What's College Good For?
December 9, 2017 7:36 PM   Subscribe

If schools aim to boost students’ future income by teaching job skills, why do they entrust students’ education to people so detached from the real world? "As a society, we continue to push ever larger numbers of students into ever higher levels of education. The main effect is not better jobs or greater skill levels, but a credentialist arms race." posted by mecran01 (67 comments total) 32 users marked this as a favorite
 
Another salvo in the endless argument that only STEM and Business majors are valuable. Because heaven forbid we encourage people to be creative, expressive, cultured or informed...

I'm so tired of people with engineer's disease (and conservative think tank backing) assaulting every endeavor that is not of immediate value to corporate interests...
posted by LeRoienJaune at 8:04 PM on December 9, 2017 [121 favorites]


A lack of historical context and critical thinking skills is how you get a bunch of Randroid bro-nazis* in tech. Well that, and they’re assholes.

*I typed ‘neo’ but the autocorrect is better.
posted by leotrotsky at 8:13 PM on December 9, 2017 [66 favorites]


Bro-Nazis is a much better term, agreed. Our campus is currently attempting to gut general education requirements along these same lines. I saw an article once (that I can't locate for the life of me) about a group of businessmen in India who wanted to start a liberal arts college because none of their engineers can think creatively, so they can't compete with Silicon Valley.
posted by mecran01 at 8:20 PM on December 9, 2017 [10 favorites]


I'm of the opinion that most people shouldn't have tertiary degrees, because of the credentialist arms race. I can see certain professions requiring it, ones that we've decided need to know a lot to be able to practice, but for most professions it's unnecessary. I think we need to look at the skills we're supposed to be learning at university and make sure they're being taught in high school - the design of high school is half inertia anyway. Some of the critical analysis from liberal arts degrees would, of course, be a part of this. (I also appreciate that monkeying with children's education is politically impossible because every voter's been through school and thus consider themselves an expert on how schools should work. It's one of the problems the Common Core system in the US has.)

I remember hearing that in Germany, they kept the apprenticeship system and expanded it to every profession, so you can be an apprentice programmer, for instance. I really like this idea.
posted by Merus at 8:39 PM on December 9, 2017 [22 favorites]


I am generally inclined to agree with criticism of credential inflation and grade inflation substituting very expensive value signaling in place of actual education. But this article is kind of infuriating.

I'm mostly annoyed by the nihilism inherent in "I’m cynical about students. The vast majority are philistines." Is the proposed thesis that humanity generally just doesn't live up to expectations, and we should make education policy from the starting point of screw all these worthless good-for-nothing kids? The author is not even exempting STEM students from that sweeping dismissal, so this is not just engineer's disease. It's full-on "kids these days".
posted by allegedly at 8:42 PM on December 9, 2017 [16 favorites]


If schools for millennia have aimed to boost a spirit of critical analysis and understanding of the human condition by teaching the liberal arts, why do we entrust students' post-grad lives within a uniquely narrow framework of purpose and contribution to the world? "As a society, we continue to raise the bar for employment by failing to produce enough ways for young people to not only sustain themselves but flourish. The main effect is not better jobs, but a push by students into ever higher levels of education in a credentialist arms race."
posted by hexaflexagon at 8:47 PM on December 9, 2017 [9 favorites]


Yet you never hear these folks touting free/nearly free MOOCs for STEM subjects. Why is that? Somehow the answer seems to be more tuition, more debt, more fealty.
posted by oceanjesse at 8:57 PM on December 9, 2017 [11 favorites]


Credentials Inflation

When the first tech boom's chariot swung low for me and my aimless, slacking, fast-approaching-30, liberal-arts educated Gen-X cohort, the way I knew it was the real thing was, you suddenly didn't need credentials, because the demand for talent totally outstripped the credentialing institutions. There weren't really even credentials for new fields like web design. Make a portfolio and get a client - you're a web designer. Suddenly no one cared that you had spent four years smoking bong hits, arguing about records, and reading Leviathan; you went to the head of the line, labor-wise.
posted by thelonius at 8:57 PM on December 9, 2017 [35 favorites]


Another salvo in the endless argument that only STEM and Business majors are valuable. Because heaven forbid we encourage people to be creative, expressive, cultured or informed...

I was at our community christmas pageant/concert recently, and during the intermission one of the muckity mucks made a point of thanking the sponsors - particularly the (conservative republican) county commissioners for their "investment in community arts which has a tremendous rate of return".

And, you know, I get it - if you spend money you should get something for it. At the same time... Some things are just worth doing regardless of "maximum realized return". I mean - if I wanted to maximize shareholder value on nutrient consumption, I'd eat fucking ramen every day.

Turns out, that's no way to live.

Used to be we made fun of suits and their "maximize return on investment" approach. Now they rule us.
posted by Pogo_Fuzzybutt at 9:11 PM on December 9, 2017 [20 favorites]


Yet you never hear these folks touting free/nearly free MOOCs for STEM subjects. Why is that? Somehow the answer seems to be more tuition, more debt, more fealty.

That is not the author's answer, if you deign to read the article. The author proposes redesigning the high school curriculum, vastly broadening the scope of vocational training, and thereby incentizing employers to place less weight on four year college degrees as a screening mechanism. He thinks the problem is that a four year degree is a kind of Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, a little UDSA stamp on the skull certifying Grade A fresh meat for the capitalist grinder. So a MOOC won't work, for any field of study STEM or not, because MOOC are too easy to fake your way through to serve as an acceptable credentialing mechanism.

Is the proposed thesis that humanity generally just doesn't live up to expectations, and we should make education policy from the starting point of screw all these worthless good-for-nothing kids?

I think the proposed thesis is that a course of study that started off as a fundamentally elitist enterprise is ill-suited to become the mandatory pre-requisite to getting a stable job for 2/3ds of the population. Most students are spending four years of their lives and going into tens of thousands of dollars worth of debt not because of an uncontainable drive to study Kant or memorise the laws of thermodynamics but because if they don't do these things they cannot obtain a white collar job that will allow them to buy their own homes and provide for their families. A liberal arts education is a hoop and they are a chiuahua in a tutu.

I would like to live in a world in which everyone with the drive to learn had free access to knowledge. It does not seem to me that funnelling people who fundamentally don't give a fuck into a four-year liberal arts course is obviously the only viable way to attain that blessed state.
posted by Diablevert at 9:24 PM on December 9, 2017 [29 favorites]


i certainly agree with the thesis that college is not necessary for most of the country. and downright backwards for probably more than half of the people currently in it...

college is a major pyramid scheme. and it definitely must bust at some point...

i think the primary thing that a college degree announces to your potential employer is your ability to deal with rules and institutional settings. this is the actual content of the "education" more than some equations or philosophies...
the secondary thing it announces is that you have a mountain of debt and you will do anything to keep whatever crappy job they give you because you really need it.
posted by danjo at 9:28 PM on December 9, 2017 [6 favorites]


Truthfully, I always saw the 4+ year degree as being more a signifier of dedication, at least as far as employers go. If you can work out a secondary degree then you have enough, well, dedication to stick to a job.
posted by Samizdata at 9:31 PM on December 9, 2017


Before my kid applied to colleges, we talked about what college education is for. First we talked a bit about the intangible and/or existential reasons for having this interstitial hangout between childhood and responsible adulthood, and then we talked about the practical, realpolitik reasons for going to college, which boil down to two things:

1. The degree (and honestly, pretty much any degree will do, says the philosophy major), because corporations these days substitute that credential for actual training and growing of careers -- which is terrible but is what it is;

2. The network you get from it, both in alumni and among your contemporaries, who can help you get through doors in all sorts of ways.

