We were discussing that Professor X article earlier in the week. Russell Arben Fox has been discussing it, as well. In the article, Professor X questions whether or not everybody should go to college. He wonders if certain jobs, such as cops or retail management, really ought to require a college degree.
The question of the day. Should everyone go to college?
20 thoughts on “Question of the Day – Should Everyone Go to College?”
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Apt. 11d 
I rather thought ‘Professor X’ was a giant whiner myself, though I agree that people aren’t being prepared adequately for college. Our whole system needs an overhaul from pre-kindergarden on up.
That being said, I think everyone should either go to college or a technical school as appropriate for what they’re planning to do. College isn’t just about your major; college is about exposing you to a fundamental level of knowledge that everyone in a civilized society ought to have. We live in a democratic society and for people to function as voters, they need to know more about how the world works than you get by the end of high school. And lots of people don’t know what they want to do until they’re exposed to lots of different fields.
I teach at 2 junior colleges and a senior college and I have some days of screaming at the walls, but nevertheless, I think my students all benefit by attending those schools, if only by learning they’re going to have to work harder to do well.
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We live in a democratic society and for people to function as voters, they need to know more about how the world works than you get by the end of high school.
This says more about the failings of high school than the necessity of college. Thirteen years of schooling should be enough to make people a member of civilized society; if it doesn’t, let’s address that instead of advocating tacking on another four years of fairly ineffective but very expensive education.
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As should be obvious from the post Laura cites, I’ve become increasingly suspicious of the idea that “everyone” should go to college. But that doesn’t mean I’m down on liberal learning as a form of intellectual socialization and a preparation for citizenship; I still believe those are good things for our democracy. I just would like to see us move in a direction which loosens the often all-too-harsh economic ties between a specific kind of education, and the reward of a specific place along our nation’s meritocratic class divide. When John talks about how our thinking about education “needs an overhaul from pre-kindergarden on up,” an overhaul that might involve a better funded and more respected mixing of th liberal arts and/or vocational and technical training, then he’s not saying anything I disagree with; I would very much like to see those developments. I’m just dubious of the rhetoric that suggests we can move in that direction without challenging the presumptions that Professor X’s essay helps to pop.
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“…college is about exposing you to a fundamental level of knowledge that everyone in a civilized society ought to have.”
I think college is too late for instilling general knowledge–if you haven’t already acquired a pretty big store of facts by the end of high school, it’s extremely unlikely that you’re going to start when you’re away from home from the first time, enjoying beer, hook-ups, Greek life, and no curfew. I am very happy with my BA and learned a lot from my undergraduate classes, but college courses (even the supposedly general ones) are very focused. Outside my majors, I learned neat facts about bonobos and chimpanzees, quite a bit about the history and formation of the Old Testament, and so forth, got hooked on Dante, and got to read a couple 20th century Japanese novels that I would never have got to otherwise, but what I managed to take away from the general ed courses was awfully scattershot. My knowledge of American history is mainly based on my excellent AP course with its very detailed, highly nuanced textbook. Looking back, I’m glad that I had it in high school rather than college. Even though I took it at the same time as AP English, taking the history course over the course of a whole year was much better from the point of view of being able to absorb the material rather than just cramming from test to test and then forgetting everything as I probably would have done in college. Within my majors (Russian and print journalism), I did learn a lot, but almost nothing about “how the world works”–in that respect I learned just as much from the works of P. J. O’Rourke. I have very little notion how my new town in Texas works, and I am pretty sure that reading the local paper or taking a class isn’t going to help me much there.
Laura, do you know how New Jersey works?
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Whenever this topic comes up, I think of my roommate my freshman year in college. One evening we were both reading. For some reason, I noticed that he wasn’t turning the page. He was reading an introductory textbook of the sort with lots of pictures and was turning the page every five minutes or so. Even if he studied all of the time that I studied, plus all of the time that I spent drinking, he couldn’t possibly have covered enough material to pass. And, he may have very well studied that much. He certainly didn’t drink or date.
He flunked-out after his first year. I think he may have went to a community college after that, but I never kept in touch. About fifteen years later, he was who showed-up when parents called an exterminator and he was apparently doing pretty well for himself. Maybe the year of college helped him, but maybe it just gave him several thousand in debt to pay-off.
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This is an interesting debate, because rather than “college” I think the question is how much do we reward cognitive skills at the expense of all other skills. College is supposed to be how we develop and enhance and sort those cognitive skills. Does every child have the ability to do “college level” work (and I put it in quotes, because we don’t know what it means). For example, to use my favorite example, should everyone know what a standard deviation is? what the integral of e^x (or it’s derivative :-)?
