Compulsive Higher Education

In the fine TV movie of "A Dance to the Music of Time," set in the 1930s, an Oxford don asks a new student, "Are you happy?"

He replies that he is not, that too many students are there to drink and have fun. Some things never change.  I can't imagine professors today asking such a question of a college freshman, in part because they already know, in most cases, what the answer is. They can tell by looking at their bored, passive faces or reading their lifeless essays.

They know what I observed for years dealing with thousands of new students at a large state university: that most of the freshman are there because it is expected--by their parents, their past teachers, their future employers, and their peers.  Not going to college (a four-year, preferably residential school) is not cool. It is supposed to be the dream world at the end of twelve years of compulsive education.

Frank Bruni in a recent NYTimes column  (9-3-17) talks about the loneliness of many new students at universities and their tendency to drink in order to forget.  He says what many of us know: that college is over-sold to students. From elementary school on, it seems, studying hard and getting good grades will mean acceptance at a good university, which will please the family and mean a chance at a good job--along with bragging rights by all involved.  And dropping out to learn about life, to see the world, to learn a trade is looked down upon.

This results in compulsive higher education. How often I have looked at the faces of freshmen who have come with high expectations having little to do with studying. In fact, they don't read much, or enjoy the life of the mind, probably because it's unfamiliar to them.

To return to Bruni's column: he says college in America isn't merely oversold to teenagers as a rite of passage. "It's a gaudily painted promise. The time of their lives!  The disparity between myth and reality stuns many of them, and various facets of media today--from social media to a secondary school narrative that frames admission to college as the end of all worry--worsen the impact."

No wonder there is too much drinking, some drugs, too many parties, reckless behavior at fraternity or sorority houses and too much depression.

A four-year college education is not for everyone, nor is it a fundamental human right. It is for those who have a career goal that requires the advanced study that our fine universities and colleges provide.

I am glad to see more and more young people taking a gap year to learn a bit about life outside the classroom. I would like to see more high school counselors promote technical programs that don't require a four-year degree--and more parents encouraging their kids to gain some life experience rather than landing, alone, in a college lecture hall with 450 other students, most of them prepared since early childhood for the great "college experience," which sometimes isn't so great.

Advice to parents: check out the drop-out rate at the colleges your kids plan to attend and explore some of the reasons for these drop outs.  Such data is not widely advertised.

Update: What to study in college

This is an important addendum to my March 29 post about the value of the liberal arts curriculum in university study.

The new "ammunition" in my argument comes via Nicholas Kristof in the April 16 New York Times, quoting Harvard economist Lawrence Katz: "A broad liberal arts education is the key pathway to success in the 21st-century economy."  Why? Because there has been a flattening of pure technical skills in the economy, and what is now wanted are those who can combine communication skills and people skills with technical skills.

The student needs both, in his view (which I am glad to say is widely shared). So a humanities major with courses in psychology, economics, computer science and other sciences has greater career flexibility.  So too a science major who takes a good dose of the humanities will be in good shape.

Kristof goes on to say that our society needs people from the humanities to reach wise policy decisions. He also cites evidence that wide reading in literature "nurtures deeper emotional intelligence."

We have to understand ourselves and others if we are to engage with the world as educated people who are, upon graduation from college, not merely trained.  Since literature offers lessons in human nature, in assessing the feelings of others, there is still an important place for the English major.

In my days at the university, I hated to see young people short-changing themselves by having too narrow a  focus. Many freshmen had blinders on when it came to the liberal arts, which they saw as useless, whereas engineering or computer science promised jobs. Yes, but what kind?  And does a technical degree produce a happy life in a world where we must know how to interact with others?

What to study in college

I was glad to hear Fareed Zakaria defend the importance of the liberal arts and sciences on his CNN interview today with Anderson Cooper.  Zakaria is the author of a forthcoming book,  In Defense of a Liberal Education.

