My career-path dream was to be born to a rich daddy; spend about a thousand years in college; earn a doctorate in art history; work in a big museum; and then finish up as a university provost, because nobody actually knows what a provost does – sort of like a newspaper publisher or editor.
It didn’t work out quite as I intended, but I did trick five different colleges and universities into letting me teach part-time for the past 33 years – a niche that was intellectually engaging, especially when I could sneak into the faculty lounge and partake of the champagne fountain.
I’ve decided to stop teaching – although I am still open to one of those “provost” things. I think my timing is good for the graceful retreat. Higher education is a mess.
In the Boston-Cambridge colossus, it’s hard to imagine dark clouds over the higher-ed landscape. Harvard exudes its primacy, MIT cranks out its numerical-electronic freaks – and Boston College, Boston University, Suffolk, Brandeis and all the others are a formidable cluster difficult to match anywhere else on Earth. Wander on over to western Massachusetts for the small-college snob appeal of Mt. Holyoke, Smith, Amherst and, of course, UMass, which keeps promising to reek of snob appeal some day.
Add the college folks in Worcester and others around and about – Massachusetts offers up squadrons of educated folks whose checks don’t bounce and whose jobs don’t ride on whether a campus decides to relocate to South Carolina.
But higher education is under assault, at least in an intellectual (how fitting) kind of a way. Like many things in life, it’s all about the money. There has been an avalanche of studies lately suggesting that there is no particular financial advantage to attending an expensive, snobby, Ivy League-flavored school, as opposed to a middle-brow institution with tweedy, pipe-smoking professors, just like everybody else. As Boston University economist Laurence Kotlikoff joked in a Bloomberg opinion piece, “It’s good to know that Harvard applicants can safely attend Boston University and that ‘better’ higher education doesn’t pay better.”
A Question Of Class?
There is also a growing suspicion that too many American kids are attending college; that the push for “higher” education forces marginal high school graduates into curricula for which they aren’t ready – when they should be learning about heating and air conditioning technology, so they can take care of provosts and publishers and bank presidents.
A new book by a New York University professor reports that after two years of college, almost half of college students show no significant gains in learning at all – except for maybe beer and sex.
A recent Harvard (who else?) study suggests a damaging over-reliance on higher education. “The American system for preparing young people to lead productive and prosperous lives as adults is clearly badly broken,” the study found.
One conclusion of the Harvard study is that non-college alternatives that provide sophisticated training will wither, if college is perceived to be the only appropriate goal. As one of the report’s authors, Professor Ronald Ferguson, put it in a Christian Science Monitor interview, “If we persist with the illusion that everyone is going to college, then we’re cheating those kids who aren’t going.”
This particular piece of the higher education criticism makes many of the players squeamish; it reeks of class and race and socio-economic pecking order. The kids at Harvard aren’t agonizing over whether they make a wrong turn on the way to the neighborhood community college.
At the Boston campus of UMass, where the student body is 44 percent minority, the six-year graduation rate is only 41 percent. The politicians and educators would be more comfortable “reforming” higher education for lower-income kids than suggesting that many of them don’t have what it takes to be Shakespeare scholars.
The higher education focus for the public institutions in the short term will be, of course, fiscal distress at the state and local level. But for Harvard and UMass alike, there is a battle of minds to be fought, over such subtle stuff as what we learn, if we learn it, how we value it, and whether some of us should simply wander away and settle for being bedraggled newspaper columnists.