I find myself perplexed about this question. First, I think that there’s good evidence that people (on average) are developing cognitive skills (Flynn’s latest book on intelligence makes some interesting arguments). So, more people have cognitive skills that are college-like than they did many years ago. But, I also think there are people who aren’t interested in those things (just like I don’t like sodoku, there are people who don’t want to spend their time pondering the meaning of intelligence, and would rather build a boat). Except for surgery and sports, we value (as a society, with monetary compensation) those skills less, and that leads everyone to push for the intellectual skills. But, all human beings don’t have the same skill set, and making them all the same does not make the world a better place.
And, the people who are trying to teach all 7year olds (or 17 year olds) to go to college are the ones who have to deal with this question, more than theoretically.
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“Maybe the year of college helped him, but maybe it just gave him several thousand in debt to pay-off.”
It always kills me, when I’m listening to my favorite personal finance show on the radio, to hear a caller making a minimal living at a dead end job and no prospects mention that among their other debts, they’ve got student loans.
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No. Definitely not.
But I’m an anomaly here; I don’t even think everyone should go to high school. (Of my siblings, less than half have more than an eighth-grade education; all of us are doing well.) Eight grades is enough for most people and most jobs. (A good friend at church has been a builder since he was 13; he’s in his forties, and runs a construction business with annual revenues in the millions. That’s not uncommon in my world.)
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I’ve ranted about this many times, so it’s not like anyone’s going to be surprised when I say no, not everybody needs to go to college. I’ll reprise my comment from earlier this week:
I do think everyone needs to be prepared for gainful employment and citizenship as an adult. This does not mean college to me. As many have noted, it’s more about making high school effective.
As an aside, this is one of the few areas where I think the Gates Foundation is really off base. They are firmly in the “everyone should go to college” camp.
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Several things being talked about at once here, I think: inappropriate credentialism. empowerment for effective citizenship, and for the enjoyment of intellectual pursuits. educational deficits. Another should be I think the ability of some young people to get college (‘never try to teach a pig to sing. you get dirty. and it annoys the pig’)
In my checkered college career I spent time at an open-admission junior college, a third-tier state college, and at my state’s Flagship U. At the first two, I saw quite a number of students who I think were going to end up with very little of value from their college experience. Maybe fixing the high schools could do something, maybe these kids were just not college material.
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This post is causing me to link this wonderful good will hunting clip: http://youtube.com/watch?v=ymsHLkB8u3s
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“A 35-year-old network engineer needs a college degree to prove he can manage others?”
and, because of this rule, you do have to finish college, or you end up lying (like the MIT admissions director).
The “every kid to college” idea bugs me, too, ’cause I can’t see anyway of it happening without degrading what college means. What happens next? every kid gets a Ph.D? I think everyone is trying to avoid having to do the evaluation of their workers themselves, and trying to get someone else to do it for them.
But, I also think that the reason this happens across society, is the choice that we’d all make for our own kid. I think we had this conversation once before on this blog, when Laura was talking about her schooling hopes for her own kids. The fact is, every parent like us (whatever group we want to call ourselves) wants to keep options open for our kids. If they’re prepped for college when they graduate high school, they can become a surgeon, or a professor, or . . . . If they’re not, they’re options are more limited. So none of us want to limit our options for our own kids.
I usually justify this to myself by arguing (to myself) that my kids are intellectuals, with extraordinary cognitive skills, and so by prepping them for college, I’m prepping them for their most likely career (not just the least “narrowing” option). And I don’t think I’m wrong, but who am I to say that every other parent shouldn’t feel that way, too? How are we going to differentiate between the kids (like mine, of course) who are “college material” from the kids who are not (who of course, aren’t going to be my kids!), and especially when we’ve been so bad at it before.
So, I really don’t believe that every kid is cut out for college, but I don’t know how to pick the ones who are from the ones who aren’t (and I’m not sure they do, either). And, when we’ve tried to do it before, we’ve been racist, and classist, and ignored learning disabilities that we might be able to ameliorate. So it’s hard to get on board with accepting that every kid isn’t going to college.
bj
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I love that movie, kip. just watched it again a couple of nights ago. I was thinking about writing a post about how my office looks nothing like the Robin William’s office.
My dad did crappy in high school. Lots of Cs and Ds. His older brothers never went to college and no one was at least bit concerned about whether or not old dad went to school. On a whim, he took some classes at Univ. of Ill. on Navy Pier. He hit some great professors and got all As. After two years, he transferred to Univ. of Chicago and ended up with a PhD a few years later from Fordham.
