Saturday, October 29, 2005
(7:02 PM) | John Emerson:
College of my dreams: response to comments
Several people noted that the ideal college I recently described was pretty similiar to existing liberal arts colleges such as Swarthmore and Reed, and especially St. John's. The difference from St. John's is that my school wouldn't be organized around The Great Books, and thus would be less past-oriented.
The suggestion that the mathematical part of the program should stress statistics rather than calculus strikes me as a good one.
The six-year program (starting at age sixteen) was my way of dealing with the well-known weaknesses of even the best American high schools. In my opinion, some of the excessive specialization of American higher education comes from the fact that a lot of very bright students, even in elite schools, start their serious education only at the age of eighteen -- and yet are expected to enter PhD programs at age 24 or so. Just to get students like this up to competence in a specialty is tough enough in itself, and general education is the thing that suffers. (A particular motive of mine would be to provide a place in the humanities for very ambitious students. Science-oriented students already have MIT and Cal Tech -- schools which, as I understand, have maintained their standards in part by recruiting students from abroad.)
A third feature of my school, not commented on by anyone, was an attempt to disengage undergraduate humanities education from the graduate school system, and to produce humanities graduates who are able to get decent jobs outside the university. My proposal here was vague, but teaching all students a wide variety of midlevel software applications usable in IT, publishing, data-management, etc., should keep them out of the coffeeshop jobs, and partnerships with professional schools in journalism, education, etc. might lead them to careers in which their educations will actually be valuable.
If the BA degree amounts only to "cultural enrichment", it is a reasonable choice only for those with plenty of family money, and by and large it will attract mostly slackers and personal liberationists. Idealistic professors who scorn "vocational training" almost always have pretty good tenured jobs, and they do a disservice both to their students and to the humanities. (This problem is particularly vivid for non-college families which must make sacrifices to send their first member to college).
It all comes down to money. The humanities in the university are a vestige of an aristocratic era when a general education grounded on Latin and Greek (or on Classical Chinese in China, or on Koranic and Vedic studies in the worlds of Islam and India) was required for those aspiring to positions of power. Those days are gone. Very few today are able to live on family money, and jobs normally go to people with technical training in a specialty of some kind.
The humanities BA is now useful only as a stepping-stone to something else -- usually either a PhD or a law degree. A humanities PhD, in turn, is useful only when it leads to a tenure-track position. Adjunct positions aren't something to aim for, and PhD's can't even work as newspaper reporters or as high school teachers without additional schooling.
When you lump all post-secondary education together, it's unquestionably a good investment, but when you separate out humanities education, the case is not good at all. (I've read that in the UK, people with arts degrees actually do less well than HS graduates without college). The humanities BA has been undercut by other, more technical forms of post-secondary education (often enough in the same schools). A four-year nursing, education, or social work degree is worth far more than a BA, even if the holder of the BA is brighter and harder-working than the holder of the technical degree.
My piece was more of a thought experiment than a serious proposal for change. I'm not sure that the demand would be there from students and their families, nor do I think that anyone in the education biz is really interested in the kind of thing I proposed. In any case, the educational world looks ready to shrink, and in a deflationary world people tend to hold on to what they've got and refrain from new ventures. Dissatisfaction with university career tracks in the humanities is pretty widespread, but (as with the lottery) as long as there's any reward at all to be hoped for, people will keep trying to chase it despite the odds. So the most reasonable thing to expect is an increasingly grumbly and mopey humanities world.
