Two conservative intellectuals have recently raised questions about the value of college for most students. While they come from different starting points, they make the same basic point. I find the sources mildly interesting but I think the basic concept is long overdue. Just as high school needs to be reinvented, so does the undergraduate college model.
Charles Murray from the American Enterprise Institute had a piece in the New York Times about a week ago, which is summarized in these first paragraphs.
Barack Obama has two attractive ideas for improving post-secondary education – expanding the use of community colleges and tuition tax credits – but he needs to hitch them to a broader platform. As president, Mr. Obama should use his bully pulpit to undermine the bachelor’s degree as a job qualification. Here’s a suggested battle cry, to be repeated in every speech on the subject: “It’s what you can do that should count when you apply for a job, not where you learned to do it.”
The residential college leading to a bachelor’s degree at the end of four years works fine for the children of parents who have plenty of money. It works fine for top students from all backgrounds who are drawn toward academics. But most 18-year-olds are not from families with plenty of money, not top students, and not drawn toward academics. They want to learn how to get a satisfying job that also pays well. That almost always means education beyond high school, but it need not mean four years on a campus, nor cost a small fortune. It need not mean getting a bachelor’s degree.
Then yesterday George F. Will had a rambling column in the Washington Post about civil rights court cases that included this nugget:
…many employers, fearing endless litigation about multiple uncertainties, threw up their hands and, to avoid legal liability, threw out intelligence and aptitude tests for potential employees. Instead, they began requiring college degrees as indices of applicants’ satisfactory intelligence and diligence.
This is, of course, just one reason college attendance increased from 5.8 million in 1970 to 17.5 million in 2005. But it probably had a, well, disparate impact by making employment more difficult for minorities. O’Keefe and Vedder write:
“Qualified minorities who performed well on an intelligence or aptitude test and would have been offered a job directly 30 or 40 years ago are now compelled to attend a college or university for four years and incur significant costs. For some young people from poorer families, those costs are out of reach.”
Indeed, by turning college degrees into indispensable credentials for many of society’s better jobs, this series of events increased demand for degrees and, O’Keefe and Vedder say, contributed to “an environment of aggressive tuition increases.” Furthermore they reasonably wonder whether this supposed civil rights victory, which erected barriers between high school graduates and high-paying jobs, has exacerbated the widening income disparities between high school and college graduates.
Maybe this rings true to me because it matches my own experience. I never liked school with its emphasis on memorization, and was bored to tears as a college freshman when I dropped out. By the time I went back years later and got a BA, I was able to test out of about two years worth of courses. By then I had started a couple of small businesses, edited and published two newspapers, been a broadcast engineer, managed a radio station, done a lot of political activism, and had many other jobs. None of these required me to have a college degree at the time.
However, I don’t accept Murray’s thesis that this is primarily Obama’s responsibility – everyone under the sun is trying to pile more work on his desk. Instead it should be the basis of a public conversation involving universities, think tanks, unions, and other interested parties.
What do others think?
January 6th, 2009 at 4:50 am
Here in the UK the introduction of “tuition fees and the abolition of maintenance grants for students to be replaced by loans from the state has radically altered undergraduate degree courses. I’ve done two undergrad degrees – one before the introduction of fees and one afterwards. The difference in the students was immense.
After fees, I noticed students were far more passive – they expected to be “taught” by lecturers, who are not teachers. Before fees, my fellow students were far more active and realised they had to learn, not to be taught.
Also, the post-fees students seemed to expect to be made employable by their course and academic staff. They wanted skills, they wanted recruitment fairs, they wanted to be handed everything on a plate. Pre-fees, students seemed to grasp that it was up to them to get involved in extra-curricular activities, volunteer, get some work experience, network. All of this just to get “value for money” from their (heavily subsidised, despite the) fees.
I’ve read (perhaps on this site? can’t remember where) that the “premium” between graduate careers and non-graduate degrees is pitifully small. Having to pay at least £9,000 for the fees alone for this privilege means that undergrad degrees will increasingly be seen as simply a badge of your prejudice.
Yet, isn’t making service-sector jobs more stimulating, satisfying and better-paid one of Richard Florida’s proposals for spreading the benefits of the Creative Class? If skills and talent are so important to economies and to places, and unversities teach skills and harbour talent, then is the solution to make service-sector jobs dependent on university-level qualifications?
