Higher-education bubble
It is college commencement time, and the graduates are being told in typically boring commencement addresses to go out and save the world.
Or at least to not mess it up more than it already is.
There is, of course, plenty to celebrate. The kids no longer have to endure indoctrination sessions disguised as lectures on global warming, American imperialism, and the evils of capitalism and their parents can now afford that long-postponed vacation in Hawaii.
But handing out all those sheepskins should also raise some obvious questions, foremost of which is whether a college education means what it used to mean and whether whatever it has become is really worth all that time and money.
The one certain thing is that it has become increasingly difficult to build a successful career without a college degree. Employers specify “college degree required” not so much because a particular degree is necessary to perform a particular job but because they assume that the bearers of such degrees have at least a modicum of intelligence and have demonstrated enough perseverance to get through four years (or, these days, often more) of college.
That’s about it, however. Getting a degree is crucial because one is at a competitive disadvantage in the labor market without one and because they serve as crude “job filters” indicating minimal competence.
Alas, what we can’t assume, given the watered-down nature of the contemporary college curriculum, is that the degree holder is actually an educated person, which was once upon a time the purpose behind going to college.
Most high school graduates now go to college of some sort or other, although there is strong reason to believe that most of them aren’t capable of benefiting much from or even hazily understanding college material (traditionally defined).
The great paradox of the contemporary age when it comes to education is the dynamic which pushes everyone to go to college combined with the reality that most of those pushed to do so can’t do and aren’t remotely interested in college work. So the work gets dumbed down so that just about everyone can do it.
Thus, the same college degrees that are required for entry into the job market have been essentially emptied of content because they no longer signify intellectual rigor or a thorough grounding in the subjects that make for cultural literacy.
Most college students endure the boring lectures and impenetrable disquisitions on Plato and Aristotle and Shakespeare (if they even have to take such courses, instead of Basket-weaving 101 and Comic Book Analysis) because it is the only practical means of acquiring future employment that will have absolutely nothing to do with those exams on Plato, Aristotle and Shakespeare. Study after study indicates that college students these days spend only a fraction of the time studying that their counterparts did just a few decades ago, and many graduate without taking a single course in economics, U.S. history or western civilization.
As a logical matter, when we reach a point when everyone is supposed to go to college, college ceases to be college. Even with their relaxation of requirements and abandonment of rigor, colleges struggle with “retention” issues because many of those they admit don’t belong there in the first place, but everyone in the racket is afraid to say that and thereby admit that the emperor has no clothes. That colleges have to engage in an increasing amount of “remedial education” says a great deal about how the concept of college has changed.
College still works for the most intellectually curious and gifted, but for the rest of the student body it is simply a rite of passage that leads to a next step.
That majority tries to do as little work as necessary (which in many colleges these days isn’t much), takes whatever courses they are required to take in order to graduate (regardless of their content or relationship to each other), and lets it all slip through their minds as soon as they get back to the dorms to switch on the Xbox or the next reality television show.
There are, undoubtedly, exceptions to these trends (and I like to believe I teach at one), but the suspicion remains that the typical college graduate in the year 2012 writes more poorly, possesses less knowledge, and has even less ability to comprehend abstract thought than the typical high school graduate 60 years ago.
We are incessantly told that everyone must go to college, and that the federal government must keep pouring ever more resources into aid for students to make that possible. No one seems to notice that college has become even less affordable because of such subsidies and that the quality of the educational experience is declining as its costs go up.
The higher-education “bubble” is soon going to burst, not just because current levels of student debt are unsustainable, but because those incurring it are going to begin to finally ask some hard questions about what they’re actually getting for all that money, and if there might not be less costly and more efficient ways of getting it.