Second of two parts
Students once pondered life after high school as a matter of what they wanted to be. Today it’s often a question of what they can afford to be.
The Review, an economics research quarterly of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, recently published a paper entitled “Is College Still Worth It? The New Calculus of Falling Returns.”
The article examines college education as a payoff against the loans to pay for it. Will the debt ultimately lead to a “success” of high-income employment? (The article suggests that net worth may be a better measure of that success than income.)
Student debt is at issue here because legislatures, in Kansas and elsewhere, have shunned adequate funding for post-secondary education for at least a decade. Tuition, books, fees go skyward.
Add this to the trend of maligning the four-year college degree – more specifically, the broad, liberal education; it’s considered risky on today’s job track, too expensive, an indulgence for the elitist crowd and for others, a waste.
Enrollments increase at technical colleges and decline at the universities. Observers note that technical schools cost less; at four-year schools, students take courses beyond the focus of declared majors, pursuits of little value in job training. The technical school focuses on certain skills, with hands-on experience as the student learns.
This nation may need more trade schools, but it also should support institutions that provide students the education they need to cope. It takes more than skill with a drill press or a keyboard to grow in today’s world.
And yet many educators and legislators have caved to pressure from the most vocal critics who demand that we teach our youngsters how to earn a living at the expense of teaching them how to live.
A student enrolled in, say, business administration technology may learn to navigate data entry programs and marketing algorithms. But should that ignore the value of learning our nation’s role in world affairs and how we got that way?
The impeachment hearings last fall offered bracing lessons in the significance of a broad education. The testimony of venerable diplomats was grounded firmly in history, languages and geography; atop this, heaping measures of sociology, political science and the cultural experience in living abroad. Here were fiercely apolitical public servants, dedicated to enlightened and pragmatic diplomacy, invaluable for their service to country.
The liberal arts today are threatened because of pressures that change the emphasis of what education is, a movement that has turned some schools into technical centers.
We don’t need to downgrade technical training to see the hazard – the threat, even – to the individual. A student may go through life not knowing Thomas Jefferson’s dedication to liberty, but it won’t be as good a life.
The greater risk is to society. If the mass of our young graduates have only skills, without the basic disciplines of language, history, geography, economics, sociology, they will be easy prey for the demagogues.
The late Edwin O. Reischauer, a Harvard professor, leading scholar on East Asia, and former ambassador to Japan, issued a warning long ago:
“So many (students) are emerging from school with little or no knowledge of the history of their own country or of any other country,” he said. “Having little understanding of non-Western lands especially, they are no better prepared to face today’s world than was an earlier generation of students who in their time of leadership marched us into the quagmire of Vietnam.”
Today, the quagmire of the Middle East. Closer to home, the quagmire of Congress. Closer yet, the malignant wake of the Brownback years, of deficit budgeting, educational indifference and social malfeasance.
You can see without too much study that we face a trend in hard-pressed colleges and universities that will short-change our youngsters. They may learn to understand new technology but not the minds that paved the way for it, and its potential for peril.
Critics may say this is educational status seeking, impractical, an expensive elitist pursuit. It is just the opposite. A basic understanding of man, his history, his language, his judgments, is the most practical education of all. What Plato said of music can be said of the broad liberal education: It is moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination; it brings charm and gaiety to life, to everything.
It offers a way to understand great missions and the ability to accomplish them.
*** ***
