How Liberal Arts Colleges Are Failing America
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
I don't know where this idea came from. It was never true. It certainly wasn't true when I graduated 33 years ago.
My fellow students at Caltech were well aware of the job market, and the prospects of jobs and salary ranges for various degrees. It was well understood, for example, that having a degree in Astronomy meant no job. Astronomy majors did the sensible thing - double majored, AY for fun, another major for a job.
These days, it is so trivial to google for salary ranges and job prospects, I cannot understand anyone selecting a major and being surprised 4 years later.
America is facing a problem with the latter - you need to be able to absorb even your lit majors.
I think this cuts both ways, and in fact "cuts more" in the opposite direction; even the non-marketable majors (in fact, especially the non-marketable majors) need a plan for how they will participate in the economy to support themselves. Expecting external entities, particularly abstract aggregates like "society", to figure that out for you is not a reasonable bet, and is certainly not compatible with being a responsible, independent adult.
On the other hand, young people are often terrible at reasoning about long-term consequences. To mitigate this, I occasionally ponder whether high schools should offer some kind of 3 month "this is what life is like outside of school" program in which people play a simulated game of seeking employment, paying bills, etc wherein their stated degree/career choices affect the various probabilities.
Unfortunately, it would be very hard to run such a game in a truly representative way (how do you reasonably estimate the chance of a lit major getting a good job straight out of college? How do you incorporate their other talents?). If done poorly, there's a chance such a game would devolve into being dominated by pre-law/pre-med/engineering/CS/business strategies, which would probably alienate more people than it educated.
Concerning failing graduates: I think the problem is that many graduates today are at the uncomfortable crossroads of existing in a knowledge economy after passing through an education system pushing an industrial age mindset. They need to take a step back and realize that passively sitting in 1000 seats in 1000 classrooms for 1000 weeks following 1000 instructions does not equate to what's considered real competency in a targeted job area and in general a happy and successful life.
Maybe there should be a warning attached to every college application:
Warning: The shiny glorification of what a college education actually provides you may cause blindness to reality.
In my opinion however, the real issue isn't just the students that get solely a liberal arts degree, but the amount of debt racked up to get one. Getting a philosophy degree at a state university and being $25,000 in debt is one thing, but getting that degree at a private university is being $100,000 in debt is another.
I'd imagine the younger generations will gradually stop pursuing these degrees because of the terrible ROI in terms of debt to future income. If this happens, our economy will be healthier in the short term without so much accumulated debt, but it may come at a cost of eliminating the programs that nurture our future philosophers and artists.
The problem with this is that most 17-18 year old don't have a sense of what ROI of their education will get them. Many of high-school graduates will be thinking "oh I like to read shakespeare so I'm going to major in English", and they probably have no idea how long the $100k will take to get paid off after their job.
I think if anything that will solve this problem once and for all is to make liberal arts minor degrees and only offer STEM as majors.
STEM is absolutely worth the money.
English/logic/philosophy/history etc should be plumeting in cost. With the internet, the cost of books/articles should have gone to zero by now. Non-profit universities could force sharing of peer-reviewed work online for the priviledge of the peer review publication (for example).
A degree of this type is not worth more or less (especially as a social rank signifier) today than yesterday. And they are valuable. But they sure as hell cost way more than they should. Its time to question why they are priced as if they were luxury, brand name handbags. Rather than public goods being distributed by non-profit, tax exempt organizations.
_________
Princeton: Endowment US$ 17.1 billion (2011)
Harvard: Endowment US$ 32.0 billion (2011)
Yale: Endowment US$ 19.4 billion (2011)
Stanford: Endowment US$ 16.5 billion (2011)
___________
Facebook: IPO US$ 10.0 billion (2012)
_________
Its not the payout to the staff. That its typically 1/3 of the budget spent at a University. Princeton just raised $1.8B for its latest fundraising project. etc.
It used to be that books were so rare and expensive that they were chained to desks. A single copy would be read aloud to students -- the very word "lecturer" means "reader".
These days, for a liberal arts education heavy in classics and great books, the cost of the materials is close to nought. That's what I meant by the capital.
If one assume that an English degree's purpose is to teach the comprehension and production of English vis-a-vis a body of literature, and assuming that degree is priced cost-plus, one would assume the price of degrees to come down modestly over time due to efficiency gains.
Consider the alternative hypotheses where a) an English degree is primarily a signaling mechanism to demonstrate that you are in the upper N% of some distribution measured by the university admissions office, b) the LTV of being in the upper N% is widely perceived to be high, c) credit is available in quantity, and d) universities price degrees at 100% of their customers ability to pay. If these hypotheses all hold, you would expect the price of degrees to inflate to capture all familial ability to pay plus all aid plus all available loans plus a bit of a fudge factor for blood plasma, summer jobs, and gifts from grandma.
