For Most People, College is a Waste of Time

[Laura Gibbs]

From the Wall Street Journal's opinion page, an article by Charles Murray (YES, that Charles Murray):

Imagine that America had no system of post-secondary education, and you were a member of a task force assigned to create one from scratch. One of your colleagues submits this proposal:
First, we will set up a single goal to represent educational success, which will take four years to achieve no matter what is being taught. We will attach an economic reward to it that seldom has anything to do with what has been learned. We will urge large numbers of people who do not possess adequate ability to try to achieve the goal, wait until they have spent a lot of time and money, and then deny it to them. We will stigmatize everyone who doesn't meet the goal. We will call the goal a "BA."
You would conclude that your colleague was cruel, not to say insane. But that's the system we have in place.

Speaking for myself, I don't agree with the author's contention that certification tests are the answer (for the certification exam solution, see Murray's article)... but I do agree with the premise that college education, as it currently exists, is more or less farcical - the farcicality of it depending on what day of the week you happen to ask me.

SO: Here are my questions:

Do you agree that the college degree system we have in place is insane?

How would you fix it?

Shamelessly anecdotal ssessments of what your college education did for you, or what it did not do for you, would be welcome, too! :-)

[Ed Jones]

Laura, I have another way of answering this, totally unlike the first 10 answers to come to mind.

I live in a county with very few college grads--9%. That's one third the national average and less than half the state mean.

The result: an economic growth rate (2000-05) less than 1/4 the national average. No YMCA or athletic facilities. No bike trails. No movie theater.

Of our county leaders, only the judges, engineer, and coroner have degrees. Not one other elected official does.

Do you think this info applies?
ed

[Laura Gibbs]

Hmmm, I think it is a different side of the problem - what I was trying to get at here is the problem is that as a college teacher, I feel implicated in throwing away literally YEARS of students' lives and a LOT of their money in pursuit of something that is empty of real value, even if it does get accorded an inordinate value in our society. And I feel very badly if students like the students in your county make the huge effort of breaking the cycle in their community and go off to college, and are then subjected to a lot of fakery and emptiness, when they should have deserved better. Here at Univ. of Oklahoma, there are many first-generation college students who arrive at our doors. I do not think we serve them well in terms of an education of real quality, especially weighed against the sacrifices they have indeed made to be here.

Likewise, I am not prepared to say that having a college degree makes someone a better elected official. Not by a long shot, in fact...

[Ed Jones]

And I will be the first in line to point out my interpretations of 'fakery and emptiness'!

I asked you earlier if you'd read An Education for Our Time. To me, this is what I want for our students, from our colleges. What they get is a long way from that.

Yet, if we get them to go off and study literary criticism - brain mush to me - and they along the way pick up an accounting class, and meet a Hasidic Jew for the first time, and hear a bit of poetry read, and talk to an architectural student, and the daughter of a international lawyer,...and so on for four years, hit and miss to be sure, but the occasional hit,...then they may be better off...

Of course, for the community, they will surely be drawn away if they are good at anything.

Yet we are getting a few young people who at least can tell a debit from a credit and an expense item from an investment. ...That really helps if you run a small shop.

[Laura Gibbs]

I think that's the point I wanted to make: if education in college is just going to happen at random, as in the examples you cited here, it can happen just at random in LIFE and at WORK... without being in college, and without turning over all that money to people who are allegedly there to assist in your education but who are instead just arranging for you to have a hit or miss experience no better than what would happen to you doing volunteer work in your own community full time (at least you don't have to PAY to do that, even if you are not earning a salary). In fact, probably LESS worthwhile than if you dedicated four years of your life to volunteer community service...

In my own experience, on a day to day basis, I draw more on what I learned from work (jobs that I have held) and from books that I have read (on my own) than anything I learned in college classes. So that's where I'm coming from: if college education is just a random hit or miss thing, we deserve better for all the billions of dollars being invested (insanely) in it.

[Ed Jones]

Well, in my case, I could never have had the work experiences if I had not learned the things we did in school. On the one hand, I almost never needed to understand matrix theory, but my first boss did his hiring on the theory that we just might on occasion have a need to talk with the recluse who was a master of the Kalman filter, and indeed, one day I did. And low and behold, a few weeks earlier, I needed to understand a problem of refractive optics, and, though I'd nearly forgot (as you recently described) even the experience of those chapters, was quick enough able to dig out the text, examine my notes, and move onward.

Its a strange thing: my buddy and classmate who went through mostly the same classes, save for a handful that were more practical, berates our education as way too theoretical and not nearly practical enough. Perhaps, I, as you say, found more of my practical starts in the volunteer and intern work...but then,.. he wouldn't sign up for those anyway!

I know I'm mostly getting away from what you intended to talk about - I don't think you were talking engineering, science, biomed, etc. Yet I guess that's where I see the solution to your question. If we are to make higher education work better, my suggestion is that EVERYONE take accounting, EVERYONE take a serious micro-economics class (not macr0--too gushy), everyone a law class--business law, in fact, everyone a statistics class, and everyone a physics lab class. I don't think we could get everyone to endure a full semester of managerial finance, but at least 3 weeks should work. And, I would take at least a month to lay out the framework of national security studies.

Frankly, I would disband the English departments. I would contract out the History teaching to the local historical society. The schools of business would be there to serve all students, but would not have their own undergraduate majors--they too undervalue history and overrate behavioral science and marketing theory.

