by In the Basement of the Ivory Tower: Confessions of an Accidental Academic
The economic downturn has done nothing but help community colleges. Even without President Obama’s American Graduation Initiative, the price of community college tuition is highly attractive during a recession. A late-2009 cover story in Community College Week, “Bursting at the Seams: Study Finds Colleges Struggling With Unprecedented Demand,” talks about surging enrollments fed by the recession. College administrators would no doubt say that they are merely trying to satisfy a demand that already exists, and that is true. But every new facility, every expanded student union, every additional classroom wing, commits colleges to maintaining enrollments high enough to justify their expense. That infrastructure will never go away. A college such as Yale may be able to increase its enrollments 15 percent without dropping its standards. There are many elite students who do not get in. It is not as clear to me that an institution such as Huron State, which has done its own expansion in years past, can do the same.
The students. Even the worst-performing students, who have scant hope of graduating, may use government-sponsored financial aid, or get themselves buried under mountains of debt in the form of student loans. And for what? For something that is very important in our culture: to try to participate, successfully or not, in what Bryan Caplan, associate professor of economics at George Mason University, calls a “signaling game”:
Most college courses teach few useful job skills; their main function is to signal to employers that students are smart, hard-working, and conformist. The upshot: Going to college is a lot like standing up at a concert to see better. Selfishly speaking, it works, but from a social point of view, we shouldn’t encourage it.13
The students understand the signaling game, and the necessity of their playing it. They feel compelled to attend and succeed at college. They pay their money, or sign the aid forms, and they expect to thrive, no matter what level they start from. They see everybody participating, so it seems that everyone should be able to succeed; the sheer universality of college attendance makes for an odd sense of entitlement among the students. The students understand that they need a college degree to get a good job, and even though attending college might never have been their fondest wish, what choice do they have? But a more inefficient system can not have been devised by man. For a certain percentage of students, college attendance is an emotional, spiritual, and financial drain, with the expected financial rewards only tangentially a result of all the effort and expense. Until the core job-training components are separated from the rest of the college curriculum, students less inclined toward an academic track will suffer.
Industry. A college diploma means higher earning power—no one denies that. But the number of jobs calling for college has become artificially inflated. In much the same way that the country spent the first decade of the 2000s redefining what it meant to be a homeowner (to disastrous effect), so too we have reclassified which jobs require a college degree of some sort. Industry, including the civil service, wants its workers to be as credentialed as possible.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics has published a list of the 30 fastest growing occupations covered in the 2008–2009 Occupational Outlook Handbook. One requires a professional degree: veterinarian. Five normally require a master’s degree: mental health counselors, mental health and substance abuse social workers, marriage and family therapists, physical therapists, and physician assistants. Nine normally require a bachelor’s degree: network systems and data communications specialists, computer software engineers (applications), personal financial advisers, substance abuse and behavioral disorder counselors, financial analysts, forensic science technicians, computer systems analysts, database administrators, and computer software engineers (systems). Four normally require an associate’s degree: veterinary techs, physical therapist assistants, dental hygienists, and environmental science and protection technicians. Three normally call for nothing beyond postsecondary vocational education: theatrical makeup artists, skin care specialists, and manicurists. The rest call for just on-the-job training: home care aides, home health aides, medical assistants, social and human service assistants, pharmacy techs, and dental assistants.
I am not impugning anyone’s career, but it seems apparent that the bachelor’s or even the associate’s degree required for some of these professions is an inflated credential. Surely a vocational certificate coupled with on-the-job experience would be sufficient for a substance abuse counselor or forensic tech. Why does a dental hygienist require 60 credits of college? Why would a computer software engineer require a full four-year degree? Five of the nine professions requiring a bachelor’s degree, in fact, involve computer systems, networks, or software, and it seems particularly challenging to connect the technical aspects of the computer science program with the remaining requirements of the bachelor’s degree, the hallmark of which is a breadth of learning much at odds with vocational training.
Let’s look at the requirements of one school at random, a nice prestigious college: the University of Pittsburgh. For a Bachelor of Science degree from the Department of Computer Science, the student is required to take 8 core courses for 25 credits and electives for 15 credits, making for 40 credits. Additionally, 2 math courses and a statistics course are required, bringing the total to 52 credits or thereabouts, which is less than half of the 120 credits needed to graduate. Industry wants the bachelor’s degree for all that it signifies about a candidate. The larger question is: what is the value of those additional 68 credits, those 22 or 23 courses, in terms of computer expertise? Couldn’t the computer degree be compressed into a smaller, shorter, cheaper, more efficient certificate?