I made the point to her that for the first of these, pretty much any degree from any accredited college or university would be fine, and that, in terms of actual education, for the most part that was down to individual effort -- you could get an excellent education at a third-tier state school, and a really shitty one at an ivy league, and it was to a great extent all about what you wanted out of it. For the second of these, it really did help to go to an elite school, either elite in a "US News and World Report" ranking sense, or specifically in one's desired field. And yes, it was monstrously unfair that someone from, say, the University of Chicago (where I went) has a better network (and therefore, better unearned advantages) than someone who goes to Chico State, but there it was.

Was this helpful for my kid to hear? I hope it was. She's currently at a very good school and also I think the right school for her, and I like to think her decision was informed by our discussion.
posted by jscalzi at 9:32 PM on December 9, 2017 [41 favorites]


I have a NZ 3-year degree, when I lived in the US it confused a lot of people (especially employers) - essential in NZ (and OZ, the UK, etc) there's no real general ed requirement, there's a year right there, essentially you don't get into university without having passed a national university entrance exam that requires you to have already passed what the US does in general ed in highschool - so no remedial math learning fractions because your school never got around to that, no Shakespeare - if you do Uni Math or English they know you already have the required background - to do this the US would need to have a national standard for High School Diplomas.
posted by mbo at 9:48 PM on December 9, 2017 [2 favorites]


The degree ... because corporations these days substitute that credential for actual training and growing of careers

People think I'm joking when I say that my doctorate is a union card. I'm mostly not. That credentialism is one of its most lasting and greatest values to me professionally. I don't use the knowledge I gained, much; I changed fields pretty radically post-degree. I didn't keep that school network; I've gown another. But I'm still glad I did it because it does open doors as nothing else can.
posted by bonehead at 10:01 PM on December 9, 2017 [2 favorites]


My father gave the similar advice as Scalzi up above. He started his engineering career during the big software boom of the late 70’s/early 80’s and got his job after the teacher of his computer graphics class at Pierce College recommend him to a vector graphics place looking for smart kids. Later on, mid-90’s, he rushed a night school degree because big software companies wanted degrees all of a sudden.

His advice to me was: Get a degree in anything, and no one learns anything job related at school.

I graduated high school in 99 and took my dad’s advice to heart by getting my first web dev job that summer and dropping out of college halfway though my first semester. 18 years later things are going great.

I have a kid if my own now, and in 9ish years I’ll be giving my own advice for college. Right now I’d yell her: yeah i’m a senior software guy at The richest company in the world, but I may have retired by now if I had gone up to UCSF like originally planned. For sure I would have spent less time worried about my skills and job prospects if I spent 4 years in the Bay during the dot-com era.

But, if she’s interested in software, I’d tell her to get a degree in classical lit or something. I learned how to be an engineer on the job. To this day I couldn’t take notes on a book I’ve read, write a paper longer than a few pages, or know what “romantic literature” is (something to do with romantic languages, maybe?). She should do all the stuff she wouldn’t do at work.
posted by sideshow at 10:07 PM on December 9, 2017 [2 favorites]


I think what's funny about the article is that this hyper-educated author is putting forth a claim that colleges are failing the needs of society, and the solution is for people to choose vocational "education" ceteris paribus, or something like that. But that's a terrible analysis because it implictly admits that the problem is structural, while denying itself that truth in offering such an anemic solution. I went to the exact same schools as this white guy and it appalls me they hold such politically conservative views, and find platforms to promote their rhetoric.
posted by polymodus at 10:08 PM on December 9, 2017 [10 favorites]


Most students are spending four years of their lives and going into tens of thousands of dollars worth of debt not because of an uncontainable drive to study Kant or memorise the laws of thermodynamics but because if they don't do these things they cannot obtain a white collar job that will allow them to buy their own homes and provide for their families. A liberal arts education is a hoop and they are a chiuahua in a tutu.

But isn't this like saying "Students in medical school don't have a drive to learn about biochemistry and embryology, they just want to be doctors and this is the hoop they have to jump through"?

How excited the students are to be in college seems like a poor metric for judging whether a college education is a worthwhile preparation for the jobs that require it.
posted by straight at 10:13 PM on December 9, 2017 [7 favorites]


"Bryan Caplan's advice is exactly wrong for America... for 3 reasons:"
  1. He misapplies the signaling model.
  2. There is evidence against his hypotheses.
  3. He takes way too narrow a view of the role of college.
posted by kliuless at 10:46 PM on December 9, 2017 [10 favorites]


It's worth pointing till getting out that people with college educations tend to be much more liberal than those without college educations. So if you want a future where more people believe in economic equality and civil rights, supporting mass college education helps.

So it makes sense that Republicans and Libertarian/Authoritarian techbros would want to stop people from going to college. But it's kind of odd to see so many mefi tests here enthusiastically buying into the idea that people would be better off uneducated, and therefore conservative.
posted by happyroach at 10:56 PM on December 9, 2017 [24 favorites]


But isn't this like saying "Students in medical school don't have a drive to learn about biochemistry and embryology, they just want to be doctors and this is the hoop they have to jump through"?

I am not a doctor. From what I understand, doctors do seem to spend a lot of time in med school learning how the human body works. This seems fairly important to being good at being a doctor. (Obviously, doctors then go on to specialise in various fields, I am sure your average thoracic surgeon may have little use or recollection of many of the details of the embryology they took in med school. It still seems to me worthwhile that all potential doctors should start off with a foundational knowledge of such sorts.)

But we're not talking about using your time in college to learn highly specialised knowledge that you will actually apply in your fields. Even Caplan concedes that if you learn something in college and practice it and then go on and use it, it sticks with you. We're talking about the average four year liberal arts degree, in the humanities or many of the sciences, where the bulk of the coursework you're required to take is frankly of little practical use in later life. Most people who argue in favour of it argue that having a broad grounding in the basics of history, literature, science and culture is useful not in the sense that it'll guarantee you a lot of dosh but that having an informed citizenry is beneficial to society, and having a well-stocked mind beneficial to the soul.

What Caplan argues --- crucially, but rather weakly --- is that the current college system fails to actually do this. That people who graduate don't actually retain much of what they learn, and aren't actually more critical thinkers or more well rounded than people who don't go. They just get paid more. So that's why they do it.

But it's kind of odd to see so many mefi tests here enthusiastically buying into the idea that people would be better off uneducated, and therefore conservative.

