Obama’s educational argument

Following Obama’s comments about education during the State of the Union, David Shribman refutes the argument that the value of a college degree can be quantified on a scorecard (look up your own school here). He states:

Where the president has gone wrong — along with those college trustees contributing to the 39 percent decline in the number of liberal arts institutions — is in assuming that Americans need to be trained for a living rather than educated for life. This is more than a semantic distinction. It is the difference between reading Shakespeare in college and mastering accounting.

This is the sort of argument that many faculty members have been making, but it seems that the view of student-as-consumer, however flawed, is inescapable.

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What job will this get me?

A recent article in the Chronicle by Nannerl O. Keohane tackles the age-old question of why a liberal arts education is valuable. Keohane mentions a number of good reasons, but I don’t know how many of them would resonate with my students or their parents. Although I work at a private liberal arts institution, most of my students don’t want an invitation “to a community of scholars, both professional and amateur, spanning the ages.” They want jobs.

Because students and their parents want reassurance that $120,000 of their money will not be wasted by spending four years in college, there is increasing pressure on institutions like mine to offer more applied majors with direct connections to jobs. I see this in my intro students when they tell me that they love sociology but that they don’t want to major in it because they don’t want to be social workers and even in my advisees when they come to ask me what kind of job their sociology degree will get them after graduation.

Maybe majors at schools like Duke and Wellesley, where Keohane has worked, have a direct pipeline from the liberal arts to careers and graduate degrees, but the experiences of my own students (and most of my friends) have been very different. Ask a few non-academic friends what they majored in in college and compare their responses to their current jobs. I’m guessing that most of them aren’t employed doing anything remotely close to what they thought they would do when signing their major.

While schools like mine are facing pressure to offer more applied majors, the reality of the job market for most people is that those who are best off are those who have a broad knowledge base and can use that knowledge to reason, solve problems, and clearly communicate with others. There seems to be a huge disconnect between what students think they will get out of college and where they actually end up. If we can get people to realize that linear paths from high school to college majors to careers are the exception, the importance of the liberal arts should be self evident.

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