I suspect this is already happening (undergrad degrees in catering, event management, tourism etc).
January 6th, 2009 at 9:50 am
However, I don’t accept Murray’s thesis that this is primarily Obama’s responsibility – everyone under the sun is trying to pile more work on his desk.
Well, he is the messiah. Did Jesus ever say, “Not now, too busy”?;)
Seriously, Obama’s campaign stoked these outsized expectations. Now he has to live with them.
Seeing as how the college-industrial-complex is the bedrock of the creative class, I’m surprised to see questioning of the value of college education on this blog. What would all those english majors do if they couldn’t teach at liberal arts colleges?;)
I think that the weak economy will do more to get kids thinking about the true value of college (and how to get an education for less money) than anything Obama might do. I expect that my kids will start with community college, and maybe finish at a state school (choices are Purdue and IU, not bad choices!).
And my true hope is that Obama’s example will inspire African-American males to be a little more… mainstream… and get an education. If Obama does nothing more than that, I will be happy with his time in office.
January 6th, 2009 at 10:33 am
If my son can earn more money as an electrician, plumber, carpenter or builder (see some of the other posts on “green collar jobs”) without going to university, then stuff the creative class and I’ll use all the money I’m saving up for him now as a deposit on a house rather than waste it on a worthless piece of paper just so he gets to prove how middle class he is, sleep a lot and drink an awful lot of beer at my expense in the process.
What’s the point of paying £9000 (at today’s prices – who knows how much tuition fees will be in 17 years’ time?) over three years if you’ll never earn that back over your career (after factoring in later earning start, interest on the loans, overdraft, credit cards etc)?
If that’s the sum total of the benefit of university education, then is the Creative Class all that it’s cracked up to be? Alternatively, are electricians and plumbers creative? I would say they are but would you?
“Creativity” is outrageously subjective. People call other people “creative” because they tally with their class prejudices – university education, no regional accent, wear the right clothes, listen the right music.
Surely what matters is talent = innovation = wealth creation, and then redistributing that wealth from those who own it through protected privilege at the moment to those who are currently excluded. Yes universities play a massive role in that equation, and class plays a massive role in creating the demand for goatees, ersatz pop acts, theatre tickets, double decaf lattes with a twist of lime and fads in home improvements, but neither are essential for individuals to gestate and exploit talent.
January 6th, 2009 at 11:23 am
I have lived over 20 years in a town dominated by college students. A huge number of the students would seem to fit Robert’s description. They are paying big bucks to be ’serviced’ with an education: if they are doing the paying, why should they be the ones to do the work? They are not all that curious about the larger intellectual world, they just want a good job and need the union card of an undergraduate diploma in order to get one.
A lot of students also use college as a way to avoid growing up for another 4 years. They care more about partying, drinking and hooking up than about actually learning something. The campus bookstore used to put a credit card application into every shopping bag they handed out. No big surprise that too many students graduated college with a credit card debt exceeding $ 20K. For the last decade the school and the town have been building single-bedroom student accommodations because students now prefer singles even at a substantial cost premium – which is piled onto their already sizable mound of college debt. Many students must build up an appallingly large debt just to pay tuition. The amount is so large that it feels unreal. So why not get those concert tickets, buy that pizza, take that single bedroom – what’s ANOTHER $ 20K? Let’s party like it’s 1999!
College has an important role as a mating market. Where else do you find middle-class young adults in such large numbers, with so much free time and so many opportunities to get acquainted? Will a middle-class person be interested in you as a mate if you do not have a college education? If this is the goal of college, how important is it to actually learn something?
That said, our school also is the place where students from small towns learn about the much larger world. A dear friend who is a science professor feels he does a great service teaching the 101 class each year. He doesn’t just teach the introduction to a science. He is the first scientist and the first Jew that many of these kids have ever met. He models a passion for ideas, information and an intellectual life to people whose parents do not have a college education. Every year he finds a few brilliant students to mentor in scientific research, many of whom come from the ranks of folks who had never met a scientist or a Jew before taking the 101 class.