I suppose if we don’t want nineteen- or twenty-year-olds horsing around the corridors of industry, or causing trouble in the streets, four-year colleges are the best place to warehouse them. But the burden of debt a baccalaureate degree imposes on many students is cruel. The latest available figures state that 66 percent of students graduating with a bachelor’s degree find themselves saddled with debt. The top 10 percent of those with student debt owed $44,500 or more on graduation; 50 percent owed at least $20,000. Almost as many graduates of certificate programs, 63 percent, graduated with the debt, but that debt was smaller by half. The top 10 percent of certificate recipients with student debt owed $22,300 or more; 50 percent owed at least $9,000. Credential inflation has ensured that earnings for certificate holders are smaller, but this really doesn’t need to be the case.14
Credential inflation can be insidious. After a while it starts to seem that a particular occupation requires a degree, when it simply may not be the case. Consider the illustration of nursing. Currently, approximately 60 percent of nurses graduate with a three-year associate’s degree, but that wasn’t always true. Although a few baccalaureate programs in nursing began in the late nineteenth century, they never provided more than 15 percent of the new nurses each year; most nurses originally came from diploma programs affiliated directly with the hospitals. The model was that of an apprenticeship; the nursing students were essentially employees. The discovery of antibiotics expanded the need for health care services, and by the end of World War II the United States faced a serious shortage of nurses. Tasked by the Carnegie Foundation to study the problem, a sociologist named Dr. Esther Lucille Brown recommended a game change: that nurses be educated in colleges and universities, an idea that suited many of the young women entering the profession as well as the hospitals, which had begun to find their nursing programs burdensome. Meanwhile, President Truman’s Commission on Higher Education urged large-scale expansion of the community college system, and soon the two-year colleges had moved into nursing education.15
The Associate Degree in Nursing, originally a two-year program, has grown to three years. And now the Carnegie Foundation, once again seemingly in the forefront of credential inflation, has put in its two cents: a new study from their Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching recommends that a Bachelor of Science in Nursing, a four-year program, be a prerequisite for all those seeking
to work as nurses.
Kim Tinsley, a member of the National Organization for Associate Degree Nursing’s Board of Directors, raises her objection to the recommendation. “[The nursing students] cannot afford to attend four years of B.S.N. classes and not work. The A.D.N. student does take up to four years to complete their degree, but it is due to the fact that they are working (sometimes full time) and have a family to support. The average age of our student is 27. The majority of our students are either married with a family or are a single parent. They cannot afford the time nor resources to attend a four-year program.”16
Soon, they’ll need a master’s degree.
Sheriff Obama. President Obama is a cheerleader for universal education. Perhaps because of his own unusual biography, a multiplicity of individual narratives rings in his ears. He is an educationist: a believer that “schooling will guarantee the creative growth of cultural systems” and tends to influence “positively the development of an individual’s potential.”17
“We need to put a college education within reach of every American,” says President Obama, and I can hear his inspiring cadences. “That’s the best investment we can make in our future.”18
It seems to me we’ve done that already.
The schools, the teachers, the students, industry, and the sheriff hold their weapons aloft. No one will back down. For any movement to occur, someone has to move first, and no one will. Mexican standoff.
I have had no choice but to recognize that many of my students have no business being in college. Putting an end to their participation without sentencing them to a life in the aisles of Wal-Mart would require that Americans relinquish their ill-thought-out love affair with higher education. Which would require an abandonment of the cockeyed optimism that has taken over our educational discourse. Which would require an embracing, again, of simple job training. Which would involve an acceptance on the part of human resource gatekeepers that college is far from essential in many professions. Which would require the colleges, particularly the lower-tier and community colleges, to rethink whom they are enrolling, whom they are serving, what the purpose of the whole rigmarole is. Which might lead to some streamlining, and the elimination of my job.
None of which I see happening. Undeniably, it is a societal ill for a poor student, financially poor and academically unskilled, to get lots of aid and go off to college where the likelihood is that he will not even finish the degree. But no student wants to be the first to forsake going to college for the good of society. No employer wants to be the first to admit that his job may not require college skills. No college wants to sacrifice enrollments. No senator wants to cut educational funding. No president of the United States wants to grab the podium and call, in bell-like tones, for fewer enrollments in the coming years, for more blue-collar workers who are skilled at what they do and make a good buck but don’t have a clue about Bloom’s Taxonomy. And the American people, bless their hearts, have no stomach for limiting anyone’s options.
Here is Daniel Yankelovich, founder and chairman of Viewpoint Learning, Inc., who believes that anyone who can should go to college:
Most advanced industrial democracies distinguish more sharply than we do between higher education in the sense of a four-year college education and apprenticeship training. Theirs is a test-based meritocratic system. Our system of four-year and two-year colleges is more flexible, allowing greater opportunity for highly motivated students. Our democracy tips the balance, in keeping with our social norm of equality of opportunity. I am not arguing that our system is superior to that of other countries, but simply that it is a core American tradition that fits our culture and history—a bastion of stability in an unstable world. We should do everything we can to safeguard it.19
Part of American culture and tradition, yes, but as outmoded a tradition as the ritual stoning in “The Lottery.”
