AUGUST 15, 2008

Is College A Waste Of Time?

According to Charles Murray, the W.H. Brady Scholar at the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute, that’s exactly what it is. In an op-ed in the August 13th issue of The Wall Street Journal, Murray poses a hypothetical question:

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.

Murray argues instead for a system of standardized certification tests specific to a person’s chosen career field:

The solution is not better degrees, but no degrees. Young people entering the job market should have a known, trusted measure of their qualifications they can carry into job interviews. That measure should express what they know, not where they learned it or how long it took them. They need a certification, not a degree.

The model is the CPA exam that qualifies certified public accountants. The same test is used nationwide. It is thorough — four sections, timed, totaling 14 hours. A passing score indicates authentic competence (the pass rate is below 50%). Actual scores are reported in addition to pass/fail, so that employers can assess where the applicant falls in the distribution of accounting competence. You may have learned accounting at an anonymous online university, but your CPA score gives you a way to show employers you’re a stronger applicant than someone from an Ivy League school.

My first thought upon reading all this is that education can’t be reduced to training. I’m of the opinion that well-rounded individuals tend to think more clearly and contextually and show a capacity for breadth of interest. Murray attempts to answer this:

Certification tests need not undermine the incentives to get a traditional liberal-arts education. If professional and graduate schools want students who have acquired one, all they need do is require certification scores in the appropriate disciplines. Students facing such requirements are likely to get a much better liberal education than even our most elite schools require now.

The problem I see here is that it makes a broad, liberal arts education contingent on utility. If your employer wants it, or your grad school wants it, only then do you make the effort to get it.

I’m not a fan of the idea that whether I want to be a marketing executive or a systems engineer, taking a course on Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy  or possessing a half-dozen college credits on the development of Western Civilization is considered essentially superfluous to my career path. Knowledge is edifying for its own sake, and understanding the world is a key to being successful in any endeavor. It also gives us something to fall back on in the event that we find ourselves in an industry that is in decline and we need to branch out or start over on a new path. I couldn’t tell you how many times a day I fall back on my liberal arts education (if for no other reason than to reference something I learned while writing a blog post about education).

On the other hand, I agree with Murray that the post-secondary educational system can be overly bureaucratic and ossified.  I like the idea of convenience and self-study, and universal standards for admission to the workplace that test knowledge rather than diplomas. Student loans are prohibitively expensive for many individuals, and college (and other) debt is on the rise. Worse, those seeking to go back to school after starting out on a career path often find that the time required is extremely prohibitive, and would be much better spent pursuing the credentials needed in as expeditiously and inexpensively as is possible.

As opportunities to participate in distance education become more widely available, and industries become more specialized, I think Murray’s vision is the more likely outcome. I just hope we don’t lose sight of the fact that there are things worth knowing that transcend the specific skills we want to put on our resumes.