Tag Archives: job training

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.

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When Does the University Stop Being Public?

The role and function of universities is increasingly a topic of discussion, and there is plenty to discuss. College costs have soared, student loan debt is at an all-time and dangerous high, and people are asking–reasonably–whether the product is worth the cost. The standards for making that determination are frequently misplaced; I’ve posted before my own frustration with those who see no difference between education and job training.

Meanwhile, state legislators routinely issue critiques and mandates. (This shouldn’t surprise those of us in higher education, since the General Assembly evidently considers itself a 150-person school board for K-12. This year it’s thou shalt teach cursive. A few years ago it was phonics.) Some of those legislative critiques are justified; most state universities could do with a leaner, meaner administrative structure. Many others betray an appalling lack of understanding of what a university is about.

One question that doesn’t seem to occur to these legislative overlords is: why should they have the ability to dictate university policies at all?

The assumed response to such a question is “because those institutions are supported by the state. It’s the Golden Rule: he who has the gold, rules.” But that assumption is getting thin indeed. State support is currently 11% of the budget at my university, and we are no anomaly. The vast majority of our funding comes from other sources: primarily tuition and fees, research grants, and fundraising.

This situation raises an interesting question: when do state universities cease being public? At what point does it make more sense for an institution of higher education to assess the considerable costs imposed by legislative mandates, compare those costs to the dwindling benefits of state financial support–and declare themselves private?

When children become self-supporting, they can declare themselves emancipated.

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Preliminary Questions

There has been a growing debate about the value of a college education. That debate takes two basic forms. The most prominent is an argument that the rising costs of higher education are making college years less cost-effective–that what you get really isn’t worth what you pay. There is also a growing “movement” of young people who decide to drop out to pursue more “creative” endeavors, who want to emulate folks like Bill Gates and other wildly successful internet entrepreneurs who made their billions without dilly-dallying around a college campus for four long years. (Yesterday’s New York Times had an article about several of them.)

The young people who are impatient to be the next Big Thing have always been around. The truly gifted among them will be successful; the others will find jobs or return to school or do whatever it is that such young folks have always done.  College affordability, on the other hand, is a genuine issue, and requires our attention (and probably some unwelcome-to-college-administrators interventions).

I don’t claim to know what measures to take to make higher education more affordable. But I do know that we need to preface that discussion with one that addresses what trial lawyers like to call “a preliminary question.”

Preliminary questions are those we need to answer before we can make sense of the answers to subsequent questions. And mine are deceptively simple: what is education? What is it for? How does it differ from job training?

This question is as applicable to elementary and high schools as it is to college, and the answers will have clear policy implications. If–as many parents seem to believe–K-12 education is a consumer good, something one gives ones children in order to advantage them in the marketplace , then sending Junior to a private “academy” may make sense–at least, so long as that private institution provides accurate science and history lessons. If, however, education also has a public dimension, if it includes an emphasis on citizenship and the forging of a unified polity from a diverse population, it may need to be delivered by a public institution.

When we get to the question of university education, differentiating between job training and education becomes much more important, because those are two very different missions, and the conflation of them is in large part responsible for the current woes of academia. In my (admittedly jaundiced) view, there are far too many students on university campuses who really belong at a job-training institution. They have been told that their employment prospects require a diploma, and they are on campus to acquire that credential. They have zero interest in what great minds have pondered in the past, what history might teach us, what we have learned about human interaction and all the other intellectual goods acquisition of which was once the purpose of the university.

Faculty spend far too much time in campus meetings assessing whether the courses we offer will lead to employment and far too little time considering whether those same courses will lead to enlightenment.

If we separated out the institutions offering a credential from the ones offering an education, it would be much easier to assess cost-effectiveness of the former, and it would send a clear message to students considering attendance at the latter.

Mission clarity is an important element of assessment–if you don’t know what you are trying to accomplish, it’s hard to determine whether you’ve accomplished it. Until our institutions of higher education can answer those preliminary questions—until they decide whether they want to be vocational schools or educational venues–arguments about cost and efficacy will continue.

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Shortchanging Students

Okay, okay … I may be beating the proverbial dead horse here, but yesterday, a colleague shared an article written by the the president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, bemoaning the continuing elevation of what I’ve called “credentialing” over the sort of broad, liberal education that Americans used to recognize as an ideal. The author criticised the the “current policy rush to move students swiftly and efficiently through their educational paces,” a goal that is too often reached by simply dispensing with such “non-essentials” as history, philosophy, science and the arts in favor of providing “marketable skills.”

I couldn’t agree more. Somewhere along the way, we seem to have forgotten that job training is not education.

We lie to our students if we pretend that a quickie program of “how to” courses will prepare them to cope with our increasingly complex, interconnected, globalized world. Learning how to communicate, learning how to learn, learning how to think critically and analytically, and learning how to understand the world in which they live--are the essential survival skills, and inculcating them requires exposure to a broad array of subjects.

Today’s college freshmen can expect to have at least five different careers–careers, not jobs–over their lifetimes. At the same time, they will have to cope with dizzying social changes and increasingly complex political, economic and interpersonal environments. They will need tools not just to earn a living despite changes in the economy, important as that is, but tools that help them live authentic, meaningful lives, and be contributing members of American society.

As the author of the article put it, “The United States is in danger of squandering the opportunity to develop the liberally educated citizenry that both our economy and our democracy so urgently need, a citizenry possessed of that fuller understanding of the world and of the global challenges we face.”

Knowing how to program a computer or run a lab test for e coli or engineer a highway is important and useful, but it is insufficient preparation to be fully human. To the extent we conflate education with job training, to the extent we forgo genuine education–the sort of education that prepares young people for engaged citizenship and richly realized personal lives- we are cheating our students and impoverishing our civic and communal life.
Socrates said the unexamined life is not worth living. We owe our students the tools with which to examine–and fully live–their lives.
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