“Finding great teachers and insisting on learning from them is a form of resistance,” [David Coleman, president of the College Board,] wrote in the Atlantic. “You must push the rules and the system. One of the most misleading things we say in education is that a good school will ‘give you an excellent education.’ A great education is never given—it is taken.” [Ron Lieber, The Price You Pay For College: An Entirely New Road Map for the Biggest Financial Decision Your Family Will Ever Make, Harper Collins, 2021, pp. 108-109]
You now may think that you’ve about got it made. Amidst the impressive college buildings, in company with a high-powered faculty, surrounded by the best of your generation, all you need is to keep doing what you’ve done before: Work hard, get good grades, listen to your teachers, get along with the people around you, and you’ll emerge in four years as an educated young man or woman. Ready for life.
Do not believe it. It is not true. If you want to get a real education in America you’re going to have to fight—and I don’t mean just fight against the drugs and the violence and against the slime-based culture that is still going to surround you. I mean something a little more disturbing. To get an education, you’re probably going to have to fight against the institution that you find yourself in—no matter how prestigious it may be. (In fact, the more prestigious the school, the more you’ll probably have to push.) You can get a terrific education in America now—there are astonishing opportunities at almost every college—but the education will not be presented to you wrapped and bowed. To get it, you’ll need to struggle and strive, to be strong, and occasionally even to piss off some admirable people. [Mark Edmundson, Why Teach?: In Defense of a Real Education, Bloomsbury USA, 2013, pp. 51-52]
So, if you want an education, the odds aren’t with you: The professors are off doing what they call their own work; the other students, who’ve doped out the way the place runs, are busy leaving the professors alone and getting themselves in position for bright and shining futures; the student-services people are trying to keep everyone content, offering plenty of entertainment and building another state-of-the-art workout facility every few months. The development office is already scanning you for future donations. The primary function of Yale University, it’s recently been said, is to create prosperous alumni so as to enrich Yale University.
So why make trouble? Why not just go along? Let the profs roam free in the realms of pure thought, let yourselves party in the realms of impure pleasure, and let the student-services gang assert fewer prohibitions and newer delights for you. You’ll get a good job, you’ll have plenty of friends, you’ll have a driveway of your own.
You’ll also, if [I’m] right, be truly and righteously screwed. The reason for this is simple. The quest at the center of a liberal-arts education is not a luxury quest; it’s a necessity quest. If you do not undertake it, you risk leading a life of desperation—maybe quiet, maybe, in time, very loud—and I am not exaggerating. For you risk trying to be someone other than who you are, which, in the long run, is killing. [Mark Edmundson, Why Teach?: In Defense of a Real Education, Bloomsbury USA, 2013, pp. 58-59]
To almost everyone, university education is a means to an end. … Students come to college with the goal of a diploma in mind—what happens in between, especially in classrooms, is often of no deep and determining interest to them.
In college, life is elsewhere. Life is at parties, at clubs, in music, with friends, in sports. Life is what celebrities have. The idea that the courses you take should be the primary objective of going to college is tacitly considered absurd. In terms of their work, students live in the future and not the present; they live with their prospects for success. If universities stopped issuing credentials, half of the clients would be gone by tomorrow morning, with the remainder following fast behind. [Mark Edmundson, Why Teach?: In Defense of a Real Education, Bloomsbury USA, 2013, pp. 53-54]
A great majority of our nine million college students are not in school because they want to be or because they want to learn. They are there because it has become the thing to do or because college is a pleasant place to be; because it’s the only way they can get parents or taxpayers to support them without getting a job they don’t like; because Mother wanted them to go, or some other reason entirely irrelevant to the course of studies for which college is supposedly organized.
As I crisscross the United States lecturing on college campuses, I am dismayed to find that professors and administrators, when pressed for a candid opinion, estimate that no more than 25 percent of their students are turned on by classwork. For the rest, college is at best a social center or aging vat, and at worst a young folks’ home or even a prison that keeps them out of the mainstream economic life for a few more years. [Caroline Bird, “College is a Waste of Time and Money,” The Case Against College, David McKay Co., 1975, https://www.scribd.com/document/46775622/Caroline-Bird-College-is-a-Waste-of-Time-and-Money]
For some careers, having a degree is still important. And, on balance, graduates can still expect to earn a lot more over their lifetimes than nongraduates. But having a degree is no longer a guarantee of work in any field, and in some it’s an expensive irrelevance.
