Scholarly Critique Fail

To their minds, little of what takes place on college campuses today can be considered either "higher" or "education." They blame a system that favors research over teaching and vocational training over liberal arts.

 This is the main thrust of an interview at the Atlantic with the authors of the book Higher Education? (and yes, the question mark is part of the title). The authors do not like faculty who care about research to the point of avoiding teaching, an attitude I can sympathize with. Here is an excerpt on the perils of the Publish of Perish mentality:

The problem is that there are just too many publications and too many people publishing. This is true even in the hard sciences. If there's a research project on genetics in a lab, they will take certain findings and break them into eight different articles just so each researcher can get more stuff on his or her resume.

And many of the publications are too long. A book on Virginia Woolf could be a 30-page article. Somebody did a count of how many publications had been written on Virginia Woolf in the past 15 years. The answer is several thousand. Really? Who needs this? But it's awfully difficult to say, "Here's knowledge we don't need!" It sounds like book burning, doesn't it? What we'd say is that on the scale of priorities, we find undergraduate teaching to be more important than all the research being done. 

So far, so good. But they also have some very particular ideas about what constitutes good vs. bad ways to pick a college to attend. The bad way, in their view, is to go to college for signaling purposes:

[...] go to a prestigious college, and when you graduate the world will know you went to Princeton or Stanford. It doesn't matter what happened in the classroom as long as you have that brand behind you. Claudia and I were up at Harvard talking to students, and they said they get nothing from their classes, but that doesn't matter. They're smart already—they can breeze through college. The point is that they're going to be Harvard people when they come out.

So what do the authors advocate instead?

The second reason to go to college is get a good liberal arts education.

Wait, really? Liberal Arts? I thought having people write volume upon volume about Virginia Woolf was a bad thing. So why would we train students to do the same thing by having them read those very volumes? Or is this not what the authors mean by a liberal arts education?

There are two ways to look at it. First of all, freshmen come in at age 18. Let's suppose they've decided to major in sports management. What's an 18-year-old going to do in a freshman course in sports management? I've attended some undergraduate business courses. The students are young; they don't have business experience. Really very little is imparted.

To me this sounds more like an argument for skipping college and going into the workforce than anything else. Is that what they mean?

In our economy, they're not really ready for you until you're 28 or so. They want you to have a number of years behind you. [...] Besides, young people today are going to live to be 90. There's no rush.

The economy wasn't ready.

Oh. Nope, apparently the modern economy can't handle young people. Their labors aren't going to get them anywhere when they're young no matter what they do. So what should young people be doing with their time?

The second way to look at it is that liberal arts, properly conceived, means wrestling with issues and ideas, putting the mind to work in a way these young people will only be able to do for these four years. And we'd like this for everyone. They can always learn vocational things later, on the job. They can even get an engineering degree later—by the way, in two years rather than four.

This sounds like a good plan... for high school. But I don't quite see how it's an effective plan for college unless we are planning to greatly multiply the volumes of Virginia Woolf for these students to wrestle with, assuming they have any interest in doing so. Even if college were much cheaper than it is now (they do have a nice comment on massive borrowing for college, which at least for non-vocational, non-investment schooling is a pretty poor idea), many students would rather work at low wages than hang out wrestling with books they don't care about. Are they wrong to feel this way?

Good teaching is not just imparting knowledge, like pouring milk into a jug. It's the job of the teacher to get students interested and turned on no matter what the subject is. Every student can be turned on if teachers really engage in this way. [...] Some people say to me, "Your students at Queens, are they any good?" I say, "I make them good." Every student is capable of college.

No. I have to stop you there. Not every student is capable of college. I went to the local Vo-Tech in high school, and met some people who would not have been able to keep up with college level coursework at the local state college. Period. And they knew it. They knew they'd be frustrated and tired and hate every minute of it no matter how enthusiastic or capable the teachers. And you know what? It was OK.

They were studying something they found somewhat appealing, like computer repair or auto mechanic work or graphic design or what-have-you. They were learning something they could understand and appreciate and be good at that would also pay the bills, and possibly even leave them some free time to explore their side interests. And that's fabulous. I've had a fair number of students who I think would live happier, healthier, and possibly even wealthier lives if they stopped trying to finish college because everybody-who's-anybody-has-a-college-degree, and instead learned a trade. Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs fame made a similar point here (second video), and there are some interesting links on the subject here.

Do I think liberal arts education can serve the consumption and productivity goals of students? Absolutely, given the right students (and there are a lot of them). I think we could do even better to have capable, demanding, well-trained, and enthusiastic teachers of these topics starting in high school and continuing into liberal arts schools for those so inclined. But I think we would do a lot better at promoting real higher education if we stopped pretending that "higher" means "top of the line but somehow still accessible to everybody." That's a waste of the students' time, creativity, and enthusiasm in too many cases. Those are resources we should take more care in managing.

(Craig Newmark comments briefly and to the point on the same article)

PS- Here's hoping the economy is finally ready for this: