Is Your BA BS?

Both the NY Times and the Economist have written this week about higher education and the search for business talent, respectively. While the Economist isn't faulting higher ed for the problems of talent recruitment just yet (they have often been critical of the 'skills' universities pass on to students) the NYT editorial certainly was. In either case there is growing concern about what is going on in our universities and what this means for the country. Conservatives (which includes our NYT editorialist who works for the Heritage Foundation) have long griped about higher ed in this country but not in quite the same way as the Economist. Conservatives are worried about liberal (in the left vs right sense) indoctrination and the Economist is worried about job skills. Only recently have conservatives begun reframing their arguments to sound more like the latter. I will admit, however, that they are right but for the wrong reasons. In fact, I'd go so far as to blame conservatives and Republicans in general for the problem.

Yes, increasingly a BA is becoming a load of BS. The problem and its causes, though, are not so clear cut. Part of the problem are the students themselves. Coddled, crabby, narcissistic, and with a nasty sense of entitlement students are increasingly and speciously looking to profs to entertain them since, they argue, they are paying for it. Universities, in a growing budget bind, have encouraged this by selling out. Increasingly, universities are taking a more market oriented approach to higher ed. This includes handing out free Ipods in some cases, laptops in others, luxury dorms in still others. They are increasingly chasing rankings that will, they argue, bring in more students. This really only creates a pampered atmosphere for students who then get crabby when their profs make them do real studying- it's no longer any fun.

Students come to a university to be educated and they pay (too much) to do it. But students need to be reminded that this is not a consumer/producer relationship. This is a student/teacher relationship and, quite honestly, if you want experts in the classroom then you need to give them the freedom to dictate how and what they teach.

Is this the student's fault, though? Not entirely. It is natural for them to take this consumer approach given that we have opened it up to them. Indeed, Republicans have fostered it by slashing university budgets, transforming the discourse of government from a republic of voters to a republic of consumers, speciously arguing for market based approaches to every aspect of our lives, and by reorienting our approach to education away from education as a social good to one of personal enrichment. It is this latter point that is most pernicious.

I might go so far as to venture that the editors of the Economist are well aware of the value of a wide ranging liberal approach to education (even though they favour markets and feel universities need to teach what markets want not what profs want). I say this because it is fundamental to democracy and, indeed, free markets that we create not automatons but free thinking individuals. Education is hardly a path to personal enrichment (though the educated, up to a point, do earn more) it is a path to societal enrichment. Maybe Republicans can't fathom the use of a class examining the finer details of Proust or American folk myths, but if done properly such courses not only foster a critical approach to the load of BS handed out in society (above all by our own govt) but also a sense of creativity on how to approach it.

Far from backing a Leave No Child Left Standing approach to higher ed as advocated by the NYT, and far from supporting a market approach to university education, I think it's time we better fund our universities and push academic research in every possible direction. And I think it's about time we remind ourselves that education benefits society as a whole and not just the individual (maybe that is why the right to education is enshrined in the French constitution).