Glenn Reynolds (a/k/a Instapundit) writes about the growing bubble in higher education. I think he’s right in the main. The cost of college has skyrocketed far in excess what colleges deliver. Easy credit in the form of student loans inflates the bubble.
But here’s where I disagree. Reynolds offers three justifications for getting a college degree:
First, it may actually make them more economically productive by teaching them skills valued in the workplace: Computer programming, nursing or engineering, say. (Religious and women’s studies, not so much.)
Second, it may provide a credential that employers want, not because it represents actual skills, but because it’s a weeding tool that doesn’t produce civil-rights suits as, say, IQ tests might. A four-year college degree, even if its holder acquired no actual skills, at least indicates some ability to show up on time and perform as instructed.
And, third, a college degree – at least an elite one – may hook its holder up with a useful social network that can provide jobs and opportunities in the future. (This is more true if it’s a degree from Yale than if it’s one from Eastern Kentucky, but it’s true everywhere to some degree).
All of these look at how others will view the college graduate and say nothing about any inherent value in education. Surely there is still some merit in the notion that education enhances the quality of one’s life, even in instances where it does not result directly in higher-paying employment.
But maybe not, and maybe that’s part of why colleges are failing: they are no longer focused on delivering knowledge and the skills needed to continue obtaining knowledge and to use it wisely. In fact, colleges are delivering less and less of that as the costs increase.
The liberal arts have lost their currency in society. Some of the blame goes to the liberal arts departments that stopped teaching liberal arts in favor of a mushy and very illiberal political ideology. People suspect that liberal arts majors are infected primarily with women’s and gender studies that equip the student only for a lifetime of anger and a slightly more eloquent approach to whining.
Those who recognize the futility of such a liberal arts curriculum often compound the problem by turning their attention to “skills valued in the workplace” and job-training. Their mantra is relevance. I’m all for educating people in fields like nursing and engineering, but a smattering of liberal arts would make them better nurses and engineers, just as a smattering of medicine and physics would do wonders for liberal arts majors.
But let’s talk about computer programming, which I’m afraid represents a philosophy of educational relevance run amok. Of course we need computer programmers, but do we need computer programming degrees? For that matter, do we need degrees in advertising, journalism, family and consumer studies, parks and recreation, and myriad other over-specialized fields?
What these specialized majors too frequently lack is a curriculum that includes the core skills needed to be a true professional in those fields. Too often, we end up with journalists with a marginal ability to write clear prose and computer programmers whose skills will be obsolete in three years. We need journalists skilled in rhetoric and knowledgeable in the field they write about. We need computer programmers skilled in math and logic. Such skills are what we used to call the liberal arts.
Ask yourself what reaction you would have to a job applicant who earned a computer programming degree in 1990. If you’re looking to hire a computer programmer, that degree means very little. If you’re looking to hire that person in another field, then you need to know whether he acquired a decent education in the course of earning his degree – an education that goes beyond a narrow area of specialization.
Colleges need to do two things, and there isn’t a ghost of a chance that they will do either. First, they need to restore rigor to their curricula – cut out the fluff, end the grade inflation, get back to core subjects in the liberal arts and hard sciences. Second, they need to make teaching what they do and kill their bloated bureaucracies. College administrations hire faculty for the wrong reasons, manage them ineffectively, and reward themselves at the faculty’s expense, forgetting that faculty members are (or ought to be) a college’s primary asset. (How many faculty, as opposed to administrators, have reserved parking spaces?)
College faculties themselves will not allow most of this to occur because the current denizens of academia know it would be suicide. And any steps that they might be willing to take would be shot down by the marriage of bureaucracy and government regulation, which support each other to the exclusion of all other concerns.
Even if colleges were magically transformed tomorrow into true centers of higher education, they would face the other insurmountable problem: There would be very few high-school graduates anywhere near prepared to begin a serious course of study.
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