Battle for the Soul of Higher Education

In this morning’s New York Times, Frank Bruni has a must-read column on the purposes of higher education. He focuses upon a debate currently consuming Texas, but anyone who has listened to the rhetoric coming from the Indiana General Assembly will recognize it as an issue equally salient in Indiana.

As Bruni poses the central question:”Do we want our marquee state universities to behave more like job-training centers, judged by the number of students they speed toward degrees, the percentage of those students who quickly land good-paying jobs and the thrift with which all of this is accomplished? In the service of that, are we willing to jeopardize some of the trailblazing research these schools have routinely done and the standards they’ve maintained?”

I would suggest an even more basic question: are we willing to value education?  Do our lawmakers even recognize that education is not the same thing as job training? Do they see any value in the liberal arts, or in research that adds to the sum of human understanding and knowledge? Evidently not.

Bruni quotes the new Governor of Virginia on the subject: “Pat McCrory, the new governor of North Carolina, recently advocated legislation to distribute funds to the state’s colleges based not on their enrollments — or, as he said on a radio show, on “butts in seats” — but instead on “how many of those butts can get jobs. If you want to take gender studies, that’s fine, go to a private school,” he added. “But I don’t want to subsidize that if that’s not going to get someone a job.”

The current emphasis on what we used to call “vocational education” not only minimizes the value of education itself, it ignores the reality of today’s job market. Most college graduates will have several careers–not just jobs, but careers–and a significant number of those have yet to be invented. Students who emerge with “training” rather than an education that prepares them to think, to apply critical analytic skills to a rapidly changing economy and world, will soon need re-training.

Students who have been taught to think only instrumentally–who value only instruction that is immediately applicable economically, who are satisfied with the “how” and never ask “why”–are already at a considerable disadvantage. We have plenty of those students now, and I often want to invert the dismissive and ignorant statement made by Virginia’s Governor, and tell them: If you just want to learn how to manufacture widgets or push paper, fine.

Go to a trade school.

6 Comments

  1. In education, as Texas goes, so goes the rest of the herd.

    Generally, I would argue that few actually “value” an education in or out of an academic environment. The old meme, “employers love employees with a liberal arts education” is true only because the employers know that they can pay liberal arts majors much less than anybody else in most cases (see barista or management trainee).

    And the idea that most employers want employees who can think critically is simply ludicrous, on the whole. Mediocre managers certainly do not want someone who can think around the bosses’ mediocrity. Asking “why” too much is a sure path to the unemployment line or a dead end career path. Lucky be those few who find work under a able and confident administrator. Truth is, they are few and far between.

    I’m sure you have a different perspective being that you are a college professor, but way too many professors are more interested in themselves (see tenure, work/class load, renumeration and peer recognition) than in turning out graduates who can think and express themselves clearly. Clearly, you are in the minority.

    It’s a debate that should be had, yet the question is already skewed against any progressive position.

  2. May you live long and prosper — not only in the bank account, but in political achievement in Indiana! At the top of my list would be the “fuzzy thinking” across Indiana in allowing Daniels to appoint most of the trustees at Purdue and then accept a job for pay from them ! ! !

    When will we begin to get some serious FBI attention to the “insider trading” that goes on all the time with Indiana legislators and high office holders???

  3. Yes, generally managers in the private sector are hostile to college graduates, especially the members of the management team who do not have a college degree. I have encountered it firsthand, both in the private sector and the military. It seems like the Bottom Line is that they do not want an educated workforce capable of critical thinking, rather they just want what John Carpenter’s They Live (1988) exposed through the Alien sunglasses: “OBEY”, “CONFORM”, “REPRODUCE”. Yes, corporate drones fighting each other to obtain fiat currency that is not worth the paper its printed on. This is why even though I am considered a liberal democrat, I do not support amnesty for illegal immigrants. Not because I am against immigration but because corporations will exploit the lack of knowledge and skills of the immigrants while at the same time eroding the labor force, causing wages and benefits to drop, which is what corporations want.

  4. Yes, generally managers in the private sector are hostile to college graduates, especially the members of the management team who do not have a college degree. I have encountered it firsthand, both in the private sector and the military. It seems like the Bottom Line is that they do not want an educated workforce capable of critical thinking, rather they just want what John Carpenter’s They Live (1988) exposed through the Alien sunglasses: “OBEY”, “CONFORM”, “REPRODUCE”. Yes, corporate drones fighting each other to obtain fiat currency that is not worth the paper its printed on. This is why even though I am considered a liberal democrat, I do not support amnesty for illegal immigrants. Not because I am against immigration but because corporations will exploit the lack of knowledge and skills of the immigrants while at the same time eroding the labor force, causing wages and benefits to drop, which is what corporations want.

  5. Yes, generally managers in the private sector are hostile to college graduates, especially the members of the management team who do not have a college degree. I have encountered it firsthand, both in the private sector and the military. It seems like the Bottom Line is that they do not want an educated workforce capable of critical thinking, rather they just want what John Carpenter’s They Live (1988) exposed through the Alien sunglasses: “OBEY”, “CONFORM”, “REPRODUCE”. Yes, corporate drones fighting each other to obtain fiat currency that is not worth the paper its printed on. This is why even though I am considered a liberal democrat, I do not support amnesty for illegal immigrants. Not because I am against immigration but because corporations will exploit the lack of knowledge and skills of the immigrants while at the same time eroding the labor force, causing wages and benefits to drop, which is what corporations want.

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