Which world more closely resembles the world we are living in?
P.S. I believe your use of the term "public good" is non-standard in this paragraph. Do you mean that, as an aspirational statement, we should subsidize the consumption of English degrees, or that perhaps "English degrees have positive externalities"? The more common use of "public good" in economics is "a good which, when produced, is enjoyed non-rivalrously by the public, such that one's enjoyment of the good does not content with another's enjoyment of the good." For example, national defense (well, precisely, the state of nation-not-under-attack) is a public good. University educations are not a public good under the standard usage of that term: buying you a degree does not buy me a degree.
& You raise some interesting points on what that front...But it just points to the answer: Universities are acting as hierarchies (ie, like firms) with monopolistic pricing power under assumptions of profit maximization (viz, rent seeking). You have to ask your self: self: why are these 20-30Bn investment hedge funds being not only tx exempted by the government, but having their operations/cost based subsidezed (viz, grants) and having their revenues subsidized (viz subsidized loans, grants) etc?
These institutions are highjacking huge flows of money that are supposed to be charitable contributions. The are leveraging the prestige of the projects financed to create a massive rent-seeking opportunities for themselves, not to further the free flow of information. This rent seeking is counterthetical to their stated mission and the public policy principles that underly their tax-exmpt and socially privledged status. The degree as entrenched credential is now a giant "hold-up-problem", with universities as the opportunists. And With kids as the hostages.
They should just hand out Birkin Bags at graduation. In the latest colors. To he!! with the sheepskin. =D
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birkin_bag
[edits]
Now I'm curious.
At Caltech, you must have a minimum of 486 units to graduate (Caltech units are based on the amount of time a course is expected to take (lectures + labs + reading/homework) a week: 1 hour == 1 unit).
Of that, 108 units must be in humanities and social sciences. At least 36 must be humanities (art, English, film, history, history and philosophy of science, humanities, music, and philosophy), and at least 36 must be social sciences (anthropology, business economics and management, economics, law, political science, psychology, social science). Half of those must be introductory courses and half must be advanced courses.
Generally, this means a Caltech CS major (or any other major except a humanities or social science major) takes one humanities or social science course every term, which is about 20% of their total course load.
Anyone happen to know the humanities and social science requirements for other top schools, like MIT, Berkeley, and so on for people in technical majors like CS, math, physics and so on?
I suspect that MIT and Caltech students end up taking as much humanities and social sciences as do STEM majors at liberal arts colleges, and could plausibly claim to have obtained a liberal arts education.
Look at all the arbitrary rules: it has to be 4-year (apparently art takes exactly as long to learn as bio-engineering!) It has to include a football team, dormitories, in-person lectures, mid-terms and tests.
Look at all the squishy rules: you can graduate with a C- or D-average. You can learn pretty much anything you want. You can take up to 10 years to do the "4-year" degree.
Clearly its not What you learn that is the critical aspect; its the fact that you went through the same gauntlet as everybody else.
Given the irrationality of the whole process, its no wonder folks have fastened on the optional job-training feature as its true purpose - that's at least something you can measure (in terms of return-on-investment).
To me I got educated by doing arts and got qualified by doing CS. Being exposed to challenging opinions on what it means to live is not going to come up in an engineering interview but I don't feel poorer for thinking about it.
I almost feel like arts would do much better as a sabbatical from a real degree, where you took a year to think about yourself and your interests.
Certainly price is the biggest problem here, no college degrees are worth their current prices, what you bank on is that they allow you to skip ahead of others less qualified to get better paid jobs, with no defined career from liberal arts this is a massive problem. Your education had value, but to yourself and writing a check for a hundred thousand dollars to yourself at 18 is not a wise investment period.
On the other hand, CS majors are failed by their course too, everyone knows that a CS grad who only learns the prescribed texts is not the best grad. All college degrees do these days is determine intent.
Education right now is at a massive junction, I feel like an arts student who used their extra free hours to hit Udacity, Coursera and mitX as well as building a github and doing internships in software companies would be downright dangerous when they graduated.
Price is the killer. In the mid-1970s, a kid stocking shelves or pumping gas could make a year's tuition at a state school with a fair bit left over during the course of summer's work. For a private school it might be more like a third of tuition, leaving a couple thousand to be come by some other way.
I'm a programmer, small business owner, and recently an author. I credit St. John's with helping build the foundation that I've used in my professional life - namely, the ability to listen well and think through problems, and most importantly, "fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion." This is something that most definitely wasn't a priority while chasing an EE degree.
The assumption that STEM = logic is erroneous. I've seen enough mental athletes and Frankenstein monsters to know.
law degress seem more prevalent, looking at obama and romney alone.
I'm an engineering major myself so I'm acquainted with the disdain with which engineers view liberal arts types, but it's greatly misplaced. The simple fact is that outside STEM fields, college is more about signaling than education. It is the nature of non-STEM fields that you don't really need to know anything before you start the job. The purpose of college is to learn how to think abstractly and how to write, and to allow employers to separate out the smart, hard-working people.