He mentioned Mark Zuckerberg, who mastered languages, including Latin and Greek, then studied psychology along with computer science at Harvard (before dropping out).  The young Facebook mega-billionaire agrees with Jeff Bezos of Amazon that a grounding in the basics--thinking, writing, understanding behavior--along with technical skills is essential for young people going to college.

Bezos requires his Amazon employees to have strong verbal skills. They must, according to Zakaria, write a polished six-page memo to indicate their ability to handle critical thinking and language.  He doesn't want just computer nerds.

The liberal arts are not a waste of time, Cooper added. Often high school graduates, having had required math, history and English courses for 12 years, understandably want to pursue something practical, something they believe will produce income. But that is not the purpose of a college education, as I have said many times in print and in person over the years.

It is good to see that highly successful people today concur in defending the liberal arts tradition, which does not train the student to do something but educates the whole person. I often quoted Justice John Paul Stevens of the Supreme Court, one of many English majors to pursue the law, who recommended the study of poetry as the best preparation for law school.  Why?  Because of the close reading of texts, the analysis and interpretation of a piece of work, resulting in a carefully crafted essay.

There is still an important place for the English or history and certainly the psychology major in college. Don't major in marketing, Zakaria said on his show, just because it sounds business-like; rather, learn to think. Read widely.  Combine technical subjects with the classic liberal arts curriculum--writing, philosophy, language, mathematics, science, psychology, etc.--to become a thinking adult who can communicate: that is what most employers want.

So if you're a high school student heading for college, or know one, you might mention the new book by Zakaria along with the advice not to dismiss the core liberal arts tradition in higher education.

P.S.  Since writing this, I came across a website listing prominent people, many in business, who majored in English. They include  Conan O'Brien, Sting, Mitt Romney, ex-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, Michael Eisner, ex-Disney CEO, Steven Spielberg, Barbara Walters and Diana Sawyer and Andrea Mitchell and John Dickerson (network journalists), Garrison Keillor, Bob Woodward, Mario Cuomo, Paul Simon, Emma Watson, Sally Ride, Dr. Benjamin Spock, Rollo May and B. F. Skinner, as well as Supreme Court Justices Stevens and Thomas. Not to mention ex-CEOs of Xerox, NBC, Avon, MTV and Xerox.

Students or Sheep?

What is the point of going to college? This has become a key question for many young people and their parents as costs increase, jobs grow scarce, and the old ideal of a liberal education seems, to many, outdated. This is one of the central questions raised in a new book by a former Yale professor.

Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaninful Life by William Deresiewicz comes, amid some controversy, as a welcome addition to the ongoing debate about higher education.

Like the author, I, too, began college (not an elite one) because it was the thing to do for someone who had attend a college prep school, with only vague goals in mind as to what I might do with a degree. Today's students tend to be more practical: finding majors that will land them jobs--and being pushed on all sides to do so, while hoping along the way to pick up some knowledge and have a bit of fun, too.

Higher education, even in the Ivy League, has become commercialized with students, according to Deresiewicz, too busy jumping through hurdles to analyze what they want, too busy developing a resume to enjoy the life of the mind. Too stressed to meet the wide variety of people and ideas that will help them develop their true selves. Instead of four idyllic years of cultivating the mind, they live with a fear of doing things that might put their future careers at risk.

The author talks about problems found at state universities, too, the kind of school where I taught for many years: students with little time to make real friends, professors geared to research rather than teaching, and a pressure to succeed that often lands students in the over-crowded mental health center on campus.

The students the author encountered at Yale were, he says, smart, driven to succeed but timid, anxious and lost: great at what they are doing but with no idea why they are doing it. What seems missing is an over-arching vision of educational goals, the kind of humanizing education we once spoke of in academe--and tried to inculcate in our curricula until recent decades when careerism took hold.

Deresiewicz found students on their high-pressure treadmill to be cheerfully confident but lacking in the moral purpose he sees as basic to education: the combination of introspection, observation, critical thinking and reading that leads one to build an individual self.  Of course, a four-year program of study is only the beginning of such a life-long quest, and perhaps the author overemphasizes the moral purpose of a college education. 