I am not arguing that people would be better off uneducated. I am questioning the value of the current system of education. Four years is approximately 5% of a human life. Student loan debt averages about $37,000 per graduate, in the US. Those are high prices, by any measure. They foreclose other opportunities. By choosing to go to college a person sacrifices much. Do they gain enough to make it worth it? Looked at from a purely capitalist perspective, sure: 73% lifetime boost to wages. Looked at from a humanist one? I am not at all sure. I don't think it is clear that many people end up better informed than if they hadn't gone to college, and instead just pursued whatever intellectual interests they may have on their own, driven by where their passions took them. Or been able to study with experts in some other way, that might make that pursuit of knowledge far more affordable and accessible than it is now.

As for college's usefulness as an indoctrination center, if it requires four years of dedicated study in an isolated environment in order to get someone to come round to my way of thinking, that strikes me as more of a critique of my ideology than an endorsement of it. I don't believe that humans are by default naturally conservative and have to be browbeaten into liberalism by their betters, and if I did I wouldn't think they ought to be charged $100G for the privilege.
posted by Diablevert at 11:42 PM on December 9, 2017 [11 favorites]


It's strange that for Americans, the cost of education always part of the argument over whether education is worthwhile. Perhaps if more people had a liberal arts education, the political landscape would be different enough that university wouldn't cost so much in the first place and that argument would be moot. The high cost of University is a political choice, not an inevitability.
posted by klanawa at 12:27 AM on December 10, 2017 [44 favorites]


Caplan uses test scores and salaries to argue that college doesn't teach anyone, has a quick paragraph saying "of course, some people would argue that you can't evaluate society with test scores and salaries," and then goes back to arguing that the reason test scores and salaries are low is because the students are "philistines" ("Am I really so out of touch... no, it's the children who are wrong"). He pays lip service to the objection of the "humanists," but doesn't seem to understand why anyone would look past test scores and salaries. At the end of the day, he still firmly believes that poetry is less useful than business writing. He still believes that art and history have no relevance to daily life. And he seems totally unable to understand why these things might have value.

The point of, especially, general education requirements isn't that you should be indoctrinated, or that you'll be able to recall the dates of Bacon's Rebellion or SALT II. The point is that you're exposed to a broad variety of subjects, in more depth, and with more guidance than you could experience on your own. This is why gened requirements are typically in the first two years of college, because it gives you an opportunity to explore different subjects and find out what interests you. I've taken classes in linguistics, art, music, English, history, film, anthropology, astronomy, French, German, math, and probably subjects I can't even remember anymore. And I'm glad I took them! I can't remember a lick of statistics, but I was exposed to a field I previously knew nothing about, and I'm still better off for it.

Besides that, I don't know how anyone who, presumably, reads academic and technical articles all day could possibly think that poetry and English classes are irrelevant. I wish everyone had to study prose.

I've been hearing arguments for many years that college is an inefficient way to prepare people for the workplace, and they're massively missing the point. If we reduce people's value to what they're able to produce at work, if we only care about their critical thinking as it's applied to a physics lab, then of course we're going to think college is a waste of time and money. If we think art and poetry have no value, then of course we'll question why anyone should learn about them. And it seems like Caplan can't understand how else you'd evaluate people.
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 12:43 AM on December 10, 2017 [35 favorites]


I think that it’s frankly moronic to think that the way to become good at business writing is to take classes called Business Writing. Business writing is not a separate skill from other writing, ang good writers tend to be people who read and write a lot. My very strong sense, as someone who works with both business and English majors, is that you would be much better off hiring the English majors if communication skills were important to you. And I bet it’s easier to teach an English major to read a spreadsheet than it is to teach a business major to write a clear, concise, engaging report or proposal.

I got a job right out of college writing press releases for a publisher. Nobody gave a shit that I’d never taken a marketing class. They cared that I could write a punchy sentence, and I learned that in lit classes and at the public library.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 3:46 AM on December 10, 2017 [22 favorites]


A lot of misreadings above.

Caplan believes everyone who truly wants higher education should have it, and every employer who truly needs higher-educated workers should be able to get them.

The problem is we’re spending vast sums of dollars and losing years of productivity forcing through college people who don’t really want higher education so they can get jobs that don’t really need higher education, with no demonstrable benefit whatever, and of course life-devastating effects upon those we force to borrow tuition who just don’t have the stuff to grind out even the easiest of degrees. It’s purely insane — conceptually akin to, but economically an order of magnitude worse, than the War on Drugs.

For everyone pleading for the liberal arts, a sensible system would leave them quite intact. Credentialism-coerced students aren’t majoring in philosophy or English, they’re majoring (overwhelmingly) in business and other vocational-type fields.
posted by MattD at 4:16 AM on December 10, 2017 [9 favorites]


So maybe we should keep college but get rid of vocational fields.
posted by dame at 4:33 AM on December 10, 2017 [3 favorites]


Previously
posted by BWA at 4:45 AM on December 10, 2017


He lost me here:
First and foremost: From kindergarten on, students spend thousands of hours studying subjects irrelevant to the modern labor market. Why do English classes focus on literature and poetry instead of business and technical writing?
That's the first paragraph. There's philistinism here, but it sure isn't the kids. But then, he's a Cato Institute wonk who also once wrote the following:
I rejected Christianity because I determined that it was, to be blunt, idiotic. I rejected Objectivism and Austrianism, in contrast, as mixtures of deep truths and unfortunate mistakes. Let me begin with the deep truths. The Objectivists were right to insist that reality is objective, human reason able to grasp it, and scepticism without merit. They correctly hold that humans have free will, morality is objective, and the pursuit of self-interest typically morally right.
It's an article about education from someone who is not opposed to the idea that education is only a professional credential, but has wholly and unthinkingly bought in to that idea.

He just about walks himself up to a real point here:
When the same students were retested the second semester of their fourth year, each group had sharply improved in precisely one area. Psychology and other social-science majors had become much better at statistical reasoning. Natural-science and humanities majors had become much better at conditional reasoning—analyzing “if … then” and “if and only if” problems. In the remaining areas, however, gains after three and a half years of college were modest or nonexistent. The takeaway: Psychology students use statistics, so they improve in statistics; chemistry students rarely encounter statistics, so they don’t improve in statistics. If all goes well, students learn what they study and practice.
And then he manages to stumble away from it obliviously. Why, it's almost as if a more robust , broad -based education where students practiced and integrated these skills across the curriculum would produce people with a variety of capabilities, ones that would serve them well as citizens and as workers in a job market where, we are repeatedly told by other economists, no one will stay in one job forever, soft skills are increasingly important, and flexibility and the ability to learn new skills sets quickly are the greatest assets of all.

And, of course, he doesn't understand either contemporary trends in education or the other issues that weaken good teaching and a good education. We know active learning works, and he mentions it, but seems to think it only exists in vocational fields. But we also know that this requires small class sizes and low section loads for instructors, so that they can offer a stream of continuous feedback on low-stakes work.

That doesn't happen most places, but the reasons it doesn't happen have more to do with the withdrawal of funding than with the irrelevance of subject areas. Perhaps that harder to see when you're tenured at an R1 and use a combination of lecture and TAs as your instructional techniques.