College also performs the job of helping young people find out what they enjoy and what they are good at. William Wells was able to find and to create interesting work for himself without a college degree, but too many people cannot pull that off all by themselves. I feel that college could do a lot more in the area of vocational testing and mentoring, especially for students whose interests are unformed or confused.
College also helps an age cohort to master the cutting-edge technology. In the 1960s, the cutting edge was a calculator that could actually do square roots. In the latter 1970s, it was the personal computer. Today it includes: Facebook and Twitter; the latest strategy games, IPODs, and electronic books; college courses taught over the internet; Obama-style political campaigning; the latest in music, art, literature, and fashion; tools, skills, life habits for a ‘green’ lifestyle……..
The current paradigm for undergraduate college education does reflect an industrial-age mentality and teaching technology. It needs to be updated, in ways that we are only beginning to figure out. Given that college costs rise at much greater than the rate of general inflation, that students are evermore forced to pay for college through personal debt (rather than subsidy, scholarship or savings), and that the US economy is in such bad shape, we now have a grand incentive to try out new conceptions of college education. Community college is only part of the picture.
January 6th, 2009 at 2:07 pm
And undergraduate education of undergraduates also is only a part of the picture. Just about this year, the ‘baby bust’ is reaching college-age. Lots of schools that depend on tuition are going to be in trouble if they cannot attract the same number of students as in the past. Some will be able to solve their problem by accepting a larger percentage of the applicant pool. Others will have to find other age cohorts to fill up the spaces. Likely markets include educated retirees and mid-career people who need to retool. These latter groups sound a bit more like William Wells: they walk in the door with greater maturity and real-life job experience. In sufficient numbers, perhaps they could affect the attitudes or behaviors of the traditional undergraduate population.
January 6th, 2009 at 2:46 pm
Actually my name is Michael, just to avoid confusion.
I have friends who told their kids they would pay tuition for engineering school, but if they studied liberal arts they were on their own. They used the old joke:
Q. What does a liberal arts graduate say to an engineering graduate?
A. “Do you want fries with that?”
There are several issues here. As Zoe says, college serves many purposes — a basic job requirement, 4 years of extended adolescence, a mating market, a window to the world of ideas, etc. Not all of these are bad, but the model is flawed or perhaps just outdated. As Murray & Will point out, a BA is required for jobs where the academic knowledge is irrelevant, which distorts both the academic and job markets. The old idea of college as a marketplace of ideas where kids learn to analyze, argue and think critically is increasingly disappearing. Maybe these two models need to be separated.
One of Richard’s insights was that creative people cluster, and often they cluster in university towns. But is the university, specifically the undergrad part, a necessary part for the creative mix to happen?
January 6th, 2009 at 2:48 pm
Zoe B’s post is, as usual thorough and accurate. I would like to add that the central problem with university education now is the cost. When I went to school it was far less expensive, and most people I know graduated without any debt. I can’t imagine the impact of graduating with tens of thousands of dollars of debt. If Obama could do anything, it should be the return of free community colleges.
The other problem is the separation of academic, and vocational education, which begins in middle school. My sons, in private school, can’t take shop classes, because their school doesn’t offer shop. It continues at university. I would like to see auto mechanics classes at Berkeley, for example. There are great possiblities if various areas of learning are not segregated.
January 6th, 2009 at 5:04 pm
“It’s what you can do that should count when you apply for a job, not where you learned to do it.”
Are we willing to let self-taught people practice nursing, law and medicine if they can sit for their boards and pass them?
January 6th, 2009 at 5:31 pm
Sorry, Michael!
January 7th, 2009 at 1:10 am
Cheryl,
The quick answer is I was talking about the general studies BA, not graduate school for professions.
But a more interesting answer is “Maybe.” One of the best health professionals I’ve had was a physicians assistant who had learned medicine as a medic in Vietnam. He diagnosed a chronic condition that had been missed or misdiagnosed by MD’s for decades. Not self taught but not med school either. While I wouldn’t necessarily want the physicians assistant as my cancer doc, I wouldn’t necessarily want most GP’s either. But I would have been perfectly happy to have him as my primary care provider.
And I remember a friend saying how disillusioned he had been in medical school, which he said was just trade school. He had wanted to help people but he had been trained only in the mechanics of the body.