If so, the emphasis is welcome since the other two reasons for college education--commercial and cognitive (acquiring information and learning about critical thinking)--have become dominant in the competitive collegiate world.  In these two areas, the author says, elite universities have excelled, while ignoring the moral-philosophical (or liberal arts) ideal that is sadly missing from what many schools provide and what most students want today.

Are today's students "excellent sheep"? Perhaps. And perhaps it's impossible for any quality institution of higher education to be all things to all people, providing the freedom of a humanistic, moral education as well as satisfying the practical demands of parents and students.

But perhaps our universities are doing a better job, overall, than this welcome and provocative and very readable book suggests.

College for All?

Having spent most of my adult life in universities, many of them teaching undergraduates, I have some definite ideas about the cultural trend in America that leads young people to see a four-year college or university degree as the only passport to economic success.

I was sorry to see Mr. Obama say that every young American should pledge to attend one year of college. What, Mr. President, if they are not academically interested or prepared?  Or do you mean the trade and technical schools that too often get sidelined by the middle-class emphasis on a degree?

In a recent article in the Wilson Quarterly, Sarah Carr brings such issues to the fore once again in her focus on minority students in New Orleans and elsewhere who, like American students in public schools generally, are "brain-washed" into thinking that college (four-year university study) is their ultimate goal. The teachers' mantra, as early as kindergarten, often is "get knowledge for college."

This one-size-fits-all view of education is not new, but Carr says that in recent years educators have been increasingly calling on low-income students to pursue a college education as America's anti-poverty strategy.
What about the programs in two-year colleges and technical schools that train people in fields ranging from plumbing to culinary arts that do not require SAT preparation and other academic skills?

These programs are seen as outdated, yet in my own area, the two-year state colleges provide some valuable "trade" programs, even though they lack the prestige that their parents often want.  The middle-class ethos of a college education for all remains alive and as unrealistic as ever.

I am an elitist, I suppose, who wants to give every talented student the chance to excel; but I see the university as a place for those who want to study and learn and have the ability and motivation to do so. I have seen far too many incoming freshmen bored with their academic studies. Many drop out, some take three years to find a major that suits them, then complain that there are no jobs for them when they graduate; so they come back for an M.A. or become depressed in a dead-end job.

If only their grade school and high school teachers had do more to promote what Europeans have long developed: a two-track system, one for the academically motivated, one for the career-motivated, without any stigma attached to the latter. Many people do not belong in universities and find this out the hard way, after taking out expensive loans to fund an education they do not want, that our society does not need. 

I know that having "college" as a goal can motivate kids and give them a structure for their studies in math, science, and language, but it can also intimidate them and limit them by forcing them into an academic mold that, whatever their socio-economic class, does not fit their talents. Carr writes: in cities "where more than half of students fail tests of basic academic skills," imposing purely academic aspirations is a fool's errand.

Carr talks about the dismal state of our technical and career programs in the post-secondary world of education.Why are they so dismal? These need a major boost among the community colleges so that "going to college" in this country does not mean simply pursuing an academic, four-year degree and having the "college experience" (including, of course, those spring breaks and other forms of partying).

Too many young people are being guided toward unrealistic goals.

Standards in Higher Education

This is Part II of a discourse on college education, a follow-up to my Feb. 13 post, "How Valuable is a College Education?" and a more recent one on testing. Several readers who contacted me via e-mail (schiffhorst@yahoo.com) suggested that I should say more.

It so happened that the Sunday NYTimes (4-8-12) ran an article on colleges measuring what students are learning. The article suggested that this was something new, yet I well remember the amount of assessment that was done in Florida universities in the 1990s. The problem is that the results were not disclosed to the public and the point of these tests seemed vague and pointless.

The Times quotes the president of Lehigh University: "I'm not sure any standardized test can effectively measure what students can gain in problem solving." Amen. Same is true of the other major goal of education: critical thinking.

