Tech investor Peter Thiel, who founded PayPal, told an Aspen Ideas Festival crowd Wednesday that while highly regarded institutions of higher education claim to benefit society as a whole, the ultimate worth of the degrees they confer is actually inextricably tied to deliberate, ruthlessly enforced exclusivity.
If you were the president of Harvard or Stanford and you wanted to get a lynch mob of students, alumni, and faculty to come after you, what you should say is something like this: We live in this much larger, more global world. We offer this great education to everybody. So we’re going to double or triple our enrollment over the next 15 to 20 years. And people would all be furious, because the value of the degree comes from massive exclusion. And what you’re really running is something like a Studio 54 night club that’s got an incredibly long line outside and a very small number of people let inside. It’s branded as positive sum, everybody can learn, but the reality is that it is deeply zero sum.
The Danger of Picking a Major Based on Where the Jobs Are
And the human-capital framework in economics is that education is an investment and there’s a payoff from it. That got picked up by people in policy who were arguing about how we’re going to pay for college. The implication or extension of that argument was, “Well, individuals should pay for it because they’re benefiting from it.”
.. Well, one reason is that the economy bounces all over the place in terms of jobs, particularly for these jobs that we hear are “hot” all the time, like tech jobs. The reason that they’re hot is precisely because you can’t predict them. And it’s not like all tech jobs are hot—that’s a myth. It’s not like all engineering jobs are hot—they’re not. The ones that are hot vary every few years, and the reason they’re hot is because something happens to increase demand like a new technology. Take petroleum engineering, for example, which is a hot job because of fracking. Nobody saw fracking coming 10 years ago.
.. A few generations ago the employers used to look for smart or adaptable kids on college campuses with general skills. They would convert them to what they wanted inside the company and they would retrain them and they’d get different skills. They’re not doing that now. They’re just expecting that the kids will show up with the skills that the employer needs when the employer needs them. That’s a pretty difficult thing to expect, because of these kinds of problems. So the employers now are always complaining that they can’t get the people they need, but it’s pretty obvious why that’s not happening... In Silicon Valley, the industry was built with only 10 percent of the workforce having IT degrees. You can do most of these jobs with a variety of different skills. I think what’s happening now is that people have come to think that you need these degrees in order to do the jobs, which is not really true. Maybe what these degrees do for you is they shorten the job training by a bit, but that’s about it. And you lose a bunch of other things along the way... There’s one piece of bad news on this though. As the comedian Steve Martin said, “Just be better than everybody else.” That’s probably right, although the problem is that not everybody can be better than everybody else.
Education to Monetize Skills and Connect with Employers
.. Technology is redefining work and commerce, and if we’re smart it can also redefine education for employment and advancement so everyone can monetize, or improve, any skill and connect with any employer in need of it.
.. We need to be making much better use of the federal government’s labor market data and that of websites like Monster.com, HireArt.com and LinkedIn, and even consider creating skill equivalents of the Obamacare health exchanges.
.. If we used all our technology resources, said Aneesh Chopra, former chief technology officer of the United States, we could actually give people “personalized recommendations for every step of your life — at every step of your life.” Adds Auguste: “We can use technology to do more than automate tasks. We can use it to accelerate learning, optimize talent, and guide people into better jobs and careers.”
Excellent Sheep: The Liberal Arts vs. Neoliberalism
Yet while pop-neuroscientists, evolutionary psychologists, and other defenders of quantifiable certainty have beaten back postmodern philosophical critiques, the postmodern style of ironic detachment has flourished.
.. The merger of postmodern irony and positivist scientism has been underwritten by neoliberal capitalism—whose only standard of value is market utility.
.. but those writers’ presence in countercultural discourse suggested the urgent question at its core: How can we live an ethical life amid the demands of illegitimate power?
.. Many students, myself included, acted on the unarticulated assumption that reading, reflection, and introspection might provide the foundation of an independent self—skeptical of official pieties, capable of imagining more capacious ideas of patriotism and courage than the ones provided by the dominant culture—a self that could speak truth to power. That phrase was fresh to us then.
