The Cost of Education and the Rights of Expectation

That the cost of education is sky-rocketing comes as no surprise to anyone. In the late 80s, I accrued a student loan in the range of forty thousand dollars. Today it is common for students to leave their undergraduate education with a student loan exceeding one hundred thousand; I’ve read reports of students graduating with B.A. degrees from tony ivy-league universities with loans over two hundred and fifty thousand. That price tag is equivalent to buying a house. Imagine being twenty-two years old with a thirty-year home mortgage, and not a starter home at that, and on the lookout for an entry-level job.

Yet at the same time, we live in a consumer culture. Buying a car? Of course one negotiates, paying more for the sun roof, asking for less when the color isn’t one’s first choice. If that car doesn’t please the customer during the first month, the customer takes it back for a refund. Can the same be done with a college degree? Does the person shelling out a hundred thousand dollars have the right to complain if their college experience doesn’t “meet their expectations”? Should that same person also complain if their college degree doesn’t “guarantee” a career and salary of his or her liking? Notice I say “person shelling out” the money—more often than not, that person is a parent, not a student.

Parents and students have already begun to make that leap. “I paid a lot of money for this degree, and I expect you to give me an A.” I hear this already at the low end of the totem pole; how frustrated will I be after another five to ten years of dealing with it? I have also noticed another trend: the people making this complaint are the very people who apply little to no effort into achieving the degree in the first place.

Charles Murray, author of the often-criticized book, The Bell Curve (the media reported Murray’s connection of race to intelligence as stated fact rather than concerned implication), has recently argued that colleges should scrap the bachelor’s degree and replace it with certification programs. He models this notion on the CPA exam. According to Murray’s argument in the Wall Street Journal, “Outside a handful of majors -- engineering and some of the sciences -- a bachelor's degree tells an employer nothing except that the applicant has a certain amount of intellectual ability and perseverance. Even a degree in a vocational major like business administration can mean anything from a solid base of knowledge to four years of barely remembered gut courses.” Evan R. Goldstein, in his response, “Degrees of Potential,” in the September 5, 2008, issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, has already addressed how such a program can’t work. One of the more surprising (and devastating) arguments involves liability, that such certification programs will be inundated with claims of employment-discrimination.

Murray’s argument, however, offers another, more surprising implication.

Students (or parents) are not the customer base for a college or university.

Employers are the university’s true customer.

Employers hire based on the qualifications of the degree the university confers. I know, based on conversations with business school administrators of a large southern state university, that some corporations have already begun to differentiate the quality of new hires from particular degree programs. On the other hand, many corporations don’t make those distinctions, other than whether the candidate holds a B.A. or not. I know from personal experience, spending twelve years working in corporate, eight of them with a multi-national corporation, affiliated with sales, IT and human resources, that hiring managers do indeed expect that a bachelor’s degree confirms “that the applicant has a certain amount of intellectual ability and perseverance.” The intellectual ability involves critical thinking, problem solving and communication skills. The perseverance suggests time and project management, interpersonal skill sets (with both colleagues—classmates—and superiors—professors), and the ability to balance work versus play. I frequently grew frustrated that hiring managers never asked any further question other than “Do you have a B.A.?” I wanted to interrupt, “But let me tell you about my major. Don’t you want to know which school?” I had worked my way through a regionally prestigious liberal arts university. Nor did anyone ever ask me about my GPA. All that hard work to graduate with honors, and no one cared.

The lack of the B.A., however, curtailed the careers of some of my colleagues. And perhaps I’m revealing part of the intellectual snobbery that Murray identifies as the mystique around the bachelor’s degree, but I could tell a difference in the demeanor and skill sets of my colleagues without a degree. Part of the issue lay in an inability to diagnose problems and offer effective solutions. Yet there was something else. They lacked a certain ability to interact with their peers, mostly on a social level. They lacked a certain polish, what Donald Bartholomae, the rhetoric and composition guru, would call a “discourse.” They couldn’t “speak” the language, and that language included more than just words; it included tone, delivery and composure.