I don’t know if passing boards is the best way of choosing doctors and lawyers, nor if school is always the best place for them to learn the professions. But we could probably be more open to alternative ideas. One problem is doctors, lawyers and PhD’s are accorded so much status that we don’t think about whether they deserve it. Nurses are mostly undervalued but that’s another story entirely.
Zoe — No problem, just wanted to avoid confusion. I agree with Wil about your comments.
January 7th, 2009 at 5:33 am
Cheryl’s question is valid – the problem seems to be that undergraduate degrees are peddled as a way of increasing demand for lifestyle consumption and reducing unemployment rates, which deflates the value of degrees and therefore the premium on wages that graduates can earn compared to non-graduates. Finally, because this premium goes down, talented and skilled people are put off going to university and learning studying skills such as medicine, engineering and science and we’re left with nations full of scriptwriters and no-one who can afford to make films from those scripts, let alone watch them at the cinema as the economy has collapsed.
This in turn means that there are fewer people prepared to drive buses, pick fruit or clean hotel rooms. If you’ve paid a small fortune in loans for a degree in Psychology or Media Studies, even if you’ve been unemployed and working in a call centre for five years you’re still a graduate dammit and you won’t stoop to driving a bus, even if you’ll earn far more money. Because bus driving isn’t middle class, whereas filing and sticking stamps on envelopes in an office is.
Do we just accept that student debt, increasing anti-intellectualism caused by tuition fees and a “consumer culture” amongst students and a decline in the number of people willing to work in blue-collar jobs are simply parts of the ever increasing assault on working class values as, ultimately, universities are massive drivers of the lifestyles and environments that attract the Creative Class?
Or, does attracting the Creative Class involve weeding out seditious elements of proletarian culture and putting them on trial, very much like a Reds Under the Bed situation, or Soviet-style purges? Damn those working class kids and their pesky reluctance to embrace espressos, facial hair and dinner parties! When oh when will they learn that in order to make every city on earth exactly the same with its “cafe culture”, “lively arts scene” and “fantastic dining experiences” that drive the Creative Class that they need to give up those ghastly suburbs, those preposterous strong social networks and their laughably provincial tastes?
January 7th, 2009 at 8:46 am
Regarding college costs, there are a number of issues driving it (and they’re similar to the issues driving health care costs):
1) Simple demand. People want to go to college. This is what Charles Murray is trying to address.
2) Government subsidies. If the supply of colleges is fixed, but demand increases because of government loans or whatnot, tuition is naturally going to go up.
3) Student expectations: The building boom on college campuses, building all kinds of very high end ammenities. Did colleges have high end health clubs back in the ’60s? Did they have dorms that rival luxury hotels?
I’m surprised the government hasn’t done the sensible thing of using price controls on college tuition. If you get government funds, you should be held to reasonable increases in tuition, say the overall rate of inflation or something like that. That would help mitigate item #3 above.
January 7th, 2009 at 11:58 am
All – Murray was pilloried for his earlier work on the Bell Curve which argued that cognitive capacity takes the form of a bell curve and that in a knowledge-based economy there is little anybody can do to change the life outcomes of those on the wrong side of the curve. I understood the backlash but Murray was raising an important question then and he is now.
It’s pretty clear that the economy is turning more toward an idea-driven, knowledge and creative one. This was a good thing for me, personally. I grew up working class, was not particularly muscular or tough, had fidgety hands, had trouble assembling anything, was not good at electronics or wood-working, and had real trouble with manual dexterity kinds of tasks. But I could read and write, so voila, state college on a state scholarship, and ultimately upward mobility.
But what about those with the other sets of skills? Obviously much of manufacturing has shifted outside of the advanced world, those good jobs in steel mills and auto plants are no longer there.
Instead of throwing up our hands, there are two sorts of things we can do.
One, we can work with all individuals to realize their full talents and creativity and find a better match for them in the labor market. Here, it seems not all of the problem is due to innate cognitive limits a good part of it is due to development. James Coleman among others have made a strong case for early childhood development In my own case, I cannot even begin to estimate the effect of two full involved, overly doting working class parents and extended family on my own development. These sorts of programs promise significant dividends for individuals and society as a whole.
