My wife and I were lucky enough one summer to snare a hard-to-get tee time at a very snobby golf course on the Cape, where we were teamed up with a rich, snobby fellow.
He didn’t ask us how long we had been playing golf. He didn’t ask us our names.
No, the first words out of his mouth were: “Where did you go to school?”
At a cocktail reception in Connecticut after a speech by a Fortune 500 CEO, former Secretary of State Alexander Haig asked the speaker whether he used a speechwriter. I was pointed out to him as the corporate speechwriter. Haig came up to me, but not necessarily to sing my praises. No, the first words out of Haig’s mouth: “Where did you go to school?”
Moving to the Northeast, barefoot and poor from the Midwest, I was unaware of this “where did you go to school” secret code.
If the networking and credential and stamp-of-approval of the Harvard-Princeton-Yale diploma are enough to win you golf with the right people; if the Mt. Holyoke-Smith-Wesleyan-Trinity aura is enough to at least win you access to high-end cocktail parties; then what criteria can be appropriate to assess the value or quality of higher education in general?
Rich Karlgaard, publisher of Forbes magazine, wrote about the Harvard-Yale thing several years ago. “I think the Harvard or Yale degree is worth plenty,” he noted, “not because of what Harvard or Yale teaches….The degree simply puts an official stamp on the fact that the student was intelligent, hardworking and competitive enough to get into Harvard or Yale in the first place.”
The Ivy magic came to mind as the Board of Higher Education here in Massachusetts mumbled its way through the announcement of a new initiative to certify that the state’s colleges and universities are “relevant” and educate us in a way that will produce 40 trillion local bioscience grads each and every year; and that every race, color and creed will achieve at a reasonably equal rate; and that most of those who wander onto a college campus in Massachusetts will eventually graduate.
What Will We Learn?
The “Vision Project” will at least provide a modest boost for the economy, employing bored data collectors and exhausted statisticians to pretend that they can capture in any meaningful way the mysterious chaos of the American system of higher education.
What makes the American system the wonder that it is, of course, is that it at least pretends to mirror the messy marketplace chaos of the real world.
Unlike the stultifying K-12 public education system, the nation’s colleges and universities don’t even pretend to be all things to all people.
Jack Wilson, president of the University of Massachusetts, will be severely scolded for actually telling the truth in a Boston Globe interview about the new initiative. “Data is terrific, but the next question is, what does the data tell you and what policies does it inform?”
Assuming the murky, messy business of higher education at any particular school can be captured with a page of numbers, what will determine “success?” If a Western Massachusetts school proves adept at training rodeo riders, and all the graduates move to Wyoming and become stars and invest in oil wells and become millionaires, will that be considered a success – or is that school a miserable failure because all the kids moved away and didn’t help the Massachusetts economy prosper?
If the Vision Project identifies a campus that cranks out art history majors – all of whom have rich daddies – and they all go to work for art museums in New York and Chicago – would that be alright?
And what would be made of a community college that proves especially adept at spewing out air conditioning and heating technicians, who will earn a nice salary in a blue-collar sort of way – but won’t cure cancer at a lab in Cambridge?
At some point, of course, the Vision Project may be forgotten and life will go on. We can laugh about it over a drink in a nice bar. By the way, where did you go to school?