[1] Amusingly, Harvard, a major feeder into the big New York banks, doesn't even have a finance major.
Schools like Harvard don’t do “professional” majors like that (there’s no “business”, “medicine”, “communications”, etc.). Even science and engineering students are mainly learning abstract tools rather than just being trained in some vocation.
Stephen Hawking read Natural Sciences for what it's worth.
Firstly - The topic of education is itself complex and vast.
Secondly - the intersect of education with economic opportunity leaves you with a pretty crummy field filled with myriads of discussion failure points.
House rules of some sort are almost always needed.
Limit your discussion field when you start out, or the constraints/assumptions you are working on.
It serves to have a more productive discussion.
It's only our narrow age, that conflates education with training and value with economic utility, that would think of GDP as the only contribution.
Modern employment markets are simply more efficient in pricing the various components of human capital than they used to be; it used to be enough to be smart and good at anything challenging at all (the classical liberal arts value proposition is, I submit, fundamentally based on this idea). The "learning to learn" and "critical thinking" components of this education were valuable enough to demand a price premium relative to 1950s vocational education, but it's much harder to compete with a modern degree in (say) mathematics which, I claim, is at least as powerful in developing said meta-skills as a degree in literature (and has the added bonus of having direct economic value in many industries). Over time, market forces will adjust the prices for these two different investments accordingly.
Thinking purely economically (obviously, there's more to life than economics), education in a subject for which no one will pay and which has no measurable positive externalities is indistinguishable (to the market) from consumption. So I think the future for these kinds of degrees will hinge heavily on finding evidence of positive externalities, or accepting that a degree in medieval history is better compared to a seminary (i.e. no expectation of economic reward) than a medical school.
Edit/Note: I realize that mathematics degrees, done in certain ways, can fit inside the framework of a liberal arts education. However, all the mathematicians of my generation I know took as many math courses as possible within the requirements of their degree programs. I speculate that, even at liberal arts schools, mathematicians pursue much more concentrated curricula than the typical student.
Could you define "civilized human being", and perhaps explain what some of those ways are?
I.e., explain it to me like I'm 5.
So the purpose of college is indoctrination? Good to know.
Doctrine, other than political, is critical to civilization.
The liberal arts electives I picked up taught me critical thinking, which I think were worth more to me than all the CS components combined. Some people still seek out education as a way to be taught how to learn and think, rather than just a 3+ year job investment.
Is/was my degree useless? No way. Those 4 years of studying history and doing lots of research (I think I wrote around 15 papers in those years, around 70% of which were on subjects with little previous research done before) have taught me to choose my sources wisely, to reflect on my own thinking critically (this is a prime asset as a historian, you cannot uncritically let your own preconceptions of the world direct your decisions) and to generally try to see things (and especially abstractions and thought-systems) from as many different sides as possible. All great skills to have if you code for a living.
I might not be as well versed in theoretical computer science as a CS graduate from a good(!) program, but I am familiar enough with the territory that I can pick up new areas/technologies/algorithms rather quickly and it prevents me from getting the "I graduated in CS, I know everything and do not have to make any effort any more"-attitude that I've e.g. seen in my predecessor at the current job I have (he used unsalted md5-hashes for passwords, wrote Java classes that are >10k lines long and used a mix of zip-archives of his Eclipse-workbench and hundreds of commented-out LOCs as a form of version control)
Firstly, there are all sorts of arguments to be made for how a liberal education can actually end up being unexepectedly advantageous in a professional context. A fair number of the startup engineers I work with majored in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, and they all bring interesting perspectives to the table. Steve Jobs has a fascinating anecdote about how a Typography class he dropped in on at Reed was the eventual inspiration for the proportionally spaced fonts of the first Macintosh.
As others have pointed out, studying a broad array of intellectual disciplines with any intensity ultimately will ultimately change the way you think, because even if you don't end up going into a profession directly related to them, creative thinking benefits greatly from the ability to synthesize new connections between seemingly disparate topics.
But there's still more to it than that. HN commenters love to philosophize, but many dismiss philosophy as such. We all have strong political opinions, but it's hard for me to imagine a functional political citizen that doesn't have a grasp of history, civics and the strains of thought that gave rise to our current civilization. We all consume art and music in some way, but presumably it's not worth studying. Or rather, I suspect many would prefer to continue deride those who waste their money and time on such an pursuit, while happily consuming the fruits of their labor. Even knowledge "for its own sake" is worthwhile if the end goal is personal enrichment. Personally, I'd prefer to live in a world with people whose educational prerogatives are not universally economically driven.
Whether higher education should cost so much, whether liberal arts grads are expecting too much upon graduation, and so on are for another conversation.