Two, we can upgrade the pay and working conditions of the low-skill jobs we continue to create. Those are no longer in manufacturing but service work. Recall those vaulted manufacturing jobs were once low paid, dangerous work which were turned into good jobs only after policy and institutional innovations of the New Deal and post World War II era. We can do it again: All it takes is will. This need not be make-work. As successful service companies like Starbucks, Whole Foods and Ikea have shown, these jobs can also be made more productive and value-creating. Seems to me that as part of whatever policy innovations we undertake in response to the crisis, making service work more productive, better and high paying has to be among them. This would provide more and better jobs for the less skilled.
In any event, even though I don’t agree with him, I applaud Murray for having the courage to raise these important issues.
January 7th, 2009 at 1:48 pm
Richard,
Yes, its interesting to see the sources of these articles and their assumptions. Being wrong on some points doesn’t make someone wrong on all points.
Will quotes O’Keefe & Vedder as saying ““Qualified minorities who performed well on an intelligence or aptitude test and would have been offered a job directly 30 or 40 years ago…” The idea that qualified minorities were being hired on an equal basis with whites is untrue on its face. And this falsehood distracts from their point that requiring college for many jobs might hurt low-income minorities, which you could make a case for.
January 7th, 2009 at 2:08 pm
Working class, not particularly muscular or tough, with fidgety hands, have trouble assembling anything, not good at electronics or wood-working, and have real trouble with manual dexterity kinds of tasks People Of The World Unite! That described me too.
As a working class kid who wasn’t good with my hands, it took me years to admit to myself that sitting at a desk could be “Man’s Work.” At one point I wanted to be a cabinetmaker and took the apprenticeship tests — both written and manual dexterity. They told me I should go to law school. Today I have a friend David who’s a superb cabinetmaker, and he’s a Reed College graduate. Lots of smarts and good with his hands. When I think of it, definitely creative class.
Richard’s point about making service jobs creative is right on. Some companies get it and others don’t. Before Whole Foods bought Wild Oats, for a while we had both chains in Portland. They were supposedly in the same business, but very different cultures. Whole Foods employees were/are engaging, helpful, cheerful. Wild Oats employees were resigned and sullen. You can even see the same differences in the same company. In Starbucks’ own stores the employees are friendly and enthusiastic. But in airports where they don’t hire and manage, the employees are often unfriendly and service is minimal. We need a service economy Deming.
Back to college and job qualifications. Is David a better cabinetmaker because of his Reed education? Maybe. Should college be required for the job? No. Where is the line?
January 7th, 2009 at 3:20 pm
Richard, point of fact, policy had nothing to do with manufacturing jobs becoming well paid. Simple productivity did. “Fordism”, as you like to call it. The productivity generated by the assembly line allowed Ford to double his workers pay. Productivity, and pay, has increased greatly ever since.
Productivity is also behind the demise of manufacturing employment.
Regarding service workers, isn’t one of your findings that creative class areas have a lot of diversity and inequality? Isn’t one of your conclusions that creative class people substitute low paid service workers for doing menial work like cooking and landscaping themselves? And that a lot of those workers are immigrants, especially illegal immigrants?
Wouldn’t one way to adress the issue of low paid service work to halt immigration and to really crack down on illegal immigration? Presumably, that would bid up the cost of the work to levels where the native born (or existing green card holders) would be willing to do the work.
Or, more likely, it would make creative class areas more like non-creative class areas: people would do their own landscaping, and be less productive as a result.
Inequality would decrease in any case.
January 7th, 2009 at 3:33 pm
Richard, regarding making service jobs more creative, didn’t you address that in “Rise”? Didn’t you say something like, “Even a creative card dealer (talking about Las Vegas) is limited in their upward mobility”?
And if service jobs are in fact more like manufacturing than creative ones, maybe it does make more sense to go the “Fordist” direction. Things like scripting can make a telephone receptionist a lot more productive, valuable, and perhaps better paid, than creativity. I think I read an article a few weeks back in the Wall Street Journal about applying Taylorist principles to service work. I can’t remember exactly what job they were applying it to. But Taylor could have a field day in a Starbucks!
Scripting is also a controversial area in education. I think that you would call teachers a part of the creative class, and they certainly can be creative. But programs where lesson plans are given to teachers, and they are told exactly what to say and when to say it have been shown to improve student achievement greatly.
