I recently read an article in the New Yorker, which addressed how the expectations, and the lives, of college students have been completely turned upside-down by the Coronavirus epidemic.
The author goes on to describe how far these students' expectations have been blown off course by the events of the past few months. But behind all these upheavals—and certainly these upheavals have been massive, and I don't wish to minimize them—there is the problem that higher education in the USA has never really been defined to my satisfaction. All the broken promises that the author of the New Yorker piece conveys to us from the broken-hearted words of a large number of undergraduates that she interviewed, over the phone, for the most part, were not made by anyone qualified to make them. They were made by marketing specialists, and consist of hype that has been sent down for a century, about what college does for a person.
Back in the days when the efficacy of a thing was sort of open-ended, people were accustomed to buying it on faith. A cough mixture, a wart remover, an umbrella that would last forever: we were accustomed to buying these, with a nagging suspicion at the back of our minds that the purchase would not deliver. We still have these with us; they are particularly noisome in politics, as we have found in the last four years to our acute frustration.
But, over the decades, we have become accustomed to the concept of false advertising, and now either the manufacturer of a new product must deliver a product that meets its description, or must obtain insurance, so that if a consumer files a claim of unsuitability, at least the manufacturer can offer some cash against the shortfalls.
College, though—one of the most expensive commodities that a students and his family can invest in—has no tangible product description. Its cost, too, is open-ended, and the student can be paying off college loans for decades. And often, a graduate can be an incredible success in college, but end up in a career that has nothing to do with their undergraduate training, and be a remarkable success. Just as often, a graduate with a fabulous undergraduate career could be a dismal failure at several different types of jobs. A graduate who scrapes through with a bare pass in college might be a brilliant success. Or an abject failure. What do these outcomes have to do with college? How can we think about a thing with such a variety of effects on people?
Before I mislead you readers, I want to make clear that I believe in the college experience, because it worked for me. Am I special?
College is almost the only place where certain things can happen to the right student. Having taught in college for 35 years (and as an amateur for 10 years before that), I know that there are some students who benefit enormously from the college experience. They come into a college from having spent 12 years in various schools in their home areas, and meet their fellow-students, and something happens! I don't know what it is. Within a year—or maybe four years, if their circumstances are not perfect—the world becomes their oyster. Would the same thing have happened if they stayed at home? We don't know; it depends on their hometown, on their neighbors, on their teachers at school.
Next, they get a taste of a number of different disciplines. English. History. Chemistry. Art. Philosophy. Economics. Some students want to get their teeth into all of them! Some of them don't want to have anything to do with any of them. This depends on their genetics, on their home backgrounds, on their professors, on what is happening in the world outside. No college can guarantee that a student will be attracted to any discipline that will lead to a major that will interest the student. The capacity of being interested in something is not always innate in a student. Sometimes a brilliant professor can inspire an undergraduate to become interested in something, but there is no guarantee that our student will encounter one. And, most dishearteningly for some families, there is no guarantee that the area that interests that student will lead to a lucrative job. Nevertheless, colleges market themselves with blissful confidence that every student will meet his divinely ordained career match within their institution.
In the post-pandemic world in which our college students will have to live, in addition to the problems I describe above: the problems of whether a youngster is suited for college, and if he or she is, whether or not he or she will find their intellectual niche in a given school; whether, once they graduate, they can afford to repay the horrible student loans they must take out; in addition to these problems, the student will also face a vast array of employers, viewing prospective employees with deep suspicion, and viewing the post-pandemic economy with even deeper suspicion, and wondering whether medical insurance, which they have been required (or expected) to provide makes any sense.
While I still resolutely believe that colleges do have something to offer, I do not believe that they have something to sell. Colleges are a pearl of great price, but not the sort of price that their marketers have in mind.
Do colleges have training programs that can help a student qualify for a certain job? In some cases, yes. Perhaps colleges should not offer these kinds of courses; it gives the wrong impression about what they are for.
The community, however, needs people with this type of training. Accounting. Teaching. Art. Marketing. Writing. Computing. People need to know how to do these things, often at a professional level. But sending a kid to college to learn these things seems to me the wrong thing to have to do.
I am talking about a different kind of educational structure. Maybe it is time to have these practical things taught in practical schools, where specialized teachers offer classes in them; kids will get tested at the end of the course of classes, and get certified.
Perhaps, at the same time, kids can attend different institutions, which offer what college was designed to offer: an insight into the edifice of knowledge and thinking that is not designed to lead to an occupation.
Unfortunately, also, education has been tied to the high status of graduates. As long as students pursue the more abstract aspects of their college experience out of their search for status, they will have limited success. I can't quite figure out what to do about this problem; I was probably as driven by the desire for status and respect as anyone.
I have no real expectation that these words will persuade anyone. But I'm convinced that the efforts to get qualified, and to get an education, are different things, and should take place in different locations.
And the economic problems of education—problems for the student, not the institutions—may get solved by an incoming Democratic administration, or they may not.
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