---
A thought just hit me, and I wonder if this is not the key value of signing on for 4 years: few people have kids in the 4 year residential system. And they tend to put it off even longer after that.

That gives you a lot more time to learn to play well with your peers-be it in the classroom, on the athletic field, in Circle K and APhiO, or in an underpaid internship you could never take on if you have family concerns.

And, going back to the random experiences, none of those things could have ever happened to me here, had I stayed in place as so many do.

[Laura Gibbs]

hi Ed, about the English and history departments, you are spot on - although what struck me about Murray's article in Wall Street Journal was not that he was bemoaning the absurdity of the humanities and social sciences at the university - he was even willing to include much of the sciences as well.

Anyway, a few years ago a friend of mine who is a History Ph.D. applied for a job at one of the school in Univ. of Wisconsin system, and I remember being REALLY impressed by how they had set up the school (it was a quite new campus in the system) - the only majors were true pre-professional majors. The college degree still required some humanities and other general education courses, but you could not major in English, could not major in History... which seemed to me just fine! I'd love to teach at a school where I was teaching composition, foreign languages, etc., in conjunction with a curriculum that was truly pre-professional.

One of the big reasons I gave up my career as a Classics professor was just that I could not take the Classics major seriously. And Classics, as you can imagine, takes itself VERY seriously indeed... :-)

[Luke King]

I think a lot of what a student gets out of a college education is what they put in. It also depends on the school. At West Point, all classes are taught by teachers with at least one graduate degree. Teaching assistants do not exist. Talk to any graduate of any of the military academies and I can almost guarantee that they will not say that their college experience was a waste of time. As for civilian institutions, I still think students learn a lot, both about the world and themselves. Either civilian or military schools put pressure on students, something community service does not do. And, after talking to my friends, we seem to agree that we enjoy college, and are learning. We learn about the world, and where we want to go with our lives. True, this can be done in the job market, but that is a little more of a trial by fire experience that I would prefer to avoid. However, I am just a kid, so maybe I am way off base here.

[Laura Gibbs]

Hi Luke, are you at West Point? I would guess that is a really different kind of experience since people are there out of a real choice and commitment. That's very different from the school where I teach... often people choose to come to University of Oklahoma because of our football team (and I don't mean the football players! I mean the people who want to watch the games and feel like winners as a result) - I think it would be great if people came to college having really thought about their career goals and what they need in order to achieve those goals, which I'm sure is a big part of how people end up choosing to go to West Point.
I definitely have a different perspective on teaching assistants than you do - I went to a very big public university as an undergrad, UC Berkeley, and I learned WAY more from teaching assistants than from the professors. The professors were busy with their research and often uninterested in their students. The TAs were different: they were ambitious, smart, hard-working, diligent intensely scholarly people who loved to talk about what they were studying. You could sit around and talk for hours with the graduate students - that's how I learned most of what I learned as an undergraduate. Sitting around and talking with professors for hours that way was not an option! Berkeley may be a special case, because the grad student population there is very large and very strong (and West Point doesn't have a grad student population like that to draw on, right?) Anyway, as a general rule I personally would take an excellent TA over an average professor any day. :-)

[Connie Weber]

Laura, UC Berkeley?! That's where my sister went. She has talked about the superb TAs, too. She also ended up having some life-changing professors... Maybe we can get her to talk about it.

--continuing to enjoy this amazing forum discussion--thanks!

[Laura Gibbs]

Hi Connie, oh yeah, I am a Berkeley creature through and through. I was an undergrad there 1982-1986 and then went to graduate school there after a long hiatus, 1993-1999. My undergraduate days were the much happier ones because I was less focused on school per se and just "doing the Berkeley thing" - meeting people from all over the world, reading and reading and reading (I practically lived in the library) - I cut class constantly but it was always because I was having some totally engrossing conversation with someone, a conversation way more interesting than what could be expected in the classroom. I loved it there. It's changed quite a bit since the 1980s - I could see the difference even 10 years later when I went back for grad school, which was okay, but not as rapturous as being an undergrad. There were still some serious vestiges of hippiedom in the early 1980s, less so in the 1990s, and even less so today. Shambala Bookstore on Telegraph is gone, even Cody's Bookstore is gone. It doesn't quite feel like Berkeley anymore. Moe's Bookstore is still there, thank goodness, but Moe himself died - had a stroke and keeled over right there on top of a stack of books. That's how I want to go!

[Ed Jones]

Laura, very funny how different perspectives can be.

To me, 70-80% of the reason "College is a waste of time" is precisely because of the amount of time people at the modern university spend "sitting around talking".

Talking for us was a luxury reserved for times between mouthfuls of food or swallows of beer. Not that I'm recommending that track to everyone.
However, if one is not going to class, and is primarily talking their way through school, yes...you might as well go get a job as a bartender somewhere. You'll be a lot smarter for it. You'll have had the talking time, and with people a lot more grounded in the real world than college TA's and fellow students.

[Laura Gibbs]

The only way you'll learn to speak a foreign language is by speaking it. I speak Russian, Italian and Polish fluently, or used to anyway - and I would LOVE to be a bartender in any of those countries to keep up those language skills which, alas, are languishing here now that I've got no opportunity for the conversations any more. That's what I studied in college - languages. Luckily for me, that's also an excuse to keep your mouth moving. :-)