I’ve shared it on facebook, and I hope all my “friends” read it.
On a more personal level, I consider myself a fairly well-educated individual, especially given my age (27). I am a proud graduate of the best prep school, for my (father’s) money at least, in the state of Texas, if not among the national elite. I’m also a graduate of one of those so-called “liberal arts schools” that actually purports to teach things (the University of Dallas; B.A. Economics). I was academically, socially, and personally successful at both places–but my job prospects haven’t exactly been gang-busters.
No small part of this is attributable to the economy, of course. And my personal preferences, circumstances, and luck all factor in. The fact remains, I can’t help but wonder if my “opportunities” would be greater if I’d gone to SMU or Texas (or even Texas Tech or Oklahoma).
I’m now pursuing law schools and leaning strongly toward a “name” program, over one that might offer a similar education for (far) less money. Certainly law school anywhere is not “communications” at Cal State-Northridge, but I get the sense our “perception is reality” problem goes pretty deep in this country.
P.S. I started dating my wife in college, so it’s hard to argue in favor of any “career more” over a loving spouse. But, she’s from North Texas, too, so I might’ve met her anywhere.
I have no problem with intra-collegiate sports in some form. Besides, my wife likes to watch Big Ten football and basketball, so I like to join her once in a while. Sometimes I can lure her into letting me go on a bicycling expedition (or library/archive expedition for planning future rides) if I can somehow attach a Big Ten sporting event to it.
And I agree that there is no comparison between intramural or club sports and an activity in which you represent your school in competition against other schools. I’m a pretty poor specimen of an athlete, and was when I was younger, too, but did get some of this in college wrestling. It was a small school, and even at that I won barely enough to letter, but it was still a valuable experience.
People used to say these activities help young people develop character and leadership skills. But if that’s the case, why the inordinate emphasis on coaches? Watch the TV cameras at a basketball or football game. Q. What player gets as much camera time as the head coaches? A. None of them. And what’s with all the timeouts and playcalling from the sidelines? That kind of micromanagement is not teaching character and leadership skills.
So here’s my proposal for reform: Go ahead and hire good coaches. I love Tom Izzo. But when the game starts, the coaches all go into sealed rooms where they can watch the game but have no communication with the outside. They can come out for halftime, but back in they go for the 2nd half. The team captains can manage the game. The TV cameras can pay attention to the players instead of the coaches.
Besides being better for the players, the games would become faster-paced and more interesting.
And the NCAA should definitely ban those student athlete centers that separate the athletes from the rest of the student body. Yes, some big names in college athletics will have their feelings hurt on account of the money they donated for these edifices. But it would be for the good of all concerned.
I probably should have said inter-collegiate instead of intra-collegiate.
Sorry I should clarify my terms which were muddled. By club sports I mean intercollegiate sports that represent their university and have all the fierceness of competition but without the paid coaches and without preferential treatment in funding over other student organizations. This happens all over the country for either disenfranchised sports or 2nd tier versions of the “varsity” teams the school pays for – and these very competitive teams with the letters of their university on their uniforms are called “club”.
All I’m saying is that the school should provide playing surfaces like it does for all the other students who want to stay fit (i.e. the club basketball team reserves the student gym when they have a game) and the money for uniforms should come out of the per club (or per person) allotment. When the school foots the bill for sports that don’t generate revenue at a higher cost than say the debate society or pre-law society it tacitly undermines its own mission as a primarily educational institution.
I think money making sports absolutely have to be considered in a different category because their revenue could potentially contribute to the educational mission of the school in grand ways (substantial money and when done right and achieving a certain linkage in the public mind with athletic and academic excellence, like the University of Michigan or Notre Dame). If we are honest they also are the sports that foster community solidarity on large campuses and even a sense of place to local people in the area. I would, however, be in favor of strong percentage stipulation in donations such as: “Your donation has to be 80% to the university for every 20% that goes to the football team.” And the coach shouldn’t make more than the president.
