Degrees of freedom
Turning the spotlight on what university is for and who really needs it
As it happened, on the same day I was passing through Boston, on my way from a conference at Brown University in Providence, a dozen people accused of crimes relating to the US college admissions cheating scandal were appearing in federal court in this university city.
The theme of the conference was “Building the human capital of tomorrow: a global responsibility”. Academics from Mexico, Peru, Turkey, the US, China, the UK, France and SA, to name a few, were discussing the relevance of higher education to tomorrow’s workplace requirements. The views were diverse; some thought higher education did not sufficiently prepare students for tomorrow’s human capital requirements. Others thought it just needed a bit of tweaking, and still more thought universities had a broader social purpose and should not be judged by how well they prepare students for a job.
While the academics themselves might have been undecided about the precise role and effectiveness of universities, the circumstances surrounding the court action down the road indicated that a large chunk of their market had no doubts. Each of the extremely wealthy high-profile individuals heading to court that day were so persuaded of the usefulness of higher education they were prepared to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to secure a position in one for their children — and from there the opportunity to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees and expenses.
Whether or not they believed it worth risking a stint behind bars is another matter; part of being wealthy is not having to think too much about the consequences of
breaking the law. So it’s likely most of them didn’t give too much thought to the legal aspects of securing a university position at any cost.
The strange thing is, it’s not as though any of the children involved will ever have to go out and get a job to make ends meet. They are what you might call trust-fund kids, whose parents’ wealth ensures they never have to do a day’s work in their lives.
So why is anyone bothering to secure a position in a top-class university for them? If they were interested in pursuing a particular field of research just for the heck of it, that would make some sense. But judging by most of the media comments, none of them seems especially interested in any academic training the universities offer.
And then there was Martha the Uber driver who took me to the airport on Sunday morning. She had a full-time job as an assistant in a law firm but did a few hours with Uber on Saturday and Sunday mornings to bring in some extra cash.
She was trying to make a dent in the $400,000 student loans accumulated by her three children. Martha had little doubt why her children were going to college: they wanted to do whatever was necessary to improve their chances of getting a job and clawing their way up a highly stratified social system.
The thing that Martha and the celebrities realise is that time spent at university — whether because of skills acquired or networks developed — is likely to make life a little easier.
Unfortunately, in SA the inappropriately generous tertiary education policy will be of little benefit to those who most need it because of the appalling state of our primary education.