January 7th, 2009 at 3:41 pm
The idea that qualified minorities were being hired on an equal basis with whites is untrue on its face.
If so, why were the employers bothering to give them an intelligence test? Why not just turn them away as soon as they saw their skin color?
Or was it some kind of “Bell Curve” conspiracy? They knew that African Americans score a standard deviation below whites on IQ tests, so giving the test effectively shut them out?
Considering the success that African Americans have had in the military, which uses IQ tests, I think that that is unlikely.
January 7th, 2009 at 3:42 pm
Richard, what about your pinewood derby car? I really liked that story in “Rise”, about how your father’s co-workers helped you make a winning racer.
I’m working on one with my son currently.
January 7th, 2009 at 4:36 pm
Buzzcut,
In fact, forty years ago most employers weren’t giving tests to minorities but were simply turning them away at the door. Or in many cases hiring minorities for menial jobs with no chance at better positions, tests or no tests. The point I was making wasn’t about the tests, but the idea that minorities were being hired on the basis of qualifications at all.
If you aren’t old enough to remember this, it’s documented in tons of legal briefs from the time. Or just find some news magazine photographs from the 60’s and look for Blacks or other minorities in jobs that met the public like hotel desk clerks or receptionists; or jobs with decent pay like office workers or construction workers; not to mention positions with chances for advancement like managers and executives. And while the national unions backed the civil rights movement, at a local level they often shut out minorities and women.
Of course, this isn’t all past tense. Discrimination still happens every day. Whether or not college degree requirements play a role in this is the question.
January 7th, 2009 at 4:50 pm
Michael,
From Wikipedia:
Prior to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964,[1] Duke Power Co. had a policy of segregating employees according to race. Specifically, at its Dan River plant, African-Americans were only allowed to work in its Labor department, which constituted the lowest-paying positions in the company.
After the Civil Rights Act was passed, the company changed its policies, adding a requirement of a high school diploma or a minimum score on an IQ test[2] for positions in areas other than the Labor department. This had the effect of eliminating a large number of African-American applicants for positions outside the Labor department.
Seems like the time frame you reference. Duke went from blatant discrimination, to a policy of qualifications. Problem was, African Americans didn’t meet the (minimal) qualifications required, which was deemed discriminatory in and of itself.
Discrimination by unions is still going strong. You can’t get into a trade union unless you know somebody in the union. This is very effective in keeping African Americans out of the trades. The trades that I deal with are almost entirely white, despite the strong diversity in the surrounding community (both hispanics and african-americans).
January 7th, 2009 at 5:26 pm
Buzzcut,
Looks like we’re on roughly the same page. I’m guessing that Duke Power also found other reasons to not hire African Americans with a high school diploma or good test scores. Policy & practice often diverged, and not only in the South.
Today’s tragedy is the number of young people, and minorities especially, who aren’t even graduating high school. For them, college is the least of their worries.
January 8th, 2009 at 12:41 pm
Interesting, because I wrote an article I posted as a note in Facebook/blog post about this very topic in July, titled, ‘Is college debt actually worth the amount invested?’. Can’t recall if I posted it here, but here is a slightly edited version of what I wrote then:
Is college debt actually worth the amount invested?
July 9, 2008
by Isaac Basker
While studies I have seen suggest a college degree is generally associated with increased income, I’ve increasingly developed a problem with using income as a means of determining the value of college education. In light of “data” presented by Richard Florida’s literature on the desire to be creative, the creative class, and my own anecdotal and “informal qualitative interviews” with folks, especially younger ones, around Europe, Jordan and living in the U.S. (native born and immigrant) who seem to be not utilizing their education in a professional manner there is even more reason for me to suspect something may be wrong. Why this is the case, I certainly could speculate on, but let’s hold off on that for a minute.
For quite some time, we’ve seen the rationale for a liberal arts education argued as a “benefit to society,” to the individual in terms of developing analytical as well as critical thinking skills deemed necessary to be a “good” worker (which I have read a recent study sponsored by corporations as desirable), and thirdly the civic value, or the notion that it leads one to become a “good citizen.” In no way am I suggesting these to not be true statements, but I believe that there has been, and is a gross level of hypocrisy taking place in how we are actually measuring who becomes a “success” and who is not, via post-secondary education.