The most damning statement about higher education in this piece is that someone this tunnel-visioned is a tenured professor at George Mason. If you enjoy this article, you'll love his book, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies, all about how the general public often fails democracy, or Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, in which he argues that the lowered costs of child-rearing in modern times have led people to have more children because supply and demand.
posted by kewb at 4:50 AM on December 10, 2017 [34 favorites]


Unless colleges delay job training until the very end, signaling is practically the only explanation.

They do? I mean, when I went to college the first two years were for basics and prerequisites, and the last two were for advanced classes.

Fifty years ago, college was a full-time job. The typical student spent 40 hours a week in class or studying.
Wasn't this written by an economics professor? This is due to productivity enhancements, and since colleges don't require students to uselessly sit at their desks piddling when the work is done like actual jobs do, we can accurately measure productivity enhancements. What people do with their free time is up to them.

Also, I always find it interesting that businesses get tagged with 'credentialism signaling' when only about 30% of the workers in the US even have a college degree. There aren't too many people will college degrees in the US. There are too few.
posted by The_Vegetables at 5:00 AM on December 10, 2017 [4 favorites]


It's hard not to see this as an attack on liberal arts education when he writes
Why do English classes focus on literature and poetry instead of business and technical writing? Why do advanced-math classes bother with proofs almost no student can follow? When will the typical student use history? Trigonometry? Art? Music? Physics? Latin?
We don't have some sort of national crisis where there aren't enough business majors because everyone's studying art and Latin. From the National Center for Educational Statistics:
Of the 1,870,000 bachelor's degrees conferred in 2013–14, the greatest numbers of degrees were conferred in the fields of business (358,000), health professions and related programs (199,000), social sciences and history (173,000), psychology (117,000), biological and biomedical sciences (105,000), and education (99,000). At the master's degree level, the greatest numbers of degrees were conferred in the fields of business (189,000), education (155,000), and health professions and related programs (97,000). At the doctor's degree level, the greatest numbers of degrees were conferred in the fields of health professions and related programs (67,400), legal professions and studies (44,200), education (10,900), engineering (10,000), biological and biomedical sciences (8,300), psychology (6,600), and physical sciences and science technologies (5,800).
Most of these fields are vocational. Aren't the business majors getting courses in business writing, his One True Discipline?

His solution seems to be "vocational education", but his single paragraph on it doesn't build a case. Why does he think the vocational paths that exist aren't enough? What would he propose to make them more effective or attractive? What vocations exactly are we talking about, and how much more of a workforce do they need? Are the college-path students he's writing about likely to know that they should go for "vocational education" when they're 17 or less?
posted by zompist at 5:20 AM on December 10, 2017 [20 favorites]


I was most put off by this bit:
Arum and Roksa cite a study finding that students at one typical college spent 13 hours a week studying, 12 hours “socializing with friends,” 11 hours “using computers for fun,” eight hours working for pay, six hours watching TV, six hours exercising, five hours on “hobbies,” and three hours on “other forms of entertainment.”
Maybe at the one "typical college" that some right wingers looked at for their book. At the college where I work, a non-selective public college like most US college students attend, our average student spends 25 hours per week at work. Many work far more. I had a student this semester in my 8 am biology class who came to class after working all night, 7 nights a week at a hotel front desk. Rich kids may be having fun at college, but hardly anybody is a rich kid. White kids may be having fun at college, but hardly any of my students are white.

Also, how many of us following the 2016 election lamented the poor understanding of civics and history of the US electorate? Every student who graduates from a state college in Georgia has to take an American government class and a US history class. It helps.

How many of us have lamented the poor understanding of basic science that leads people to dismiss climate change, refuse to vaccinate their kids, be terrified of chemtrails, or think the earth is flat? College students have to take some basic science, and those of us who teach those classes pitch them at exactly those sorts of reasoning fails. It helps.

Right-wingers like this economist would prefer that my students don't get basic education in civics, history, and science but instead get forced into vocational education at ever younger ages. Totally coincidentally, of course, the kids forced into vocational ed will be the poor kids and the non-white kids, while kids like his will continue to attend elite universities like his.

It is to his benefit for the American public to be less broadly education. It is to his benefit to continue to reinforce the existing structural discrimination. Don't listen to him.
posted by hydropsyche at 5:41 AM on December 10, 2017 [44 favorites]


From "Should We Trust Economists?":
What's the right move? Well, in an ideal world, you would go and get 999 patients who have illnesses similar to the prince's and give them all a variety of household substances, such as bread mold. Then you would take careful note of who died and use statistical analysis to figure out which household substances cured disease. Thus, you would discover penicillin and invent modern medicine.

Sadly, this is not what you do, because a) if you proposed it, you would be led off to the dungeons and beheaded b) it's the 14th century and you have no concept of the scientific method and c) you don't really have the right tools for that experiment, anyway. Instead, it's bleeding or leeches. So you take your best guess and you pray you're right.
It's a minor thing, and I know this was kind of a joke anyway, but one of my big pet peeves is when people assume that you don't produce new, useful knowledge without the scientific method. There were rigorous principles behind medieval science and medicine, and they were based on empirical observations. And they managed to produce some impressive results! I hate it when people look at historical science and say "those fools!" because the conclusions aren't as accurate as ours. You end up treating only your viewpoint as truth, with everyone else, living or dead, simply having an opinion (and how nice for them).

Anyway, is it really the scientific method to just throw a bunch of stuff at a problem until something sticks? It's like someone in the future saying "in 2017, the right way to cure Disease X would have been to get 999 people and keep testing various household goods on them until arriving at the correct cure, which we all know is those detergent spot cleaner pens. It's the scientific method, LOSERS."

I know I'm really making a big deal out of something that actually doesn't matter, but agh, still drives me up the wall a little.
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 6:01 AM on December 10, 2017 [11 favorites]


General ed years aren't a universal feature of college - as mentioned upthread, in Australia and New Zealand it's covered in high school, and if you don't have it, you have to do a prep course to get that general ed. All the benefits of general ed, without the thousands in fees.

Which reminds me: it's weird when people mention that ethics isn't a feature of an IT degree in the US. I definitely had to do it, including an assessment task, and my alma mater is very transparent about how degree requirements map to certification requirements from professional bodies. Given that most of these professional bodies are worldwide, it's puzzling.

It's worth pointing till getting out that people with college educations tend to be much more liberal than those without college educations. So if you want a future where more people believe in economic equality and civil rights, supporting mass college education helps.

I don't really think this is because of college. Colleges are hotbeds of progressivism because they're filled with idealistic young people. Anyway, I th--

But it's kind of odd to see so many mefi tests here enthusiastically buying into the idea that people would be better off uneducated, and therefore conservative.