It's no wonder that the Ivy League and related schools insist that what students learn "becomes evident over decades" and warn about "what is easily measured."

The folks making Big Bucks at the Educational Testing Service would not want to hear this, but it is easy for administrators to use numbers from test scores to "prove" student proficiency, and it is also misleading. It is tempting to reduce huge numbers of learners to figures on a page, overlooking all the individual differences and experiences that make up education.

I am on the faculty of the second largest university in the nation, with 58,000 students, and growing; when I came to the Univ. of Central Florida in 1970, we had about 8,000 students. Our administration opens the door to all who are able, based on the admirable democratic notion that everyone in America should have an opportunity for higher education.

This is a suspect notion: many students are not prepared intellectually or academically for a four-year degree, nor do they need one. Technical training at a 2-year institution is available for such students. It's no wonder so many incoming freshmen get discouraged, drop out, maybe return when they are older. They need life experience at 18, not necessarily four more years of study. Nearly all who do enroll are seeking future employment, not learning.

So when my faculty colleague recently asked, how do we educate the masses without lowering standards? I reply: a perennially important question, but one that assumes that the "masses" should be given a university education. I firmly believe that every American has a right to all the learning he or she can handle; I do not believe that everyone has a right to attend a university. It is not intended as a ticket to employment.

To say this raises questions about the purpose of a university or 4-year college that have been the subject of many books. Newman in the 19th century laid the groundwork in his Idea of a University. It has to do with cultivating the individual mind.

What I have seen over the years of poorly prepared and motivated students raises a more limited issue: the relation between high school and college. The late Roger Shattuck in a 1997 piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education minces no words:

Secondary schools, he says, have "increasingly allowed ill-prepared students to graduate from high school while colleges and universities willingly admitted these students into diluted undergraduate programs." Except in science and engineering, few students are required to undergo a comprehensive examination that pulls together and connects the bits of learning from disparate courses.

In reminiscing recently about my education at St. Louis University, a fellow alum agreed that the "comps," as they were called were a rigorous senior requirement: a six-hour exam that tested all the material that should have been read and learned in the major field. This was not only essential for those of us going on to the graduate level but it gave all the students a 'big picture' as they saw the relevance and historical context of the readings they had done. Passing courses is not enough.

I return to Shattuck for the second volley of his argument: "The slackened admissions requirements of all but the most prestigious institutions [of higher educaiton] deprive high schools of a major incentive to maintain rigorous standards." [emphasis added] I know of no other statement that captures as well the symbiotic relation between secondary and post-secondary education.

He goes on to point out that the responsibility for the "malfunction of our elementary and secondary schools lies in great part with the bloated system of higher education..." with its massive bureaucracy. I commented earlier on the folly of relying on Schools of Education to prepare teachers; I noted earlier the 39% national increase (between 1993-2007) in the various associate deans, vice presidents and other university administrators, while faculty hiring has been frozen or nearly so, stretching the workload of the instructors and requiring more and more reliance on underpaid and often underqualified adjunct faculty to "handle" the basic required courses, many of which have enrollents of 300 or more in a class. The other option is equally distasteful: distance learning in which the instructor seldom if ever meets his students personally; they communicate via computer.

Is this the brave new world we envisioned when new universities like mine were being created in the 1960s? Shattuck was there, at the University of Texas at Austin, where he says the enrollment grew from 17,000 to 35,000 by 1970, "with no corresponding improvement in SAT scores."

In painting such a bleak picture, I must recall all the bright, gifted young people I worked with and was proud of, some in the Honors courses, many not. They had a solid foundation and were willing to work hard and thrive in an often impersonal system. They were the all-important exception to the prevailing trends that make higher education, at least on the big scale of the state university, in need of some radical reform and re-thinking--in partnership with the public high schools.

I am grateful to Roger Shattuck and others like him for sounding the alarm. Will enough people in the bloated bureaucracy hear it?