Of course, some people go to college because they really do want to pursue their academic studies. But to judge by the low graduation rates (more than 40 percent of U.S. college students do not complete a college degree), a sizable number, especially in the West, trudge off to higher education because it’s what you do after high school. Many have no particular sense of purpose when they get there, and a significant number leave early without graduating. Others graduate with no clear idea of what to do next. Many are saddled with debt. In 2014, the average student graduating from college in the United States after four to six years was carrying a loan debt of between twenty and a hundred thousand dollars. In the United States, the burden of student debt has grown each year since 2004, from just over $300 billion to $1.3 trillion in 2013—higher than all forms of credit card debt combined. [Ken Robinson, Creative Schools: The Grassroots Revolution That’s Transforming Education, Viking, 2015, pp. 15-16]
Of those who entered a four-year college in 1995, only 58 percent had gotten their BA five academic years later. Another 14 percent were still enrolled. If we assume that half of that 14 percent eventually get their BAs, about a third of all those who entered college hoping for a BA leave without one. [Charles Murray, Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America’s Schools Back to Reality, Three Rivers, 2008, p. 104]
[O]ver the past few years, it has become clear that the United States does not so much have a problem of limited and unequal college access; it has a problem of limited and unequal college completion. … [I]n college completion—the percentage of entering college freshmen who go on to graduate—the United States ranks second to last … Not long ago, the United States led the world in producing college graduates; now it leads the world in producing college dropouts. …
The authors [of Crossing the Finish Line: Completing College at America’s Public Universities] also discovered that the most accurate predictor of whether a student would successfully complete college was not his or her score on the SAT or the ACT, the two standardized college admissions tests. … The far better predictor of college completion was the student’s high-school GPA. …
“In our view,” [the authors] wrote, “high school grades reveal much more than mastery of content. They reveal qualities of motivation and perseverance—as well as the presence of good study habits and time management skills—that tell us a great deal about the chances that a student will complete a college program.” [Paul Tough, How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012, pp. 150-153]
Midway through the last decade of the twentieth century, American higher education changed. Colleges and universities entered a new phase in which they stopped being intellectually driven and culturally oriented and began to model themselves as businesses. They sought profit; they sought prestige; the more the better. To be sure, there had always been a commercial side to American higher education. But in the mid-nineties, universities began dropping pretenses and putting profit ahead of intellectual and (dare one say it?) spiritual values. [Mark Edmundson, Why Teach?: In Defense of a Real Education, Bloomsbury USA, 2013, p. vii]
Among the many ways that colleges have evolved during the last three decades, the change in the student-teacher relationship appears to have been the most complete. In important respects, it is now the professors who must accommodate themselves to the preferences of the students, not the other way around. Requirements that used to be inflexible, such as the due date for papers, are now commonly revised when the student just can’t get it done by then. Many professors permit quizzes or even final exams to be made up if missed—missed not because of an emergency at home or a fever of 104 degrees, but just, sort of, like, missed. At many schools, student evaluations of professors are now systematically collected and used as part of the tenure decision process, and being a tough teacher does not lead to enthusiastic evaluations. …
In this environment, the opportunities for learning of all kinds have diminished. Students learn less in the way of subject matter, but also less in the way of hard work, self-discipline, self-restraint, and respect for superior knowledge. [Charles Murray, Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America’s Schools Back to Reality, Three Rivers, 2008, pp. 98-100]
How did the students respond to being treated like customers? … They’d grown up in front of the television, being treated like monarchs of the marketplace. When the universities followed suit and began to address them with similar deference, the kids ate it up. On came expensive student centers, lavish gyms, gourmet dining, and slews of student service workers, deans and deanlets to cater to the whims of the customers. Universities began to look like retirement homes for the young.