--oh I see, you were setting up a lame dunk. Son, it's going to be wild when you find out about the union movement.
posted by Merus at 6:56 AM on December 10, 2017 [2 favorites]


General ed years aren't a universal feature of college - as mentioned upthread, in Australia and New Zealand it's covered in high school, and if you don't have it, you have to do a prep course to get that general ed. All the benefits of general ed, without the thousands in fees.
The American concept of a liberal arts education was never intended to be a remedial thing for students who didn't get a good general education in high school. The idea dates from a time when only elite people went to college, and they were all assumed to be well-prepared and to have a broad education. A couple of years back, people circulated this 19th century Harvard entrance exam, which assumed that all applicants would have a solid grounding in Latin, Greek, history, geography, and various fields of mathematics. The liberal arts idea stems from a belief that educated citizens are generalists, not specialists. This is an idea with very deep roots in American culture. It goes back to people like Thomas Jefferson, who in addition to being the third president of the US was an inventor, proponent of scientific farming methods, president of the American Philosophical Society, and serious student of languages and linguistics. He founded the University of Virginia and revamped the curriculum of the College of William and Mary, and he had an outsized influence on post-revolutionary American higher ed. For better and for worse, higher ed in the US was founded on the principle that it was training citizens to understand and engage in the world in its totality, not providing narrow technical education in a single field. It's true that things work really differently in most other countries, but you should at least understand the US system before you criticize it.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 7:24 AM on December 10, 2017 [13 favorites]


General ed years aren't a universal feature of college - as mentioned upthread, in Australia and New Zealand it's covered in high school, and if you don't have it, you have to do a prep course to get that general ed

I had all my basics (history, english, physics, biology, foreign language- whatever else it's been a long time) in high school, but I wouldn't call them remedial because college goes into a lot more depth on a narrower band of material than high school does.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:43 AM on December 10, 2017 [1 favorite]


Anyway, is it really the scientific method to just throw a bunch of stuff at a problem until something sticks?

It really isn't. Most experiments start with hypotheses, and most hypotheses are based on knowledge that has been incrementally built over generations. That is, scientists need critical reasoning to engage with the ongoing scientific story.

On top of that, while exploratory science does exist, the way that he conceptualizes exploratory science is really simplistic. Throwing a bunch of random stuff at a problem until something sticks isn't an efficient use of resources, and on top of that leads to a lot of false positives.

I agree with some of his points. Rising credentialism exploits young people by trapping them in debt for degrees that aren't necessary for their careers. However, his conclusion that this means their education is useless rests on some questionable assumptions and metrics.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 7:44 AM on December 10, 2017 [3 favorites]


FWIW, the 1869 Harvard exam is fascinating, but not intimidating. Offhand the math section looks no more complicated than the SATs.

The Latin and Greek sections assume, well, that the student had studied Latin and Greek. As tests of those languages go, they're minimal— the frigging vocabulary is provided! They don't seem harder than the French exams I took the first week of college.
posted by zompist at 8:07 AM on December 10, 2017 [3 favorites]


I started working for my current employer almost 11 years ago, nine years after finishing undergrad and six months after finishing grad school. It was the first real-world job I ever got where I didn't already know someone working at the company. I might not have needed my masters to land the job, but I'm sure it helped get the initial interview, just by giving those extra couple ounces of credibility to my resume.

After my first year on the job, I thought back and realized I had used at least one thing from every class I had taken in my two years of grad school - even the ones I was only taking because of curricular requirements, many of which at the time I found silly and pointless. Few of those things I had used - from any class - had anything to do with my actual field.

In my job, I regularly find it really important to know at least a little bit from nearly every field I can think of. Law, politics, economics, finance, engineering, chemistry, marketing, ecology, microbiology, writing, computer science, history, statistics, demography, construction, materials science - and that's just the stuff I drew on last week. I rely on concepts (and analytical techniques) I learned in my 8th and 10th grade science classes all the time. And I'm a policy wonk.

I was a history major as an undergraduate, bluffed my way into a career in computers (it was '98 and you could do that, as thelonious mentioned), decided to walk away from a budding career in brewing, and found my way into energy policy. I seem to be doing OK at it and have generated some level of respect among others in my part of the field.

I'm acutely aware of the many levels of privilege that allowed me to live this life; I lucked into a lot of opportunities and I don't think there's anything innate that made me uniquely better-suited to capitalize on them than anyone else would have been. But my education - broad-based, rigorous, cross-disciplinary, and mostly liberal-arts focused - was absolutely part of my preparation and I wouldn't have been able to take advantage of other opportunities as effectively without it. To echo kewb, "it's almost as if a more robust, broad-based education where students practiced and integrated these skills across the curriculum would produce people with a variety of capabilities, ones that would serve them well as citizens and as workers in a job market[.]" You never know where life is going to take you, and you never know when some random class you took 20 years ago as part of your general education is going to turn out to have a remarkably applicable lesson in your professional life.
posted by nickmark at 8:26 AM on December 10, 2017 [7 favorites]


So let's say there are 2 schools of thought:
1) Higher education, especially in liberal arts, is worth pursuing in and of itself
2) Higher education is only useful as job training

I don't necessarily think the linked article is saying 2). I think it is proposing:
3) People who want to get jobs shouldn't be forced to spend money and time on a higher education, when that higher education arguably has nothing to do with the qualifications for the job

In other words - does it make any sense for employers to require a 4-year university education to do a job that has basically nothing to do with what was learned in the 4-year education? Or is it just another form of classism, signalling, and filtering for the "right" pedigree? In fact, as someone pointed out above, even if you'd done online courses and could demonstrably prove you had learned all the same things as someone with a degree, most employers wouldn't consider it anyway. And if everyone goes to college, then its "value" as a signalling tool goes away, and employers focus on more specific things, like which college. The result being that people have to spend even more money and time, or the unspoken class discrimination gets even more stringent, before people can be qualified for jobs.

I don't think it's at all contradictory to think that it's worth pursuing a university education purely for the intellectual benefits, and yet that people shouldn't be forced to indebt themselves to obtain a university education if their goal is to get an entry-level job. For those who have the time and money to spend four years studying the Classics purely to expand their intellectual horizons, more power to them. But people who just want relatively unqualified entry-level jobs shouldn't be forced to do that.

Personally, as someone with a fairly math-y education who works in a math-y field, I have found the value of education to have a lagged effect. In the first years of my career, it often felt that my education was 'useless' and pointlessly theoretical, since entry-level positions are more about learning and implementing company-specific processes - in other words, "bullshit work." But as I progressed, and focused less on the 'bullshit' and more on the higher-level stuff - the education became useful. Not so much in knowing how to do something (since nobody is going to remember that 8+ years out of college), but just knowing that a certain concept exists, or recognizing a problem that was presented in a different form in school, and being able to then go and read the Wikipedia article on it.
posted by pravit at 9:07 AM on December 10, 2017 [3 favorites]


I saw an article once (that I can't locate for the life of me) about a group of businessmen in India who wanted to start a liberal arts college because none of their engineers can think creatively, so they can't compete with Silicon Valley.

The trope that "Western education is superior to Eastern education because we teach creativity and critical thinking while they just learn by rote" is a common one, and IMO unjustified (and smacks a little bit of the old imperialist mindset). I have worked with people who have been educated in top Asian schools (e.g. IIT, Tsinghua, etc.), and compared to those who went to Western schools, I've noticed absolutely zero relationship as it pertains to critical thinking, creativity, or intellectualism. I've worked with incredibly creative, out-of-the-box thinkers with an Eastern training, and people with a serious lack of critical thinking ability who went to Western schools. In my experience at least it's more of a person-by-person thing.
posted by pravit at 9:13 AM on December 10, 2017 [8 favorites]


Third sentence: "The next step was what you could call my first “real” job—as an economics professor at George Mason University."