Here is the bitter reality, as spoken by Marty Nemko, a career counselor who is subjected to a steady diet of college aspirations from people who in all likelihood will not succeed:
I have a hard time telling such people the killer statistic: Among high-school students who graduated in the bottom 40 percent of their classes, and whose first institutions were four-year colleges, two-thirds had not earned diplomas eight and a half years later… . Yet four-year colleges admit and take money from hundreds of thousands of such students each year!20
The United States of America does a few things extremely well. It is unmatched at completing a certain species of task requiring a relentless approach. John Kennedy knew this when he promised America would land a man on the moon by 1970. For us, that was kid’s stuff. We’re not the best at figuring out why we’re doing any particular task, but we are a people who can get the stuff done. Is there a bathroom in America without a handicapped-access toilet, or a parking lot without a couple of special-needs spaces? Is there a residence abutting a highway that has not been discreetly separated from the noxious flow of traffic by one of those decorative noise-absorbing walls? The Hurricane Katrina debacle was particularly upsetting, I think, because the tasks at which we failed, the rescue and cleanup, the airlifting and people-moving and retrofitting of levees, are of the sort usually right in our wheelhouse.
We are, if nothing else, thorough.
Years ago, it seemed a noble goal (if you didn’t think about it too carefully) to get as many students as possible into some sort of postsecondary education. And we have done that. God, have we succeeded. We have done too good a job. We haven’t figured out why all these people are going to college, and we haven’t figured out a way to get them to graduate, and the colleges haven’t come up with a good grip on their new identities as vocational schools on steroids, but we’ve got those people enrolled. Every high school student in America who understands even dimly the concept of higher education can be whipped into a desk in an ivy-covered lecture hall so fast his head spins.
To automatically reclassify every high school graduate as college material just to conform to a national philosophy or as a shortcut for human resource departments is not a very precise approach. We have to adjust our thinking, and reject our sense of the primacy of the bachelor’s and even the associate’s degree. The old model of the vocational school is not a bad one. For everyone’s good, industry should take a hard look at the value of those college degrees it persists in requiring. Let’s reboot the civil service at the federal, state, and local levels by eliminating the college requirement for jobs that clearly do not need it. The list is longer than we think. Let’s start devising human resource qualifications that actually reflect an ability to do the job, and not an applicant’s skill at coming up with a certificate of dubious relevance. Let’s start judging based on skills and experience and talent, and save failing students from a mountain of unnecessary debt.
But, meanwhile, I keep my weapon raised. I press on. I teach my classes. And I know that all the usual stuff will happen.
I will teach college students for whom college is a fairly meaningless exercise. I will give them a questionnaire at the beginning of the course and ask: have you ever taken college English before? Yes, two years ago, someone will respond, but won’t remember specific details. Did you write essays? I will ask. Don’t remember. Did you do a research paper? Not sure. Two years ago! I can remember details of college classes I took 35 years ago. Their answers will suggest that they have suffered a profound head injury in the interim. They don’t need me; they need Oliver Sacks.
They will write argumentation papers, and I won’t know which side of the argument they are on. I may have to ask: are you fur it, or agin’ it?
I will continue to attempt to fairly evaluate students in an introductory literature class who have spent their lives avoiding all mention of the subject.
I will teach off-campus, as I occasionally do, at the satellite locations set up to serve those who, for whatever reason, cannot rouse themselves to get to the main campus. This will put me in an actual high school classroom. There
will be nasty messages left for us on the blackboard, reminders not to touch certain books or equipment, not to use up all the chalk, not to change the arrangement of desks and chairs. The high school teachers will post DO NOT ERASE signs and leave every blackboard in the classroom filled with writing. The behavior of my students will sink to a high school level. Some of my underperforming students will be sitting in one of the very same classrooms in which they underperformed as high school students. Our class will meet while varsity athletic teams condition themselves by running up and down the stairs. We will study Shakespeare with the faint buzz in our ears of Oklahoma!, which is being staged in the auditorium. One of my students will ask me, plaintively, can we go to the play? Wouldn’t that be good for an English class? And I will be sorely tempted.
I will give tests with matching columns, and the students will leave three or four answers blank, as though the effort of guessing were simply too much for them. If I tell them before the test that each matching column letter is used just once, they will get all skeptical on me, and use “M,” say, three times.
They will tell me interesting things about Flannery O’Connor’s characters in answers to questions about “The Dead.” They will think that Edward Said is a literary technique, and “allusion” the author of Ulysses.
We will spend hours on “The Lottery.” They will take copious notes. And when the exam rolls around, a student or two or three will think that the massive autobiographical novel unpublished in James Joyce’s lifetime is called The Lottery. They will think that the word, repeatedly incanted in “A Clean, Well Lighted Place,” that embodies life’s great yawning nothingness, is “Hemingway.” Whose ghost keeps appearing in Hamlet? I will ask on a reading quiz. The last time I did, someone answered “Shakespeare.” I had to think about that for a minute. Who would possibly give that as an answer? Who would confuse the author with his creation? Perhaps the student was simply acknowledging the tradition that Shakespeare played the ghost at the Globe. Perhaps she was conflating—no, no, there was no conflating going on.