.. Indeed the very notion of authentic selfhood—a self determined to heed its own ethical and aesthetic imperatives, resistant to the claims of fashion, money, and popularity—has come to seem archaic.
.. The computer analogy, if taken as seriously as its proponents wish, undermines the concept of subjectivity—the core of older versions of the self. So it should come as no surprise that, in many enlightened circles, the very notion of an inner life has come to seem passé.
.. The preoccupation with process over purpose, means over ends, has long been a feature of the technocratic mind, which despite occasional countercultural protests (as in the 1960s) has dominated American universities since the late nineteenth century and now seems poised to render other forms of thinking invisible. The focus on mastering technique rather than grappling with substance means that too often higher education “does nothing to challenge students’ high school values, ideals, practices, and beliefs,”
.. The most egregious management-speak is the near universal use of a customer-service model for what universities do. As Deresiewicz observes, commercial values are the opposite of pedagogical ones. If you are interested in students’ long-term welfare, don’t give them what they want—don’t be afraid, he tells professors, to stand on your own authority, to assume you know something your students don’t, which they might profit by learning.
We are left with Mark Edmundson’s witty summation, quoted by Deresiewicz: a leader is “someone who, in a very energetic, upbeat way, shares all the values of the people who are in charge.”
.. “The suspicion arises that the small-scale/techie/entrepreneurial model represents the expression not of a social philosophy…but of the desire for a certain kind of lifestyle”—autonomous, hip, and rich.
.. The key to this process is “developing the habit of skepticism and the capacity to put it into practice. It means learning not to take things for granted, so you can reach your own conclusions.” So it comes down to an effort at self-culture, as Emerson would have said. And self-culture involves an inward turn: it is “through this act of introspection, of self-examination, of establishing communication between the mind and the heart, the mind and experience, that you become an individual, a unique being—a soul. And that is what it means to develop a self.
.. THE CONSEQUENCE OF THIS soul-making odyssey—or at least an early way station on a lifelong journey—is precisely the kind of self that resists the siren song of contemporary intellectual fashion, a self that is fortified against disappointments and failure.
.. You read literature, philosophy, and history because “you don’t build a self out of thin air, by gazing at your navel. You build it, in part, by encountering the ways that others have done so themselves.” And the wider and more varied the definition of the canon, the better—the more examples you have of alternative ways of thinking and being in the world.
.. “The most successful tyranny…is the one that removes the awareness of other possibilities.” It was as if the conservative curmudgeon had foreseen the techno-determinists of our own time, for whom the train has always left the station and (in Maggie Thatcher’s words) “there is no alternative” to the neoliberal system.
.. Tolstoy tells us, in “War and Peace,” that real change is a grassroots, bottom-up process.
.. One of the reasons that dialogue about these matters has broken down is because we can’t seem to resist dragging straw men, caricatures, and imaginative fiction into debates about how our culture should be formed so as to foster human development.
.. The article reminded me of a story someone once told me. At the end of his freshman year, he went home and announced that he wanted to become a philosophy major. His dad handed him the yellow pages and said, “If you can find philosophy in there, I’ll pay for your education.” They eventually worked it out. The son went on to get his MBA and work at a Big 4 accounting firm.
This underscores the article’s point about education being more than a career factpory. However, both the author of the book and the author of the review ignore the main reason students choose majors that will get them the $100,000 salary out of college–student loan debt. Most students will graduate college with a 5 to 6 figure student loan debt that needs to be repaid right away, and will take several years to pay off. If it is not paid, the government will be very aggressive in collecting. They will withhold tax refunnds. They will have drivers’ licenses revoked. And, it is not possible to discharge student loan debt in bankruptcy absent a showing of “undue hardship”. All of this makes it more likely that students will look for jobs to allow them to pay off student loans, while at the same time paying for basic living expenses like rent and food.