Talk about educational signaling. You could stop reading right there. He's signaling that he is a libertarian ass at the Koch brothers funded school of economics.
posted by JackFlash at 9:24 AM on December 10, 2017 [7 favorites]


What is college for? It is for learning that your snap judgment and gut feeling in no way map onto the actual needs and problems of any field of endeavor. It's for discovering that there are realms of specialized knowledge that require a lot of preparation before you can understand them. It's for learning the limits of your existing knowledge and developing a plan to do something about them. This kind of awareness becomes ever more valuable as we enter the age of mandatory cleaning-up after the knee-jerk decisions and short-term greed of the last few generations. College doesn't have the patent on this knowledge, but it's one good place to get it.
posted by homerica at 9:29 AM on December 10, 2017 [10 favorites]


Let me begin with the deep truths. The Objectivists were right to insist that reality is objective, human reason able to grasp it, and scepticism without merit. They correctly hold that humans have free will, morality is objective, and the pursuit of self-interest typically morally right.

If this fella considers any these observations “deep truths” it indicates a stunning paucity of education in the history of the Western intellectual tradition. He apparently hasn’t heard of Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, Kant, the Enlightenment, Bentham, or Mill. He uses lots of words that I imagine he’d have significant difficulty defining with any rigor. “Morality is objective,” what the fuck does that even mean? What morality is he even talking about? Utilitarian? Probably, as he’s an economist, but does he even know there are other kinds?
posted by leotrotsky at 10:29 AM on December 10, 2017 [13 favorites]


The conversation in this thread, and nationally, is profoundly skewed by a framing that begs the question, namely that the desired primary outcomes of formal education (college or otherwise) ought to be only quantifiably practical and, specifically, vocational in nature. The author here--and so many others everywhere--builds a rationale supporting that a priori conclusion, that a university liberal-arts-model education fails students because it doesn't accomplish the ends that he has defined. Short version: you're not doing the thing that I think you ought to be doing, so you're failing. QED.

Because this framing is merely asserted, and not argued or supported in any way, it can be disregarded in an intellectual sense (i.e., it has no standing); the problem is that lots of people who buy into this framing, projected backwards onto a formal system, are in positions of political influence and power, and are making decisions based upon those assumptions (e.g., education is broken because it doesn't adequately serve capitalism; reform must produce quantifiable skills and vocational outcomes; etc.). In California, the UC and CSU systems are now seeing it manifest as a slow motion, very polite and deferential undermining of the General Education curriculum, required of all undergraduate students. It will soon be openly attacked.

The high cost of University is a political choice, not an inevitability.

This, over and over again. Consider the framing of our national discourse on higher education: is it worth it? The only reason that question even makes sense is because 1) college costs so, so much; and 2) its outcomes have been yoked to the capitalist machine, as a significant aspect of long-term existential security. As #1 worsens, so does the grip #2 can exert practically, on our daily lives.

It does not have to be this way. Undergraduate college education in the U.S. is still hugely effective, when you consider the outcomes it intends rather than the outcomes that, e.g., economists project onto it. It can also, fairly inexpensively, be publicly subsidized to an enormous degree, lowering costs to students and families significantly. This was the founding philosophy of higher education here in California, in 1868, which was clearly reaffirmed in the state Master Plan for Higher Education in 1960 (which also created the second major state university system, Cal State). While both the 1868 UC Charter and the 1960 Master Plan allow for fees to be charged, college was essentially free to California residents until Ronald Reagan was elected governer in 1966. This is not mere state or partisan political history: the Republican Party has been been defunding, dismantling, and generally delegitimizing secular, publicly-funded education for fifty years. Betsy DeVos is no accident.

California state funding for higher education is less than half of the level it was when Reagan started cutting. But hey, it's still way more dollars, even adjusted for inflation, because way more people go to college!...except that California continues to spend more on prisons and prison construction than it does on all education, K-12 and all university systems, and has for years. It simply is not a question of whether or not funding exists so that we can collectively pay for those things we most value; it's actually a question of what we value. Right now, to me, and according to where our spending goes, our values are really upside-down. But to me, that's the problem: we do not use our collective resources to serve the needs and ends that we should--and largely claim to--value. Instead, the framing of this essay considers a fake problem while covertly accepting and asserting its own premise, that colleges are failing because they do not adequately serve the needs and ends of a really fucked-up system.
posted by LooseFilter at 11:18 AM on December 10, 2017 [22 favorites]


I'm loosely associated with two biology departments that are very concerned that their students get jobs. One is part of a private college with many practical undergraduate majors. It tries to give its undergrads internships at other places. The student then gets a letter of recommendation from a person who is (or sounds like) a big deal and which affirms the acquisition of practical job skills. The other department is at a State University and tries to make sure its Ph.D. students do two-part dissertations- one part basic and one part applied. It also makes sure that some of the committee members come from an assortment of other places to maximize the networking potential. In summary, I'm impressed with how these places acknowledge the problem and try to deal with it.
posted by acrasis at 11:36 AM on December 10, 2017 [1 favorite]


1) Higher education, especially in liberal arts, is worth pursuing in and of itself
2) Higher education is only useful as job training

I don't necessarily think the linked article is saying 2). I think it is proposing:
3) People who want to get jobs shouldn't be forced to spend money and time on a higher education, when that higher education arguably has nothing to do with the qualifications for the job

In other words - does it make any sense for employers to require a 4-year university education to do a job that has basically nothing to do with what was learned in the 4-year education?


But if (1) has any validity, then that calls (3) into question. If higher education has intrinsic value, it makes sense that employers would prefer employees who had received those benefits.

All else being equal, a janitor who can think creatively and critically, who can communicate effectively, who is able to understand and empathize with people who are different, whose ethical principles have been refined through reflection, criticism, and debate is a more valuable employee than a janitor who doesn't have any of those things. The fact that none of them makes the janitor better at wielding a mop is irrelevant so long as they don't impair the janitor's mopping skills. If college education has any worth at all, employers would be foolish not to ask for college-educated employees whenever the job market makes that feasible.
posted by straight at 1:44 PM on December 10, 2017 [4 favorites]


I think a significant part of the debate about what college is for, and whether or not it is succeeding at that, is an extension of a larger disagreement over, as LooseFilter said above, what we actually value as a society. Currently we seem to have different segments with distinctly different views on private vs public, individual vs group, etc, that are not even always consistent among proponents of certain ideologies. Instead of debate, we have chaos engendered and taken advantage of by those who benefit most.

In other words, it seems to me that, when faced by the identification of a new 'problem' and 'solution', we need to ask the old questions: who benefits? How do they benefit? Who suffers as a result?
posted by Kelrichen at 2:05 PM on December 10, 2017 [1 favorite]


The elephant in the room is the slackness of the labor market outside some rather specific and highly-specialized STEM-type fields (where there's a significant shortage).