Old dad is a poster child for the greatness of second chances in college. I like that there are lots of opportunities for kids like my dad. (Ugh. can’t finish my thought. being bumped off the computer by a kid.)
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I think there are a lot of academic late bloomers like Laura’s dad, and a lot of them seem to be boys. It is a real merit of the American system that thanks to the community colleges, there is an inexpensive on-ramp to get back on the academic freeway if you exit prematurely.
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Sam — I’m intrigued by your comment and environment. Do you think what you say still holds true? “Everyone doesn’t need to go to high school” and a contingent of family who are doing well without intense eduction? Does it hold true, but only for specific people who have a built in apprenticeship network through their cultural connections? I think when we were discussing this topic before, that was one of Laura’s worries, that her children don’t have a family business to go in to, at least one that doesn’t require a Ph.D.
I come from a culture (as does my husband, and they are completely different cultures) that idolizes education, separately from its economic value (societies that considered the “learned man” as next to god, and yes, we are talking about men). So, I have multiple converging lines of reasoning pushing me in the same direction. Once someone asked me if my father had a Ph.D., and I had to stop for a second before not saying “of course, doesn’t everyone?” So, for us, college as a value isn’t a new thing; it’s historical.
So, for someone in a culture where people didn’t see education as a goal (even 100 years ago), but are coming to it anew because of the perceived economic need. Are they wrong? Is it not an economic need? Would you encourage your own children to follow the track of your siblings and cousins? or is the world a different place now that requires different things?
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I don’t think the question is “Should everyone go to college?” I think the question is “Should every 18 year old go to college?” My 32 year old sister just enrolled in college to become a surgical assistant. When she was 18, that wasn’t the right thing for her to do. In the past 14 years, she’s had so many experiences that will make her an excellent SA.
I have a few other disconnected thoughts:
1. The traditional idea of a college education is not relevant for all but a few.
2. We cannot agree on what a college education *should* be.
3. Parents don’t always do a great job of guiding their children in making their college choices.
4. I once knew what the integral of e^x is, but I have no idea now. Why should I know this info if I haven’t used it in 25 years? Serious, not snarky, question.
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I agree with Wendy–lots of people could benefit from college after a few (or more) years of experience “in the world” so they could 1) know what they wanted to get out of college and 2) know what the alternatives were. My 18-year-old daughter, who probably will be an intellectual, is taking a gap year before heading off to college in the hopes that it will make her appreciate it more. Nonetheless our society isn’t really set up–for the most part, and Sam’s experience to the contrary notwithstanding–for 18 year olds to be in the workforce, so they go to college to “wait” for four years.
(I don’t even know what e^x is supposed to mean, and I don’t think I ever did…but I have a PhD and 15 years of college teaching under my belt.)
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In some other societies, the problem is dealt with by drafting all 18-year-old males into the military for two years. Problem solved (at least for the guys)!
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When I was a green Peace Corps EFL teacher working with squirrely 15 and 16-year-old Russian boys, one of the few aces in my hand was that if they didn’t get into college, they would probably be drafted at 18 and had a pretty fair chance of winding up in Chechnya.
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bj,
Trying to answer you is hard, largely because it’s not easy for me to know what barriers people unlike me face. I’ve never known anyone who had trouble getting a beginning job in the trades, but I don’t know if that’s universally the case. Does that make sense?
It’s important to remember 2 things.
One, an eighth-grade-by-design education is quite different than a first-eight-years-of-a-twenty-year-process education. The goal is to learn enough to keep learning, and to function well (write a letter, balance a checkbook); it’s not expected that you stop reading, studying, and learning when you stop school. So reading, writing, and applicable math are a very strong focus; science, theoretical math, foreign language, history and so forth are a much lesser focus.
Two, credentialling and learning aren’t the same. The issue that it is increasingly hard to have knowledge recognized other than by college credentialling is an increasing problem. (For example, my brother would, 5 years ago, been able to get an electrician’s license by passing the licensing exam; now, you need an associate’s degree as well, or 8 years experience as an apprentice.) I have seen lack of education–credentialling becoming an increasing problem; I haven’t seen lack of education–knowledge becoming an increasing problem.
I wouldn’t discourage my children from following my brothers into the trades, or from following me into the college world. I think it’s easier to switch from the trade track to the college track at 23 (as I did), than to switch from the college track to the trade track at 18, so I expect to try to give them an education like mine. (Eighth grade and then a variety of work and a lot of reading and self-directed learning. I estimate that I read 2 books a week for the 10 years between finishing school and starting college.)
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