At Reason Magazine, Nick Gillespie voices a reactionary point of view.
What actually sets institutions of higher learning apart from high schools, barbers’ colleges, online academies, and various universities-in-name-only is that they are centers of knowledge production. That is, they revolve around faculty scholars who are actively expanding, revising, and remaking the received wisdom in their given fields. Active researchers, whether in astronomy or zoology or cultural studies or good old American literature, are the folks that make college worth a damn.
This is part of a symposium on higher education, which includes several other contributors. I think Gillespie touches on an important point: not all colleges are the same. If you drop from the 100th most prestigious school down to the 300th, somewhere along the way you will have hit the level where one must shed one’s idealistic illusions about “higher learning.”
How should we term these non-elite schools? Perhaps we should call them institutions of lower learning. At many of these, you will find a handful of highly capable students. But they are diamonds in the rough.
The cost of attending institutions of higher learning has increased, but I do not think that is where the crisis lies. Students at those schools tend to get what their parents are looking for, which is confirmation of their membership in the upper strata of society.
My guess is that the real crisis is at the institutions of lower learning. Cost have gone up there as well, and so have the hopes of progressives for results. But they are not wildly successful, to say the least.
By Richard Vedder’s count, close to half of college graduates, including over 100,000 janitors, hold jobs that do not require a college degree. This makes perfect sense, given that more students attend institutions of lower learning than institutions of higher learning. Vedder says that the default rate on student loans is 12 percent. I would bet that at least 2/3 of those defaults come from institutions of lower learning.
That is not to say that institutions of lower learning are bad. It is possible that they teach more effectively than the elite schools, with the latter simply enjoying the halo effect created by being able to reject anyone who is not sufficiently prepared and motivated.
Lisa Snell points out that many students enter college requiring remedial education. For the most part, these students get sifted into the institutions of lower learning.
I do not see the majority of students at institutions of lower learning becoming affluent professionals or articulate intellectuals. In that regard, I think that the potential for online courses taught by elite university professors to penetrate the institutions of lower learning is rather low.
Pundits and policy makers tend to ignore the reality at the institutions of lower learning. They need to give it more consideration.
Your current proposal is unconstitutional, because it would require the Supreme Court to perform non-judicial functions. I propose that a private solution could work. An eccentric billionaire, or a private institution, could flood a city with swarms of flying recorder robots, and then sell the information recorded to interested parties.
My apologies, the reply above was meant for your post about surveillance.
In this context it might be appropriate to reflect on Sturgeon’s Law: 99% of everything is crap. That includes the research done at institutions of higher learning, however defined. As pre-professional training grounds public support of those institutions might be justified. I don’t see an equal justification for using the public purse to fund an ever-escalating expense, much of it spent on administration that has little to do either with education or research, to produce 99% crap.
I was going to say something similar, although perhaps less stridently. Gillespie seems to have a pretty rosey view of the scholarship of the modern institutions of higher learning. Mine is much less so. It’s important to distinguish, though, between different disciplines. Research in the physical sciences has as high a value as ever, I would think; life sciences a bit less valuable, as Gary Taubes will tell you, and the social sciences…somewhere between useless and evil is how it looks from my point of view.
Gillespie has a PhD in English from an obscure public university. Make of that what you will.
I skimmed that piece a couple days ago and I was surprised to see Nick mouth uncritically two of the key cons of the college scam: that liberal arts degrees have value because they open your mind and that research is the real product of universities, but then he does admit he got four English degrees.
Your perspective is fairly standard on the econ blogs also: that the real problem is that a college education has just been watered down and fed to lesser minds who simply shouldn’t be in college. I’d argue instead that the beefed-up curricula that you think had value also was fairly useless for a long time, so the problem is not just below the top of the food chain but all throughout.
The real opportunity in online learning is to reject everything about the current system and go off in a completely different direction, and I’m fairly certain that’s what will happen, because the technology is so different than what came before.
On the one hand, I keep reading how the purpose of college is to become educated, broaden horizons, etc. So much so that many consider most STEM majors to not be real college.
Then on the other hand, I keep reading about these statistics, reported as being dire, that many college graduates are in jobs that don’t require a college level training. But what is the problem, these employees were “educated” and now they have jobs. The two aren’t really related if we believe the defenders of the Liberal Arts.
In fact, few, if any jobs, require a college degree except by custom or government license requirement. Even those were historically very successfully performed by those without university paperwork. As Steve Jobs is an example, you don’t need a college degree to run a successful company. So even though the founders of Google are well credentialed, they are in jobs that don’t require a college degree. I’m reminded of a man I read of, who has written more briefs for the Supreme Court than just about anyone. Yet, he doesn’t have a college degree or a law degree and couldn’t join the bar even if the degree requirement was waived as he developed his talent while serving time for bank robbery, a felony being a disqualifying factor for a law license.
In 1923, a Professor had this to say of a college education:
“A man learns more about business in the first six months after his graduation than he does in his whole four years of college. But-and here is the “practical” result of his college work-he learns far more in those six months than if he had not gone to college. He has been trained to learn, and that, to all intents and purposes, is all the training he has received. To say that he has been trained to think is to say essentially that he has been trained to learn, but remember that it is impossible to teach a man to think. The power to think must be inherently his. All that the teacher can do is help him learn to order his thoughts-such as they are. ”
So really the question seems to be, why today’s college graduates aren’t able to find positions where they can take advantage of their learning skills or are those today less differentiated from the non-college graduate employee?
It is frustrating to see the debate framed as “Is college worthwhile?” instead of the more accurate “What are the costs and benefits of college?” College is obviously not worthwhile at any cost, but it must be worthwhile at *some* cost. This is finance 101: net present value.
@Institutions of lower learning: Traditionally these were low-benefit, low-cost, and probably had a positive net present value (loosely, return on investment). But today costs outweigh benefits.
More so if your college “experience” is funded by debt rather then the spending of accrued assets on a discretionary pleasure.
If as Gillespie claims, “You should be going to college to have your mind blown by new ideas (read: whole fields of knowledge that you didn’t know existed until you got to college), to discover your intellectual passions, and to figure out what sorts of experiences you might want to pursue over the next 70 or so years,” and not to improve your earning potential, then amount of college you should purchase would be about the same as the amount you should spend/go into debt to go on a singles cruise or Spring Break. True, college today does offer many of the carnal pursuits of a good hedonistic vacation. But also true is that you can discover mind blowing new ideas, intellectual passions and experiences to pursue far better through the Internet these days than through the limiting schools of thought at any one university.
The true university these days is a collection of books.
– Thomas Carlyle