College Education and the Ordinary Citizen

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Those of us on the Internet, who read blogs and so forth, are conditioned to taking for granted that everybody has gone to college, or is on the way there.  There is, however, a significant portion of the country that has not gone to college, does not intend to go, would not send their children to college, and sincerely believes that colleges and universities are cesspools of wrong thinking and serious destruction of young minds.

There are conservatives, of course, who are deeply suspicious of college professors, who are deemed to be invariably ultra-liberal.  Anyone who has been to college would normally think that the liberal college professors are nothing we can't handle.  There is a small, vicious minority of college professors whose liberalism is determinedly obnoxious, and they do more harm than good for the liberal cause, but by and large these liberal professors will back off if you hold strong conservative views.  The worst they will do is talk at you until you're tired.

As far as I'm concerned, the kind of liberalism that I would push (if I were in a discipline in which I could represent my liberal views in college) is in terms of pooling resources.  It is much easier to deal with things like child-care, health-care, education, nature conservancy, environmental issues, law and order, etc, if we act together as a society, than to somehow get free enterprise and the open market to take care of it.  The very poor are convinced that most of these issues do not concern them, and the very affluent consider most of these issues as not their responsibility.  Finally, the very religious are deeply suspicious of typical colleges, regarding them as modern-day analogs of Sodom and Gomorrah, and not fit for their kids to attend.

Recently I visited a young couple, who had moved into their own tiny home, and had set it up as beautifully as they could afford.  The gentleman, a young man of about 28, had been raised on a farm, left home as a teenager and kept himself alive doing various jobs, mostly in construction, then reconciled with his family, and started his own little construction company.  It is not a very profitable business, but until their expenses go up with bringing up a family, they can keep body and soul barely together.  The young lady is finishing her degree at a well-known university.  Her area is environmental biology, and though she went into the field with enthusiasm and great idealism, she is becoming dismayed at her job prospects.  Even more, she is beginning to see her fellow-students through the eyes of her gentleman friend, and it seems as if most of them are simply wasting their parents money on alcohol and ---let's face it--- loose living.  Even worse, some of the faculty set a terrible example for the students.  In my experience, great intelligence and creativity do not always go with emotional stability and restrained conduct; unfortunately quite the opposite.

Yet more alarming is the fact that, to the young lady's mind, the facts and opinions she encounters in college seem to her not relevant to the outside world.  In fact, some of the opinions are totally in left field; for instance a well-known environmentalist gives a guest presentation to their environmental biology class and states that he doesn't care what happens to anything else, he is determined that a certain insect species should survive.

Of course, biology is all about passion these days.  I would be deeply suspicious of a biologist who was a cynic; my mental picture of a biologist (and that of most people I know) is of someone completely filled with respect for life.  But of course there have to be some biologists to whom the only good organism is a dead one, and there must be every shade of attitude in-between.

Coming back to our young couple, the young gentleman has even more fundamental problems with college education.  If you know how to build a house, how to cook, how to hunt, how to look after yourself in the event of a minor health emergency, why would you need a college education?  All colleges do is to cost the state an arm and a leg (certainly in California), and what do they give back?  To the working class, it looks very much as if colleges give back a great deal to the upper classes, and the working classes see themselves as bankrolling the entire enterprise.

It is very difficult to defend something from the point of view of supporting it financially.  It is the same problem with the National Endowment for the Arts.  The same problem with Public Radio, which is on the brink of losing all its federal funding.  Why should everybody support a radio station that only eggheads listen to?

There really are no ready answers to these questions; the fact of the matter is that colleges do indeed serve the higher echelons of society, even though they're funded by taxes from everybody.  Within a college, we all carry on as if only the middle-class exists as people, and as though the working class (to which many college professors feel little allegiance) is some alien species whose motivations are difficult to understand, and to whom are imputed strange and unworthy motives, which must be endured, but not encouraged.

I still do not think of colleges and universities as hell-holes and sin cities, mostly because I have survived college quite successfully, and gained an immense amount from both college and university.  I, too, don't feel any great kinship with the working class, though in actual fact I belong to it; if my employment were to be suddenly cut off, I would be left with absolutely no resources except a few thousand dollars in savings.  (When I read about the antics of the governor of Wisconsin, and other union-busters around the country, I am angered and frustrated more as a knee-jerk reaction than as someone who is responding to the removal of a fundamental right.  It is the unions who fight for a goodly standard of living for their members, but end up overreaching, and incurring the hostility of the rest of society, who ---occasionally--- feel as if the union members have gotten themselves fabulous deals at the cost of everyone else.  In Wisconsin, of course, this is not the case, because the unions appear to be targets in order to pay for tax cuts.)

The whole issue of College Education is complicated.  The complex society in which we live does, indeed, require a large minority of people who have extensive post-high-school training: teachers, doctors, engineers, technicians, nurses, veterinarians, lawyers, public servants.  But because of the significant attrition in tertiary education (post-high-school education), you have to start with a large pool.  But then, there are a lot of people with college degrees who are unemployed, further feeding the resentment against higher education: here I am, with an expensive college degree, and no job.

Where is the truth in all of this?

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