The value of a college education, pits and pitfalls

One of the best bits of journalism advice I ever got was from an editor in my last job.  I'd suggested a provocative question as the headline of the article, let's paraphrase the question as "Is X true?"  Anyway, he turned to me and said, "Well, is X true?"   "I don't know!" I said.  "Never use a question in your headline unless you plan to answer it," he said.

Someone should have told this to Louis Menand, the apparently prominent academic who recently wrote an essay about college for "The New Yorker."  The New Yorker's mainpage asks, "More and more Americans are going to college, but how many of them are actually coming away with anything?"

Menand goes on a somewhat weird meander about the historical value of college, then tries to riff a bit on white educational elitism.  What he doesn't do is answer any of the very critical and prominent questions that his essay raises, starting with the introductory one.  (In spite of this, he goes on for 11 pages, using constructions like "Two recent books suggest that they are not.  They suggest it pretty emphatically."  Clearly, this piece needed an editor.  It needed one critically.)  Menand, of course, approaches this from the perspective of privilege.  Only a very educated person could be so offhanded-ly skeptical about the value of education.

A selection of quotes that nonetheless made me think:

"Before 1945, elite private colleges like Harvard and Yale were largely in the business of reproducing a privileged social class.  Between 1906 and 1932, four hundred and five boys from Groton applied to Harvard.  Four hundred and two were accepted."

Menand now teaches at Harvard, so maybe he's engaging in a bit of wistful delusion, but this is still largely the case.  I still remember telling someone that I went to Northwestern, and him saying, "Wow, you must be rich."  That was not the answer I was expecting, but it's still kind of true.  It takes a very particular kind of person to choose Northwestern over a cheaper state school with an equally (or almost equally) good journalism program.  For people who weren't born into money, private schools are still seen as a shortcut into the arms of the elite.  You may not have been born a Kennedy, but if you go to Harvard you can still be a Senator.

One has only to see the sort of religious reverence that Asian parents have for the institution of college.  Nobody on earth has bigger dreams than immigrants; having risked everything, they keep hoping for a correspondingly impressive return.  Going to Yale is the ultimate symbol of assimilating into the American upper-most class.  It is the great leveler, or rather, the great lifter-up of (some of!) the masses to a more exalted level.  (In other words, the great leveler and its opposite, all at once)

"You see academic tulip mania: students and their parents are overvaluing a commodity for which there are cheap and plentiful substitutes."

Only someone who's already a prof at Harvard could so thoroughly ignore the elephant in the room.  More importantly, only the recipient of a first-rate liberal education could really convince himself that the phrase "tulip mania" has any relevance here.  If college were a commodity like tulips, its value wouldn't keep increasing so consistently over decades.  But the entire point of tulip mania was that people convinced themselves that tulips had no substitute, and by convincing themselves, they made this real (albeit briefly).  There's no difference, then, between the fact that we perceive college as having no substitute and the reality of the matter.

Of course, the end result of tulip mania was the interesting part.  Overnight, its value collapsed (due to many factors, among them people selling tulips that they did not in fact possess but that's another story).  Because the value of the tulip was based on the assumption that tulips had no substitute, the value was actually poised on pretty flimsy legs.  But college administrators are not headed for any such day of reckoning.  The demand for American-style higher education is only increasing all over the world.  In order to break the Yale hegemony, people would need to start believing in alternative forms of education just as seriously as they believe in Yale.  But is this really going to happen?  After all, a community college graduate can look forward to making money as a nurse, but a Yale student can share a beer with a Bush twin.  That's not going to change, at least for now.

"Arum and Roksa argue that many students today perceive college as fundamentally a social experience."

In general, this brings up an important point about society itself.  The need for intense years-long study seems to be on the wane (if it was ever really necessary).  If today's generation has a talent, it's self-promotion.  A talent for self-promotion will also get you a lot further professionally than a tendency to wax lyrical about esoteric philosophical trends.  If college is viewed as a social exercise, then so is life.  This is the age of Julia Allison and Britney Spears, not Emerson and Wagner.

The vast majority of undergraduate students are in hiding from the fact that they have absolutely no clue what they want to do with their lives or how to do it.  They were born with infinite options and an equal tendency towards inertia. Some estimates hold that as many as 80 per cent of college students don't even know what major they want to declare.  No wonder they'd rather party.

But also, along with the expansion of college to more people, American colleges have become stuffed with kids who are at college simply because their parents insisted that they go and offer to pay.  These people are not passionate about the type of learning that Menand seems to think college is for.

"Professors have little incentive to make their courses more rigorous."

Well duh.

"The students who...improve the least [in college] are business majors."

Well double duh.

"Americans are being urged to invest in something they can't afford and don't need."

I wonder if Harvard would ever hire a professor who didn't have a college degree?  Or are Harvard professors not like the rest of us?  Since when is classism restricted to the upper classes?

Menand extolls liberal arts education as the ultimate expression of the intelligent mind, suited only for the few. (It's funny that he says he subscribes to the democratic theory of education, when his entire essay is a subtle argument for the exact opposite) Missing from the debate, of course, is the question of what these intelligent, liberal graduates add to the human race.  We've long accepted that the value of great literature and philosophy can't be measured, that the market is too crass to appreciate the finer things.  That may be.  But I'd argue that the entire purpose behind Menand's essay - the recent recession, and the fact that so many graduates find themselves unemployed - actually arises because society doesn't have a ready use for these people, not because these people don't value themselves.  If anything, they (like Menand!) may be valuing themselves too highly.  But is that the result of going to college, or the prompt for landing there in the first place?

Oh well, I seem to have arrived at Menand's conclusion: a liberal arts degree might not help you get a job.  I wonder why it took the New Yorker 11 pages to beat around a fact that most of the world already knows.