American society’s apparent dominant form of measurement for “success” appears to be “income,” or really, those who generally make the most money, what is their education level, which one suspects could correlate to social status, “face,” or more cynically, social control. How can “income” be the measurement for “success” when studies show that after people earn a certain level of money happiness does not generally increase? How can it be that privileged young people choose to rebel against their society’s dominant view of how to be a success and live bohemian lifestyles, pursuing creative careers for low wages as just one example of success being more than simply “income” or hosts of immigrants to the U.S. from societies that also value lifestyle rather than simply money earned who choose to leave?
I suspect that the valuing of material most highly may also be a factor for acculturation in some cases, where children of immigrants to the U.S. or children from/in countries where collectivism and traditional/conservative religions/traditions point towards following the easiest paths to making the most money. I believe this may be true, in particular for those who come from East Asian nations, but also other traditional cultures/nations, including others coming from experiences where their basic needs were not met. After their children are exposed to stronger notions of individualism in West (especially the U.S.) it can lead to conflict between their traditional belief system and a more individualist based one.
This may then lead to increased levels of unhappiness from entering professions they prefer to not follow, but continue to work in because it makes their parents happy, makes the individual a “great deal” of (or “enough”) money, and I suspect either leads to high levels of stress, family conflict, rebellion (even amongst adults) and other negative outcomes. For multi-generational Americans who come to similar thinking, there may be less stigma associated with abandoning the path one’s family wishes, but the social control mechanism of entering the current post-secondary system of education and professional career choices made as a result does not appear to be without consequences for this group either.
We can start with the hypocrisy of modern Educational teacher training that emphasizes the wonderful, well accepted theory of Multiple Intelligences by Howard Gardner, yet we still measure “success” of schools, teachers and students by standardized tests that clearly focus most of their attention on the two intelligences that have dominated Western views of “intelligence,” that has led to vast levels of harm towards those who, this literature suggests are intelligent, and leads to a borderline eugenics arguments presented in the form of the Bell Curve to justify an inherently flawed system of measurement that still remains when it comes to “success.”
My feeling is that most folks are going to college to learn how to be the modern form of cogs in a machine (aka someone give me a job I hope doesn’t make me miserable). What if your skills can be applied, if facilitated either outside of college or through a more tailored apprenticeship program (which studies have show is highly effective with young people out of work or school), supplemented with liberal arts education and critical thinking skill development that harnesses the natural state of rebellion and identity development that young people go through.
I have been wanting to look at whether American universities are really doing a good job of facilitating financial independence (aka, minimal debt or the modern form of slavery that college debt creates for those raised in the U.S. education system) and entrepreneurship. To sum up I sense that the value of a college education has actually severely diminished, and is OVERVALUED.
To speak to my initial suspicion as to what’s behind all of this, I feel that post-secondary education is really a factory for social control where young folks with ideas and interests outside of the norm are conditioned and pressured to eventually take jobs they don’t like (yet may be afraid to leave or not take) to pay off debt they incurred for an education that might not even be worth the investment of the costs associated. I believe this is leading to the silencing of dissent by the conforming of us all to become consumers of stuff that we mostly don’t need, doesn’t actually lead to fulfilled, happy lives, and leaves many isolated, afraid, and angry at others who don’t “assimilate” like the rest of us. This is even if we, ourselves, are not happy with the choices we have made and may be unaware of how other nations and cultures actually function with different approaches to education, and work, in part because we are so engulfed in our own superiority, work culture, consumerism, and isolation (at least in the case of the U.S.).
Perhaps it is when we step outside our own box and really see how other places work that we can then realize the possibilities for education and an economy that actually provides true freedom. One risk of Florida’s work, which is quite poignant as well as inspirational is that I am concerned about the dangers of arguing within the same systems of social and economic control that repeatedly allows for the most powerful and privileged to win in the end. Competition without real collaboration and a sense of community seems to be a factor for demise, at some point. Someone is benefiting from the way things have stood, or are so disconnected from the realities of how harmful our education and post-Regan era economic system has been to most humans. We have to look beyond the language that has limited our way of approaching these problems.