Earlier this week, I wrote a summary of Douglas Belkin’s Wall Street Journal article on how Americans are losing faith in college. I want to follow that up with a series of short articles that look at related issues and make suggestions for how to fix the current college malaise. Some of this will be more concrete, some more abstract, even idealistic. Let it be. Colleges do not get formed without idealism at their core1.
I thought it might be helpful to begin with the via negativa: rather than answering what college ought to be for, I will answer what it’s not for. Much of this will be directly related to the problems Belkin offers in his article. For example, naming “job preparation” as the purpose of college makes little sense in a world where companies are axing the degree requirement.
So, what are some current justifications for college that do not adequately represent what college is actually for?
Job Training
As mentioned, job training has to be at the top of the list of what most people perceive the purpose of college to be. If its primary goal is job preparation, college is stunningly inefficient. If I am studying to be an electrical engineer, why am I forced to take a literature class or sit in a lecture hall to learn about macroeconomics? The “gen ed” requirements are holdovers from a previous incarnation of what a university education is for but make next to no sense if the main purpose of college is job training. The best training for any job occurs on the job. As companies have figured this out, they’ve become increasingly likely to jettison the degree requirement. What can be taught in a classroom usually bears little resemblance to what is practiced in the “real” world. There was an era in American education when colleges specialized in certain fields, even at the undergraduate level: agriculture and mining, engineering, teaching, nursing, etc. Perhaps then it made more sense to see college as more practical career preparation. In today’s more fluid and dynamic economy, viewing college as primarily career preparation makes no sense. As students and parents have awoken to this realization, and are reading articles about the changing job market, the idea of forking out $200k for crappy job training no longer seems feasible.
Putting Off Adulthood/Flirting with Alcohol Poisoning
The idea that college is primarily for social connections and partying is not some new discovery. Parisians in the Middle Ages complained about unruly students at the Sorbonne (they even killed a few of the rowdier element). But a lot of students today primarily see college as a four-year binge-drinking festival punctuated by annoying tests and occasional classes. As colleges have ramped up spending on amenities, the focus has decreasingly become the education taking place at the university and the experience provided on campus. It would not be wrong to label colleges today more accurately as “experience factories” rather than institutions of higher learning. If your reason for going to college is to get blackout drunk and have some totally rad stories to tell when your liver is failing in your 40s, you have gone to college for the wrong reason.
Creating an elite
The express purpose of Ivy League institutions and their wannabes (other East Coast liberal arts schools) and elite state school imitators (UVA, Michigan, Cal-Berkeley, etc.) is to foster elite sensibilities and function more like social clubs than educational institutions. Oddly, some Christian thinkers have the same goal in mind. Liberty was founded to be God’s Harvard and Timon Cline at American Reformer recently argued that Christians need to found new colleges intentionally designed to become the incubators of a Christian elite in the same way the Ivies function in the secular realm. I get the impulse, I do, but to me, this idea emanates more from a Christian desire to win the culture wars and dominate politics than it does from a desire to be faithful to our crucified and resurrected Lord. We think God will be more honored by our effectiveness than our faithfulness. But the effectiveness is His duty and the faithfulness ours. He doesn’t need an assist from people trying to build a new Christian nobility. I mean, read 1 Corinthians or the rest of the Bible or the history of the early church. As far as the broader culture, well, only a limited number of colleges can realistically play this game. Newcomers are not allowed. It’s not like a decade from now, say, Colorado State, my alma mater, will be ranked with Stanford and Virginia in U.S. News and World Report. Only a select few can play this game and they have become increasingly selective in who they let in. So, as incubators of elite culture, this role will always be confined to a few tony universities.
Those are the big three as far as I see it. Each has its place and has been a part of the college landscape for a long time, but as colleges become more expensive and the overall quality of the product diminishes, it is hard to justify the expense (and time) given the dubious return.
Next week, I will start to make an argument about what college is for and then who it is for.
Except for “for-profit” colleges; those only get started to make money.