No surprise that when the kids got to the classroom they demanded a soft ride: They wanted easy grading, lots of pass-fail courses, light homework, more laughs. If the professors didn’t oblige, the kids flayed them on the course evaluations. Those evaluations had an impact on tenure, promotion, salary, and prestige. By and large, the profession caved. [Mark Edmundson, Why Teach?: In Defense of a Real Education, Bloomsbury USA, 2013, pp. ix-x]
[I]n any sector of the economy where price competition is reduced or eliminated, there is also a common economic phenomenon called “non-price competition,” in the form of frills added to the basic product or service being sold, in order to woo customers. Professor Chester E. Finn, Jr., of Vanderbilt University, a noted authority on education, has described this phenomenon in the academic world: “Instead of vying to offer the best, trimmest product at the lowest possible price, colleges compete to erect elaborate facilities, to offer trendy new programs, and to dangle before prospective students the gaudiest array of special services…” [“Consumers Need A ‘No-Frills University’ to Turn the Higher-Education Marketplace Upside Down,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 26 Oct. 1988]
Such frills are not a response to a free market but are common symptoms of non-price competition in a market that is not free. … If the academic world ever becomes [a] “free market” … many academic frills can be expected to fall by the wayside … as institutions compete to keep tuition within student’s ability to pay—instead of having incentives under present conditions to make sure that tuition exceeds what most people can afford. [Thomas Sowell, Inside American Education: The Decline, The Deception, The Dogmas, Free Press, 1993, pp. 263-264]
As an official of the U.S. Department of Education put it, many colleges “choose to increase tuition because they can get away with it.” While colleges claim that the increased spending is to improve education, this official saw it as going into “the swelling of the ranks of vice presidents and deans” and to other costly endeavors which make little or no contribution to quality education, which is “not a function of money.” [Joseph Berger, “College Officials Defend Sharply Rising Tuition,” New York Times, 23 March 1988, p. 18] The availability of federal grants and loans to help students meet rising tuition costs virtually ensures that those costs will rise. A college which kept tuition affordable could forfeit millions of dollars annually in federal money available to cover costs over and above what students can afford, according to a financial aid formula. [Thomas Sowell, Inside American Education: The Decline, The Deception, The Dogmas, Free Press, 1993, p. 117]
Nearly 150 years ago, when Charles W. Eliot remarked that “luxury and learning are ill bed fellows,” the phrase was a commonplace expressing a consensus across a broad range of institutions. Today, top colleges vie for students by offering amenities superior to those of the competition—better-stocked coffee bars in the library, better equipped fitness centers in the dorms, and so on. At some colleges, the campus tour now resembles a promotional tour of a luxury resort. … Today, the tone of college life can be gleaned by glancing at some representative titles of recent books: Saving Higher Education in the Age of Money; Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher Education; Shakespeare, Einstein and the Bottom Line: The Marketing of Higher Education; University, Inc.: The Corporate Corruption of Higher Education—to name just a few. One Ivy League dean recently declared that universities should simply give up the fantasy of holding to academic values that stand apart from the culture of “universal commodification.” [Andrew Delbanco, College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be, Princeton UP, 2012, pp. 142-143]
Given the enormous variation in the quality of teaching, even on the same campus, the most expensive tuitions paid cannot guarantee that the education received will be first-rate—or even adequate. Whether the heavy costs of a college education are borne by the taxpayers or by parents, there is very little institutional assurance as to the quality of what they are paying for.
With the disintegration of the curriculum at many colleges and universities, students may graduate from prestigious institutions wholly ignorant of entire fields of human knowledge, such as economics, mathematics, biology, history, government, chemistry, and sociology. … Loose curriculum requirements are damaging, as William F. Buckley put it, “not because you cannot get a good education at Harvard, but because you can graduate from Harvard without getting a good education.” [Thomas Sowell, Inside American Education: The Decline, The Deception, The Dogmas, Free Press, 1993, p. 221]
[A] Carnegie Foundation study found that only 35 percent of the full-time faculty members at research universities considered teaching their chief interest, compared to 71 percent of faculty members at all institutions combined. A science professor at the University of Michigan put the situation bluntly when he said: “Every minute I spend in an undergraduate classroom is costing me money and prestige.” [Thomas Sowell, Inside American Education: The Decline, The Deception, The Dogmas, Free Press, 1993, p. 205]
The compact goes like this: If professors don’t assign too much work, they won’t have to grade too much and can get back to the research that their overlords reward them for. Then students can give the professors nice feedback in their evaluations and press on with the delusion that they learned as much as they could have. … “No actors in the system are primarily interested in undergraduate student academic growth, although many are interested in undergraduate retention and persistence. … The institutional actors implicated in the system are receiving the organizational outcomes that they seek, and therefore neither the institutions themselves nor the system as a whole is in any way challenged or threatened.” [Arum and Roksa, Academically Adrift, 2011] [Ron Lieber, The Price You Pay For College: An Entirely New Road Map for the Biggest Financial Decision Your Family Will Ever Make, Harper Collins, 2021, pp. 112]
[S]ome of the best research on higher education outcomes … proves that mentors matter more than nearly anything else in finding life satisfaction as a young adult. … [Yet] countless prominent insiders at the schools that top the U.S. News & World Report list have not just admitted but lamented the haphazard approach they take to teaching undergraduates. …
[Did] graduates have professors who cared about them personally, made them excited about learning, and encouraged them to pursue their dreams? …
Just 14 percent [of respondents] strongly agree when Gallup asked if they had actually experienced the three aspects of mentorship. … [T]he so-called R1 research universities—mostly big, mostly public—had scored second worst on mentorship, with Ivy League schools coming in dead last due to their propensity for hiring famous researchers who are not good teachers. … Also, people with arts and humanities degrees were twice as likely to “strongly agree” with the mentorship statements as business … and science and engineering majors did. [Ron Lieber, The Price You Pay For College: An Entirely New Road Map for the Biggest Financial Decision Your Family Will Ever Make, Harper Collins, 2021, pp. 103-105]
To think that more money for the university system translates into better undergraduate education is a faith that passeth all understanding. As at other research universities, it is at least equally likely that a reduction in research money would benefit undergraduate teaching. [Thomas Sowell, Inside American Education: The Decline, The Deception, The Dogmas, Free Press, 1993, p. 274]
In today’s America, at every kind of institution—from underfunded community colleges to the wealthiest ivies—[liberal education] is at risk. Students are pressured and programmed, trained to live from task to task, relentlessly rehearsed and tested until winners are culled from the rest. They scarcely have time for what [John Henry] Newman calls contemplation, and too many colleges do too little to save them from the debilitating frenzy that makes liberal education marginal or merely ornamental—if it is offered at all. [Andrew Delbanco, College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be, Princeton UP, 2012, p. 34]
The university now offers no distinctive visage to the young person. … In short there is no vision, nor is there a set of competing visions, of what an educated human being is. The question has disappeared, for to pose it would be a threat to the peace. There is no organization of the sciences, no tree of knowledge. … The student gets no intimation that great mysteries might be revealed to him, that new and higher motives of action might be discovered within him, that a different and more human way of life can be harmoniously constructed by what he is going to learn. …
Thus, when a student arrives at the university, he finds a bewildering variety of departments and a bewildering variety of courses. And there is no official guidance, no university-wide agreement, about what he should study. Nor does he usually find readily available examples, either among students or professors, of a unified use of the university’s resources. It is easiest simply to make a career choice and go about getting prepared for that career. [Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students, Simon and Schuster, 1987, pp. 337-338]
There are no measures [in the ranking of colleges] pertinent to the liberal education of undergraduates. It is hard to know how there could be. [Andrew Delbanco, College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be, Princeton UP, 2012, p. 136]
Some people believe that a main contributor to the sorry state of academic ethics, especially to the contagion of money, is what Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus, in their recent book Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids—and What We Can Do About It, call the “athletic incubus.” This charge has some basis in a national context where football coaches, sometimes paid in the millions, collude with administrators to provide fake credits for courses never taken, and strippers and prostitutes are hired to show a good time to recruits …
