Define “College” First

Dave Clary requests my response to Alex Tabarrok’s essay “College Has Been Oversold” in Marginal Revolution.

I think this is the article’s central thesis (especially since it is the last paragraph):

College has been oversold. It has been oversold to students who end up dropping out or graduating with degrees that don’t help them very much in the job market. It also has been oversold to the taxpayers, who foot the bill for these subsidies.

In situations like this, I always like to go back to first principles, i.e. the assumptions of the author and ones we foist on ourselves as a society and take for granted. These are that:

1) College degrees should cost an arm and a leg,
2) Colleges are supposed to prepare you for jobs,
3) These jobs are actually viable any longer or in the long run, and
4) Innovation can emerge from having a college degree, and especially from studying science, technology, engineering and math alone in college.

All four of these assumptions are complete and utter bullshit.

1) The staggering cost of college: Forget what the sheep market can and does bear. If more people want and vie for the same degree program, its exclusivity, i.e. its value, goes down and so should the cost with it. I can guarantee you that the quality of my undergraduate geology program was 10 times higher when I graduated back in 1998 and, guess what, it cost 10 times less. The more a university becomes an automated process of putting students on a conveyor belt and stamping their foreheads with Approved! at the end of a typical four-year term, the less it should cost. Unfortunately, like any growing corporation, universities’ administrations grow exponentially with the increase in students and that’s where the majority of college tuition goes. Deal with this problem first before complaining about the burgeoning costs of “useless degrees” and the taxpayer’s burden. Again, if you paid a ton to send your kid to Harvard or Stanford, well bully for you, but guess what, the University of Michigan ranks 18 and University of Wisconsin ranks 26 in the world and cost a lot less. You bought your kid pedigree, but don’t ever pretend they’re better-educated.

2) That college == jobs: I addressed this recently in Learning How To Learn.

… the meaning of a university has been corrupted to the point where the majority of students learn to a certain extent the works of others who did the research and, having achieved a very expensive pass from the gatekeepers, go off into the world to make it. This is unacceptable and look at where it’s landed us on education forecasts and economically.

The “college must prepare you for existing jobs” philosophy of education is evil because of its negative-feedback-loop nature. If college prepares you for existing jobs, then existing jobs are all you are prepared for. This is what we should be building instead:

… every single university student should leave college not just with information but with the abilities to, over the course of their lifetimes, teach themselves a million times as much information in the absence of a teacher and to find a teacher again should the need arise. Learning how to learn is getting and growing the toolset with which to take any concept, old or new, apart and to put it back together the same or as something completely new and/or different. In other words, knowing scientific results is important, but how to arrive at those and new states of knowledge is most critical.

3) That these jobs for which we prepare our scientists, technologists and engineers with their fantastic, focused STEM degrees are going to be around forever: I touched upon this in the previous point, but the short-sighted nature of college as higher-brow vocational training is the whole reason we have to stop this train and get off. Put aside for a minute the more exalted purpose of a university to educate and illuminate, period. Let’s look at my situation and tell you why I worry: I am a self- and college-educated geoscientist with two graduate degrees, one in geology, the other in computational sciences and geophysics. I work in the offshore deepwater hydrocarbons sector of the energy industry, am pretty good at what I do and am rewarded handsomely for it. Yay for me. What if another horrible Macondo incident happens tomorrow? What if onshore shale gas takes off and leaves deepwater oil and gas in its fumes? What if some whiz kid discovers a super-clean and renewable source of energy that puts the entire fossil-fuel sector out of work? Not only is my industry slowly bankrupted and my colleagues and I out of work, whole university departments and foundations go with it. And where will we go next? What are we prepared for? I don’t at all suggest that we not dedicate educational and human resources to, for example, oil and gas research and the development of those who work for the current energy industry, but the level of over-concentration in currently-successful technologies on the part of young students that is called for today is dangerous. Such blinders are the stuff of economic collapse. It’s already happening.

4) That offering degrees only to those entering STEM disciplines and sending them off to STEM jobs will somehow lead to innovation BECAUSE LOOK AT THE INDIANS AND THE CHINESE BLARGH BRAIN DRAIN ARGH: First of all, the Indians and Chinese aren’t innovating. They’re damned good at copying a technology and making it slightly better and cheaper, but that ain’t innovation. Their primary and secondary education systems require rote memorization, which is alright, but so do their college degree programs which have no real arts and humanities programs to speak of, and that is brain death. India and China, but mostly India, are discovering that education without creativity isn’t enough.

Workers at every level benefit from an education that emphasizes creative thinking, communication, and teamwork–the very kind of excellence already offered at top American colleges. Once in the workforce, the U.S. should take a leaf from the Indians, and steadily train and update practical and technical skills.

Only one Indian university made the list of Top 400 Universities In The World (IIT-Bombay) and American universities dominated the top 100. That’s because this particular ranking was based on the diversity of programs, the quality of original research and quality of teaching. Americans are, by the very nature of our definition as a nation, creative people. What we lack is academic rigor at the elementary and secondary education levels and this will not be achieved by underestimating the IQs of our young or via preparing them for standardized tests. A firm grounding in the basics and creative thinking first followed by more creative thinking later in college is the ticket to success.

And innovation from all this college-jobs nonsense? Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Michael Hart and some of the brightest computing minds I know dropped out of college and have done just fine for themselves.

Do yourself a favor? Take a year off after high school like I did, work a couple of jobs to survive and really, really meditate on whether your going to college is worth the money and time. I could have taught myself computer science but needed teachers and access to the field and labs for geology while a college education didn’t cost two lifetime salaries back in the 1990s, and that is the only reason I entered a university.

So, yes, you can say colleges are oversold, but not for the reasons Tabarrok’s article will have you think. If we have suggestions for American higher education of such vehemence, let them talk first and foremost of a realignment of our educational and economic priorities and associated long-term overhaul.

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