@GingerMan,
The author isn’t ignoring monetary incentives, he is critiquing them. Students are not incentivized by money per se. Rather it is social status and the vision of the “good life” that is the motivator. Unfortunately, our society has fostered the notion that money is the primary indicator of what society values and esteems.
In other words, if you want to have high social status, you choose a career with a corresponding high salary from the list of professions and median earnings. And if you want to run a successful education business, then you train your customers for those careers. No need to bother with actually educating your customers.
Educators used to talk about character formation, truth, the greater good, and academic rigor. But because these things are not necessary to graduate large numbers of high income earners, colleges only pay lip service to these ideas and graduate the uneducated.
I understand perfectly that he is critiquing the financial incentives. My problem with such critiques is that it is like criticizing the wind, but it is framed through a lens of changes in social values and a fall from the Garden of Educational Eden. E.g. “Educators *used* to talk about character formation, truth, the greater good, and academic rigor.”
I’d also contest again that institutions, as a whole, are failing to educate students. Knowledge is being imparted, just not necessarily on character formation, truth, the greater good, etc. It comes down to what one is buying from a college degree. When one is paying $30K+ per year, expecting to receive instruction on skills that will have a financial return associated with them is hardly unreasonable. In fact, it shows imminently good judgement, from my standpoint.
Maybe this devolves into a semantic discussion regarding the word “educated” but again @mushroom’s characterization above stands, I think.
“Business degrees are more like vocational education. Nobody expects the person who got his network training at DeVry to be “educated”, just trained. I don’t know why you’d expect anything different from an MBA.”
The general tone of the critiques is that MBA’s are beneath the moral stature of Peters and other brave defenders of “character formation, truth, the greater good, and academic rigor.” Any critiq
Any critique standing upon such a foundation smells suspect to me.
@Ginger
Your argument is circular. According to you, students go to university for the reasons they go to university and universities teach students the things that they learn in university. Therefore, there is no place for the author’s criticism. Or another example, “Change the incentives and you’ll change the behavior.” How do you propose that incentives be changed? According to your supposition the university is not the place to do it.
I suggest reading Menand’s article and reviews of the books the author is discussing. The evidence that students are not learning in college deserves consideration. Maybe doing so will inform your opinion of this article.
Finally, if you do not acknowledge that there is a moral superiority about which the author is speaking–a foundation upon which we all stand whether acknowledged or not–then you will continued to be “baffled” by reading fine articles like this one.
Response to Gingerman:
“My problem with such critiques is that it is like criticizing the wind, but it is framed through a lens of changes in social values and a fall from the Garden of Educational Eden. E.g. “Educators *used* to talk about character formation, truth, the greater good, and academic rigor.”
This absolutely was the case in previous educational era’s. Julie Reuben’s book The Making of the Modern University charts the shift very well. She points out that the language and values have actually changed. That is not to say the past was a “Garden of Educational Eden” but it is to say that something about the fundamental view of education has changed, and one can easily come to conclusion that this might not be such a good thing. But the change is real, its not a fabricated utopia.
Furthermore, there is no reason an MBA in principle has to be beneath these values, its just in practice they often are.
One thing we have to distinguish between is the idea of a university as a trade school and the idea of a university as a school training leaders in society. If the university functions as a trade school, there is no reason why it can’t function mostly as an economic transaction, but I think everyone must concede there should be some level of intellectual and civic thinking that goes on in the curriculum. These citizens will, after all, vote. If the university is training leaders in society – presumably an MBA fits one for a not inconsequential role of leadership in business and therefore often the community – it cannot be reduced to a purely economic transaction. That in itself is an unthinking, philosophical assumption predicated on a dessicated view of wealth and power and its relationship to the rest of society. The founders of this great nation – who constructed a carefully thought out political framework upon which we still heavily rely – conceived of education, leadership, business, and society and the relationship between all of these things as intertwined and in very different terms from our current understanding. This very fact should at least suggest we might incorporate the Question about these relationships into the curriculum of an “educated” person who will assume a leadership role in society; never mind the exact answers.