Which brings me to my main point—perhaps colleges and universities should enquire what exactly our “customers” seek in the 21st century, but with a considered inquiry into who exactly are our “customers.” These “customers” clearly are not happy. According to the often quoted NEA “Reading at Risk” survey, 38% finds high school graduates “deficient” in reading skills, while 63% rated those skills “very important.” They also report that the number of college graduates with deficient reading skills had increased by 23%. What skills sets are needed? Is academia qualified to answer that question without input? I also suggest that we consider that the medieval nature of the university has reasserted itself—we are an apprenticeship program, not a certification program. The professoriate represents a collection of individuals who dedicate their lives to the mastery of one single skill set. Each professor measures the acquisition of skill, not knowledge, based on a mutual agreement between our own expertise and the expectations and needs of the “market. “

To my colleagues who find such a paradigm too mercenary, based too much on capitalist business models, I refer them to Louis Althusser’s work on Ideological State Apparatuses: schools teach students “the ‘rules’ of good behavior, i.e. . . . rules for morality, civic and professional conscience, which actually means rules of respect for the socio-technical division of labor and ultimately the rules of the order established by class domination.” We teach students to appear before us on time, in an orderly fashion, sit in rows, accept their identities to be reduced to numbers and perform tasks per schedules, all to create perfect members of the petty bourgeoisie. The reason I bring Althusser’s critique to my colleagues’ attention is to remind them that even their fight against such ideological entrenchment only furthers the illusion of academia’s neutrality. To them Althusser has already written—“I ask pardon of those teachers who, in dreadful conditions, attempt to turn the few weapons they can find in the history and learning they ‘teach’ against ideology, the system and practices in which they are trapped. They are a kind of hero. . . . So little do they suspect it that their own devotion contributes to the maintenance and nourishment of this ideological representation of the School, which makes the School today as ‘natural,’ indispensable-useful and even beneficial.” The current education system already works in tandem with the market whether we agree or not, or even whether we fight it or not—perhaps we should address this situation on a more conscious level.

In addition, academia should consider other portions of our social networks. Our “customers” are not just the industrial-military complex, but health care, science and public administration, into which I include non-profits. Perhaps if academia is more specific about the number and kinds of professors universities need, we would also save ourselves the ethical quandary of creating thousands of new Ph.D.s, especially in the Liberal Arts, for the handful of jobs that come available each year. The “market,” however that is defined, with as many components from the arts as will make my colleagues comfortable and not some ethereal ivory tower ethos, should determine what skill sets we should teach. At the same time, that same market should realize that academia is the best organization qualified to teach those skill sets, a “Tell us what you want, and we’ll tell you how to make it happen” mentality.

And, yes, I’m fully briefed on academia’s mission to enlighten, to broaden, to better each individual, mentally, emotionally, maybe even spiritually, and that by doing so, we improve the human condition. I wonder, though, if that ethos isn’t simply nostalgia for the leisure class values of the gentleman (and gentlewoman) scholar. Not all of us have a trust fund, and because there are so few tenure track positions for us, many of us adjuncts doing the grunt work of teaching aren’t so inclined to buy that model any more. Impractical personal enlightenment can indeed be achieved alongside practical apprenticeship.

Throughout this discussion, I’ve used the term “skill set” and not content. All too often I hear from former colleagues in the corporate environment that such disciplines as art, philosophy or history (to name a few) are not valuable. These kinds of conversations are dangerous when disciplines are reduced to content and not skill sets. All of the liberal arts teach critical thinking, problem solving and communication skill sets. Can the same be said for the technical degrees, the ones most often touted as “important” to the market? A recent survey, posted by the Wall Street Journal, showed philosophy majors can expect to make a higher mid-career salary than an accountant, architect, marketing or information technology major, and on-par with a finance, international relations and information management major.

And as a mentor of mine once mentioned, if English majors can’t communicate the value of a liberal arts degree to the market, then we have a serious problem. Cost is still an issue; that’s not been my focus in this discussion. But in addressing complaints about meeting students’ (and parents’) expectations, the true expectations of a degree’s worth come from the people who intend to hire them. More should be asked about what the “market” wants, rather than what students want.