In the Ivies, financial incentives beyond demonstrated need are not permitted for recruiting any applicant—athletic or otherwise—but a significant number (typically around 20 percent) of places in the class are, to all intents and purposes, reserved for recruits needed to fill the team rosters. Other highly selective institutions, too, make academic compromises to meet athletic imperatives. [Andrew Delbanco, College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be, Princeton UP, 2012, pp. 145-146]
Many people see college as the end of the road, and never stop to think of what it will be like when they get there. …
The college environment is drastically different from most kids’ experience in high school, and many teens haven’t developed some of the fundamental skills they will need to function in that environment before leaving home. … For many, it’s chaos when their parents are no longer there to nag and remind and set limits. …
Let’s consider for a moment the daily stressors that most college students experience:
An average bedtime of 2:00 to 3:00 a.m. … Hours of unstructured time. … A culture where binge drinking is the norm. … Food-related issues. … Stimulant abuse. …
Is your kid ready to manage the alternative universe that is college life in America? This is a question that it takes courage to ask—and one that we wish more parents were asking. [William Stixrud and Ned Johnson, The Self-Driven Child: The Science and Sense of Giving Your Kids More Control Over Their Lives, Viking, 2018, pp. 285-291]
For many, college is a really expensive party. They are usually excited to go, but they look at us blankly when we speak about the long hours they’ll need to spend studying. …
We see lots of kids every year who … go off to college before they can independently get themselves into or out of bed, manage their own academic work, hold a part-time job, or regulate their use of their cell phone, video games, and other electronic entertainment. Many of them have had parents or guidance counselors who have essentially force-marched them down the straight path to college, reinforcing the idea that it’s more important to try to make kids do well than to help them truly understand that they are responsible for their own lives. [William Stixrud and Ned Johnson, The Self-Driven Child: The Science and Sense of Giving Your Kids More Control Over Their Lives, Viking, 2018, pp. 291-292]
For college kids … playtime is now longer than ever. The college workload slimmed down as K-12’s bulked up. Most critics of modern education take this as a tragic fall in standards. But once you accept the merit of play, the rise of Leisure College, USA, is a blessing in disguise. College gives students ample time for carefree exploration—time they rarely had in childhood. Plenty of undergrads fritter away their opportunity in a drunken stupor. Yet others sample a medley of fascinating options, acquiring passions that last a lifetime. My undergraduate years were my favorites precisely because classes were so undemanding. … I owe my soul to lax academic standards. [Bryan Caplan, The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money, Princeton UP, 2018, pp. 258-259]
[C]ollege can be an expensive waste of time—or worse, a time when many young people learn how to cultivate selfishness, … separate work and pleasure, develop cynical attitudes toward the value and beauty of learning, and practice, in groups of their peers, all the prejudices that our society has struggled to eliminate. One need only think about sports and party mania, the volume of business done by crib note companies, the resurgence of racism on many campuses, and fraternity and sorority arrogance and irresponsibility to get a picture of many colleges as glorified singles bars and business clubs rather than places of learning. In that sense, sadly, these students may indeed be training for life in our society. [Herbert Kohl, The Question is College: Guiding Your Child to the Right Choices After High School, Times / Random House, 1989, pp. 18-19]
We need to overhaul the way we think about college. … Parents should consider sending their kid to college just as they’d consider a business investment—because it is a huge investment. Youth may be wasted on the young, but that’s nothing like the education misspent on students who are not yet ready to learn. … Almost 50 percent of the students who enroll in four-year colleges don’t graduate. And when they don’t, it’s painful to the kids and costly to their parents. [William Stixrud and Ned Johnson, The Self-Driven Child: The Science and Sense of Giving Your Kids More Control Over Their Lives, Viking, 2018, p. 292]
The process of encouraging readiness [for college] must begin much earlier. Start suggesting as early as ninth grade that college is something that needs to be earned. Begin to outline together the kinds of skills your child will need to develop over the next four years in order to demonstrate their readiness. [William Stixrud and Ned Johnson, The Self-Driven Child: The Science and Sense of Giving Your Kids More Control Over Their Lives, Viking, 2018, p. 302]
Imagine that America had no system of postsecondary education and you were made a member of a task force assigned to create one from scratch. Ask yourself what you would think if one of your colleagues submitted this proposal:
First, we will set up a common goal for every young person that represents educational success. We will call it a BA. We will then make it difficult or impossible for most people to achieve this goal. For those who can, achieving the goal will take four years no matter what is being taught. We will attach an economic reward for reaching the goal that often has little to do with the content of what has been learned. We will lure large numbers of people who do not possess adequate ability or motivation to try to achieve the goal and then fail. We will then stigmatize everyone who fails to achieve it.
What I have just described is the system that we have in place. There must be a better way. [Charles Murray, Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America’s Schools Back to Reality, Three Rivers, 2008, p. 106]
Related:
– What is “signaling” and why is it an important concept in education?
– What is motivation? How can we cultivate it in ourselves and others?
– What is the proper function of the university?