When I was in graduate school in 1994-96 studying History, I used to reflect on this very point–that too many people are in college, and higher education exist mostly to perpetuate itself–with friends. Bachelor’s degrees no longer set anyone apart, so everyone get master’s; yet, so many get those that now it’s Ph.D’s.
It is worse now, and I recognize it. However, two points: 1) Do I tell my own 5 children to skip it? 2) I am very much a porcher in my world-view, but I have yet to see anywhere a vision of what a workable society would look like if all the ‘vandals’ decided to grow corn and write poetry.
A lot of what passes for “higher” education could be done by specific schools (e.g. engineering, accounting, business, manufacturing, etc.), but do we stop caring if those professionals can read or write?
It may have been Twain who said “The one who does not read has no advantage over the one who can’t read.” I recognize that one has to have a teachable spirit, see the value of, and care about history, literature, and the rest of the humanities to actually gain intangible value by studying it, and one can do much of that with a library card. I also recognize that colleges and universities have no incentive to turn aside those who only want a degree to get a better job to make more money to acquire more stuff.
One can not fully blame higher education. Employers also feed it by using degrees to weed out applicants. This is based on many assumptions about graduates, not all false.
But I am tired of seeing the problem lamented again and again, in book after book for decades, from Page Smith to Thomas Sowell from Rudolf Flesch to Mark Taylor, and everyone in between.
So many of the publications I subscribe to or blogs I read, like “First Things,” Touchstone,” “Salvo,” “Books and Culture,” “Christianity Today,” “The Hedgehog Review,” etc. have the same people writing basically the same things over and over. The Christian “speaker/conference” tours. The “National Review” type tours. The list goes on and on.
The same people making money writing the same books, the same articles, giving the same speeches. All academics.
When is someone going to actually present a reasonable, scalable, sustainable, achievable vision? I know human projects contain within themselves the seeds to their own destruction, that there are limits both to doing and being, that any project will have to be reformed anew in the next generation, but still…what are we to do now?
Shop Class may indeed be Soul Craft, but souls have to eat. Do I tell my daughter who is going to UNC in the fall to study Chemistry: “Don’t bother, dear. Just live in a shack, grow some corn and write poetry by lamplight”?
Degree in chemistry? She should pursue it. Womens Studies? Go for the shack.
Now that the Feds are getting into the game of insisting that colleges must show measurable value toward the goal of “gainful employment,” the jig is up. It’s only a matter of time between the world is divided between two or three vocational chain colleges and Hillsdale.
for some years now I have been hearing and reading that Americans will change careers five or six times in their life and will probably have to be re-schooled for each of them. I haven’t decided whether that is a working definition of Chaos or a prediction based on that holy tenet of capitalism called Creative Destruction. I don’t see any effort to prepare for such a future if there is to be one.
To me, it sounds like we are being groomed for serfdom.
As a former assistant professor at a large state university, I witnessed what I considered to be an immense waste of resources while the state’s regents annually raised tuition. The politics and self-preservation hysterics of academia can’t be solved until they realize that high salaries and increasing benefits for all those who teach one or two classes of ever- shrinking class sizes due to their unintelligible immigrant graduate teaching assistants, and sprawling campuses dotted with aging buildings that require massive operational outlay, is a model that can’t be sustained. Our public universities have become insitutions of sports entertainment under the guise of education. Our private universities have priced themselves out of the marketplace. Only the nimble, small-faculty, inner city college has a chance serving poor students eligible for liberal government aid has a chance of surviving. Market fluctuations have hit endowments and donors of private colleges so hard that they are shedding high paid presidents, faculty, programs and hard cost expenses as fast as you can say cum laude.
You mentioned that only 3% of people in certain countries in Europe go to college, compared to 6% in America. Could that be because we have more young people?