Dean Esmay writes:
As a full-time university student with a bit better than a 3.8 GPA, I often find myself wondering if American society will ever take a step back and ask itself what the basis of its obsession with college degrees really is. Most college degrees, especially undergrad degrees, are worthless. I’m going on three years now and I could take the sum total of what I’ve learned and put it into about two pages of written text, none of it particularly difficult. None of it–at all–required my presence in a classroom, and none of it expanded my mind or my outlook in any significant way.
Arrogant? Hardly. I’ve just given up hope of learning things that I can’t learn much better and more quickly on my own. So I jump through the hoops just fine. I just haven’t learned anything. But I’ll soon have the degree, the piece of paper, anyway. One which I will always view with no small amount of contempt, but which will apparently impress some employers. It’s an aggravation, but it’s what the world apparently wants for some reason.
First, I would note that undergraduate education is aimed at kids coming out of high school, not 37-year-olds. Students at that age obviously bring much less experience to the table and are far more likely to have their minds shaped by the experience. Indeed, Dean quite likely has several professors who are younger than he is.
Secondly, I would agree that most people don’t retain many of the “facts” they learn in college. Don Novello, of Father Guido Sarduci fame, used to joke about this:
Five-Minute University teaches you in five minutes what the average college student remembers five years after he or she’s out of school. . .
Say, if you want to take Spanish, what I teach you is “Co’mo esta usted.” That means “How are you.” And the response is “Muy bien.” That means “Very well.” And believe me, if you took two years of college Spanish, five years after you’re out of school, “Co’mo esta usted” and “Muy bien” is about all you’re gonna remember.
So in my school that’s all you learn . . . Economics? “Supply and demand.” That’s it . . .
While this is an exaggeration, it’s largely true. Most of the specific things I “learned” in calculus, chemistry, and literature are long forgotten. But, theoretically at least, what a college education does is train the mind. My analytical skills are far sharper, my ability to do research and sift credible information from junk is greatly enhanced, and so forth.
Maybe there are some people who could achieve this on their own, reading the best books and devoting themselves to studying the world, as in the movie Good Will Hunting. But these people are exceedingly rare. As someone who spent a few years teaching undergraduates, I can attest that it’s hard enough to get students to do that when they are given hand-selected materials, deadlines, and penalties for not doing it. I suspect I could have gotten 85% or so of my political science undergraduate education on my own, since I was interested in the subject and grasped the field almost intuitively. But I’m not sure how I would have known what was authoritative on my own. Or, without feedback from someone more highly trained, known what I didn’t know.
A tangential issue here is the old “What is a college education for?” question. Certainly, an environment where virtually everyone is expected to attain a degree is problematic. That means more people in our colleges and universities who are either not intellectually equipped for the challenge or who are simply not particularly motivated to learn. To the extent standards are lowered to ensure that most of them graduate with the necessary “paper,” the value of that paper is lowered.
