I have a bigger, more expansive post about the state higher education planned, but I got into a conversation about it somewhere else online, and I wanted to repost my comment here in a slightly more refined form.
I was responding to someone else, who said:
“My original snide comment was in reference to “business has quickly become the nation’s most popular major.”
This seems like desperation to me, more than anything, and I find the state of our economy and the role of education in it to be totally heartbreaking. Education shouldn’t come with a crippling cost, and it should provide more than just training for a job.
…for a lot of people I’m concerned about the soundness of the discipline, the quality of education, and the possibility of low returns after graduation.“
I completely agree, but I don’t know that this is something that can be fixed. Education, especially classical education that focuses on teaching how to think about problems, rather than how to follow steps to solve a specific practical issue, has always been a privilege. To a certain extent it’s always been the exclusive domain of the relatively rich. That hasn’t really changed, even though we often like to pretend otherwise.
We saw a demand for education, and in turn for universities, because the economy increasingly needed skilled workers for an information economy, as opposed to the trades. But this demand for training has been conflated with a demand for a classical education, and the increasing number of students desiring training and credentials for a better job has been mistaken for an increasing thirst for education in its ideal form. And so universities that traditionally provided the latter are falling over themselves to provide the former, because that’s where the students are coming from, and we’re mourning the diminishing integrity of a classical education, all the while neglecting the question of whether or not one institution can or should provide both types of ‘training’.
I think it’s important to have both types of education. It’s important to know how to run a business or code a website or design a building, but it’s also important to know how to think about problems, and to know how previous people thought about problems. We need an acknowledgment of that duality in post-secondary education, and a way to reflect that in the training that’s provided. People need to feel like they can get training for a career without giving up studying classical thinkers, and contrarily, they need to feel like they can study classical thinkers without cutting themselves off from pragmatic career opportunities. Not everyone who studies the humanities has to become an academic, but so many BAs are going into grad school because they simply don’t see any other options for themselves. And furthermore, the people who aren’t interested in being scholarly need to feel free to choose that without any stigma. There shouldn’t be anything more noble about any given pursuit. Society needs different people in order to function.
But I don’t know what the solution is. My business school offered a lot of electives, but the people who wanted to study the humanities couldn’t get enough depth with the few open slots available, and the people who didn’t want anything more than a good job were just wasting their time and energy and money. The one-size-fits-all system that is our current university system means that they had to at least pretend to have some passing interest in the humanities, but it’s not like they were going to do anything other than take the bird courses to boost their GPA anyway.
There are far more problems than that, starting with parents who groom their children to work the system, the culture of research academia, the undervaluation of knowledge for its own sake. I’m just rambling at this point. More coming soon.