Of course, if you are hiring for a janitorial position and you have the option of two otherwise-equal candidates, and one of them has a bachelor's degree and the other one doesn't, even if the degree is in something totally irrelevant, you might prefer the degree'd candidate. But if you do that over and over in a slack labor market, you've suddenly made having a degree (again, even in a totally unrelated field) a prerequisite for the job. And now anyone who wants to be a janitor has to go out and get a degree, even if they have no interest in it at all, just to get that janitorial job, which is a waste of their time and it's a waste of the other students' and the faculty's time at the institution that's going to have to deal with them, because again -- they don't want to be there, they just want the f--ing janitorial job.

That's where we are right now. The slack labor market, which is hidden behind official statistics that constantly show low unemployment through various levels of chicanery, has taken what might have once been employer preferences and "nice-to-haves" into requirements, and thus transformed what might have been a sorting process into jobs with slightly different salaries into an arms race, trying to get any living-wage job at all. Because you increasingly can't get anything that pays a living wage without a bachelor's degree. That's crappy.

There's certainly some intrinsic good in a liberal-arts education, when someone wants and is interested in receiving it, but allowing it to become a prerequisite for an entry-level job is corrosive. Ironically, it's probably most corrosive to the very educational institutions who hand out the degrees in the first place, because it pushes hordes of students into degree programs who don't have any interest in them aside from a box-checking / resume-padding exercise.

Absent some economic policy that tightens the job market at the low end of the education spectrum, which is where things are really bad, we might want to consider not allowing employers to make hiring decisions based on "nice to haves", because doing so -- despite it being a totally rational decision on an individual basis -- is demonstrably leading to a perverse outcome on a societal level. It's a sort of tragedy-of-the-commons sort of situation, where everyone can do the right thing for them over and over perfectly, but the end result is a blasted hellscape.
posted by Kadin2048 at 2:11 PM on December 10, 2017 [8 favorites]


Tech-bros don't want people educated beyond a narrow technical capacity because a broader education might lead their drones to question some of the tasks they're being given. They might even wonder whether there are values worth serving in their lives beyond the maximizing of their employers' income!

This kind of comment honestly boggles my mind:

the average four year liberal arts degree, in the humanities or many of the sciences, where the bulk of the coursework you're required to take is frankly of little practical use in later life

I use the skills I developed in college (and non-professional grad school) every day, practically from the moment I get up to the moment I go to bed. On the most general level, there's not a text I look at, from the news to ads to documents I see at work, that I don't bring critical reading skills to. Knowing how to identify bias in the news keeps me from being deceived as to what government policies are in my interest. Knowing how to pick apart an ad doesn't save me from some of the emotional techniques involved but it least allows me to identify what exactly I'm being sold and what is missing. The documents at work...if you want to make liberal-arts training strictly about work, well, if I wasn't capable of quickly and accurately analyzing the contents of documents, of using them as a basis for building up a broader narrative of what's actually going on, of figuring out who might be lying, and when, and why, and then writing about it all in a way that is both informative and persuasive...I would be unemployed. Who goes through life without needing these skills, whether or not they have them?

But I still don't think this was the most important function of college.
posted by praemunire at 2:13 PM on December 10, 2017 [5 favorites]


There's nothing that innately makes STEM students less creative and more deferential to the hierarchy than humanities or liberal arts or Classics students. We know this because there have been several periods with the opposite pattern, in which the power credential was the humanities education. Much of the Industrial Revolution in England, especially w.r.t. government service; and at least two widely separated periods in Imperial Chinese history.
posted by clew at 2:16 PM on December 10, 2017 [1 favorite]


does it make any sense for employers to require a 4-year university education to do a job that has basically nothing to do with what was learned in the 4-year education?

People keep saying this. What you learn in a four-year university education is information processing. How to ingest information, sift through it for what is valuable, relate it to other information, and communicate what you have learned to other people. This is the absolute core of any liberal arts degree, and the core of a huge number of middle-class jobs in America.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 2:23 PM on December 10, 2017 [9 favorites]


There's nothing that innately makes STEM students less creative and more deferential to the hierarchy than humanities or liberal arts or Classics students.

This is true. But there are skills which are not emphasised in the often-highly-specialised training many STEM students receive -- there's so much for them to learn in their majors that they don't get time to develop complimentary but not-directly-related skillsets. I have worked with a lot of undergraduate STEM majors, some of whom have been on a STEM track since high school. Many (not all!) struggle in areas relating to written and verbal communication. Even simple emails can be a challenge, and many struggle to write even short papers or give even short presentations, or to read critically and analytically. Many (not all!) have to take a lot of coursework in a very narrow area and this doesn't allow them to encounter and handle novel situations. They're not uncreative or deferential as people, but the training they're getting doesn't give them a lot of opportunities for creativity beyond their (often narrow) area of specialty. And when they have to engage in an activity beyond that area of training, sometimes they panic.

I once had a student almost break down in tears at the beginning of the semester because my lit class was a required Gen-Ed course and this student (a senior) hadn't read a fiction book in five years and was afraid that they'd forgotten how. This is not a good emotional place for a student to be. (Conversely, humanities students need at least a few math and science courses to be fully educated; some receive that, but some don't.)

The deferential-to-hierarchy aspect, to me, is separate from a student's undergraduate major. Many undergrads, regardless of their majors, tend to be very deferential these days, mostly because college is a breathtakingly expensive and therefore high-stakes situation and they're terrified that they will ruin their careers and lives and maybe also their families if they put a foot wrong or fail to obtain a perfect GPA. That state of mind is not one which is conducive to learning, regardless of one's major.
posted by halation at 2:30 PM on December 10, 2017 [7 favorites]


I'm working on the final project for the computer science class I'm taking this semester, and I feel like I can say with some confidence that:

1. Holy fuck would it be nice if there were some English majors writing documentation for programming languages and libraries. This stuff is not written in a way that is comprehensible to normal people, and there's no reason that it couldn't be.

and

2. All that math that I had to learn in high school and thought was useless? Not useless. I probably need to apologize to my ninth-grade algebra teacher, because I used both sine and cosine today and have solved for x about 15 different times.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 2:33 PM on December 10, 2017 [5 favorites]


It's not that Bryan Caplan and people who think like him believe vocational education will make people conservative.

At bottom, he doesn't really think people in vocations should be voting at all, and therefore a broad education which prepares students to become effective citizens of a democracy is wasted on them -- but he knows he can't say that in so many words.

Yet.
posted by jamjam at 4:16 PM on December 10, 2017 [7 favorites]


It's believable liberal arts majors might help make your product appeal to a wider audience by removing biases, ditto engineers from minority backgrounds, ala the first half of "Technology products and services are built by humans who build their biases and flawed thinking right into those products and services—which in turn shapes human behavior and society, sometimes to a frightening degree." but..

I'm dubious if liberal arts majors help that much with addressing the more fundamental problem of aggressive protocol-level data minimization, maybe even engineers from minority backgrounds do not help there. If you want to fix those more fundamental problems, then you really need people who understand cryptography and the statistics behind privacy problems, as well as who approach system design from the deeply technically paranoid prospective that only some math-like educations bring, and who extend that paranoia into their world view enough to care, but do not bring that paranoia into their interpersonal relationships.

As for the original article, I do think faculty and PhD students should be better connected with applied work, like requiring that STEM PhD students in pure fields do some applied course work. In fact, almost all math majors do applied courses in their undergraduate studies, but if the student is bright then these courses frequently come off as mind numbingly dull, anything like numerical analysis, statistics, or cryptography sucks usually. We need to be teaching interesting variants for either bright undergraduates or PhD students doing work in more pure fields. In the humanities, we should similarly make students study their field's applied edges, but actually making these courses interesting is similarly tricky.
posted by jeffburdges at 5:27 PM on December 10, 2017


For better and for worse, higher ed in the US was founded on the principle that it was training citizens to understand and engage in the world in its totality, not providing narrow technical education in a single field. It's true that things work really differently in most other countries, but you should at least understand the US system before you criticize it.

I think you misunderstood my point (at least, this is the most charitable interpretation) - it's possible to train citizens to understand and engage in the world in its totality throughout the school system, not just in higher education. In a democracy, every citizen needs at least some of these skills, even if they're not academically inclined or one of the elite.
posted by Merus at 6:05 PM on December 10, 2017 [2 favorites]


I'm seeing more and more extremely accomplished people in my circle who never went to college at all. It seems like maybe spending four years of your life and tens of thousands of dollars in debt for an education you won't use is maybe an unnecessary ball and chain, and you'll be outcompeted by people who don't have that. The old classist idea that someone without a college degree will never amount to something is starting to reverse, and I think in a few years having a degree from a non-super-prestigious university may actually even be a social stigma rather than a boon.
posted by miyabo at 5:22 AM on December 11, 2017


Many people have already said this better, but we need a college-educated population to maximize the number of people who realize how stupid and evil libertarian economists are.

Also, it is no contradiction to say that college is both incredibly valuable in forming people and citizens and a way of frontloading some of the best features of retirement for four years when people are still young enough to enjoy things that they won't be able to enjoy fifty years later.
posted by sy at 6:55 AM on December 11, 2017 [6 favorites]


I'm thinking specifically of travel, music and the performing arts, drinking during the day, and volunteering.
posted by sy at 7:53 AM on December 11, 2017


Engineer's disease is a hell of a disease. (My vocation is optical/electrical engineering).
posted by runcibleshaw at 8:35 AM on December 11, 2017 [2 favorites]


I have a degree in art history, mostly 2nd and 3rd millennium BCE middle east. I wound up an accountant and computer consultant. Wallace Stevens was an insurance executive. William Carlos Williams was a GP. Who says life has to be monocular?
posted by jim in austin at 11:16 AM on December 11, 2017 [1 favorite]


I'm so tired of people...
posted by LeRoienJaune at 6:04 AM on December 10 [115 favorites −] Favorite added! [!]


u should learn to code lol
posted by turbid dahlia at 7:46 PM on December 11, 2017


Engineer's disease is a hell of a disease.

Economists are the Engineers of the Social Sciences.
posted by bonehead at 8:12 AM on December 12, 2017


I had a schmancy American liberal arts education. To the point made about general education above - liberal arts wasn't that, at least at my college. I got an IB diploma in high school so I can confidently say that my high school education maps pretty well onto other countries' ideas of high school education. In college, to fulfill requirements, I went into more depth - I majored in economics but still took Latin American history and Spanish and psychology and linguistics and sociology and even beginning architecture lab (the hardest class I took in college, bar none). I have used some of those skills since, while others have simply informed my worldview.

My boyfriend went to a European boarding school and an elite UK university and he studied engineering. Honestly, I love him, and the depth of his engineering knowledge is incredible, but I don't think he realizes how huge his education-related blind spots are. We tried to watch Midnight in Paris and he hadn't heard of Gertrude Stein, or Ernest Hemingway, or F. Scott Fitzgerald. I'm not at ALL a literary buff, but at least I can roughly place them, y'know? Similarly, if I challenge him in political arguments, his ability to examine a problem from multiple sides, recognize biases, debate, etc. is relatively limited - because he was brought up in such a way that that sort of thinking was not assumed to be an important learned skill. I honestly feel that lacking that ability is going to do him a disservice in his life and career and achievements. My parents are both US-educated engineers with graduate degrees in the same discipline as my boyfriend and their stories of college still include the extracurriculars and boundary-pushing classes that his seem to lack (note that both of them work jobs now where they'll never use physics 101 but they're constantly using the "soft" skills that a liberal arts education fosters).

Officially my job is reasonably technical. Given what I took in college, one would think I don't use a lot of my undergrad skills - except, y'know, I spend HOURS a day analyzing and writing, moreso than anything I got out of my more specific grad program. Aside from the price, I'm proud of how my university and education were structured.
posted by mosst at 8:56 AM on December 12, 2017 [2 favorites]


I am always somewhat gobsmacked by the number of people in these discussions who attribute their critical-thinking skills (or ability to read and analyze texts, or whatever you want to call it) to the classroom. You seriously think you learned that in college, or in any classroom beyond the one that taught you functionally how to read and write?

Like, I learned how to spot bias in news reports because I've been reading the news since I was eight fucking years old. I learned about statistics, mainly, from following baseball. I learned how to pick apart an argument from reading essays about various topics that interest me (usually politics, history, economics, that sort of thing), which I've been doing on my own time since I was a teenager, and debating all of this stuff with friends.

I went to college, too. I did the liberal-arts thing. My worldview and capacity for critical thought has been shaped way, way more by the learning and inquiry I have undertaken on my own time (including, at times, on MeFi), usually via reading and friendly debate, than anything that ever happened in a classroom. Incomparably more, even. School was just going through the motions, even in college. What happened outside school was what actually mattered.

So I can't help but wonder: Am I some sort of freak? Or are people just so blindsided by the common narrative that education - particularly a college education, particularly particularly a college liberal-arts education - creates critical thinkers/good citizens/name-your-virtue that they can't see that they, for the most part, became these things outside of school?

Because honestly most people I know are like me in this regard. And in my experience, people who are interested in history, or philosophy, or poetry, or physics, or whatever, will devote some portion of their own time to learning about those subjects. And people who are not interested in those subjects will continue to be not-interested in them, and when they have to take the class in college they'll skip the lecture and read the Cliff's Notes.

Perhaps there is this whole other world of engaged students and engaged professors and people having scholarly intellectual discussions on campuses. I'm open to that possibility - maybe it's just me, or just where I went to school, or the people I know. But, mostly, what I saw in college was a lot of skating by and jumping through hoops and much ado about very, very little. I fail to see how this creates critical thinkers or well-rounded citizens, and I strongly suspect that most people who fall into those categories would have gotten there whether or not they went to college.
posted by breakin' the law at 4:01 PM on December 12, 2017 [3 favorites]


I learned about statistics, mainly, from following baseball.

There might be a few worthwhile topics in statistics that your baseball fandom didn't cover.
posted by straight at 7:37 AM on December 13, 2017


There might be a few worthwhile topics in statistics that your baseball fandom didn't cover.

Surely there were. I think I learned about some of that from other sources. That said, I don't claim to be an expert.
posted by breakin' the law at 8:23 AM on December 13, 2017


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