Is a college degree a lost cause these days?By Brian Dickerson, Detroit Free Press Columnist
It’s among a shrinking list of things on which people across the political spectrum agree: A liberal arts degree no longer cuts it in today’s global economy.
Gov. Rick Snyder has spent his first five years in office campaigning for a better “alignment” between what Michigan’s employers need and what its colleges and universities are providing. He’s fond of citing a Center for Michigan report that the state is “graduating 20% too few computer and math professionals, 14% too few health professionals and 3% too few engineers.”
Snyder’s concern is echoed by Republican peers such as Florida Gov. Rick Scott, who criticized his own state’s universities for producing too many anthropologists, and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who has proposed cutting funding for college majors that don’t equip graduates with the skills for high-demand jobs
Here in Michigan, Democrats have supported funding for community college programs tailored to the needs of employers and applauded Snyder’s proposal to bolster funding for skilled-trades training, agreeing that the latter offers many of those graduating a surer path to middle-class wages than a four-year degree.
Even President Barack Obama has poked fun at the humanities, observing in a 2014 speech that “folks can make a lot more, potentially, with skilled manufacturing or the trades than they might with an art history degree.”
Obama later insisted his “glib” comment wasn’t meant to throw shade on liberal arts majors. But it reflected an emerging consensus that U.S. colleges and universities are failing to provide many students with the skills they need to succeed in the 21st-Century workplace.
But should a perfect match between employers’ needs and graduates’ skills be the ultimate objective of higher education in Michigan? Or, to put it another way: When is training workers for specific jobs the responsibility of colleges, universities and taxpayers, and when is it a cost that should be borne mostly, or exclusively, by employers themselves?
In a provocative essay for the Chronicle of Higher Education, Eric Johnson, a student aid administrator at the University of North Carolina, wrote recently that what leaders like Snyder call a new model for higher education “is actually a new model for worker training, one in which the workers bear the costs and risks for their own job-specific skill acquisition, while employers eagerly revise the curriculum to meet their immediate needs.”
At its root, Johnson argues, the diversion of limited educational resources to skills-based training is nothing more than a strategy for companies who want to “offload” the expense of training workers to perform specialized tasks they used to learn on the job.
“The trick,” he says, “is to relabel it education, then complain that your prospective employees aren’t getting the right kind.”
Return on investment
There’s something to this argument. Many industries have already figured out how to foist research and development costs on public universities, and there is certainly a powerful incentive to do the same thing with the recruitment and training functions.
But even if you buy Johnson’s thesis — I suspect he would argue that a lot of the educational initiatives that fly under the colors of “public-private partnership” are nothing more than corporate welfare — the fierce bidding for jobs probably compels states that want to be competitive to subsidize training costs for employers it seeks to attract.
Nor are employers and the elected officials who are anxious to placate them solely responsible for the new emphasis on job-specific training; many students and parents are equally skeptical about the continuing relevance of a liberal arts degree.
Nationally, tuition costs have increased at four times the rate of inflation and twice the pace of medicals costs, for nearly four decades. At the same time, wages have stagnated, and the number of entry-level jobs offering access to the standard features of middle-class life have shrunk. Is it any wonder those paying the freight are worried that a liberal education no longer offers a competitive return on investment?
But even if taxpayers agree that preparing students for high-paying jobs should be one of the modern university’s highest priorities, they should be cautious about allowing the immediate needs of large employers to drive long-term educational investments.
Companies, and even whole industries, come and go. The skills Widgetware requires today may not be the skills its workers will need when the market for widgets dries up.
Critical thinkers wanted
What are employers really looking for in today’s college graduates? Whenever CEOs visit the Free Press Editorial Board to pitch their latest initiative to make Michigan more hospitable to so-called job-creators, I ask them what their companies are looking for in an entry-level employee, and why so many of them insist that applicants have a bachelor’s degree. A surprising number find it difficult to articulate their rationale, and few mention mastery in specific fields, such as mathematics or computer science.
Many confess that they are merely looking for evidence that applicants can design and execute a four-year plan of any kind, whether it culminates in a degree in chemical engineering, theoretical physics or French literature.
Edgar Bronfman, the former CEO of Seagram, struck a similar theme in a 2013 essay for Inside Higher Education when he advised undergraduates hoping to succeed in business to not to squander their time in college acquiring knowledge specific to one job or field.
Instead, Bronfman said, undergraduates should focus on honing the one skill he deemed critical to success in any field: “how to evaluate raw information, be it from people or a spreadsheet, and make reasoned and critical decisions.“
Fareed Zakaria takes up Bronfman’s argument in his new book, “In Defense of Liberal Education,” which argues that eschewing a broad-based curriculum in favor of job-specific training is not only shortsighted, but “un-American.”
If there is a legitimate criticism of today’s colleges and universities, Zakaria writes, it’s not that they are providing instruction in the wrong fields, but that they are doing too little to provide students pursuing any course of study with the critical reading and decision-making skills that Bronfman and other employers prize.
The solution is not that more students need to major in marketing or engineering, Zakaria, argues, “but that their liberal education should be more structured and demanding,” with greater emphasis on reading and writing.
Zakaria, a native of India who emigrated to the U.S. to attend Yale University, also warns that “Americans should be careful before they try to mimic Asian educational systems, which are still oriented around memorization and test-taking.” He credits the Asian model for generating impressive test scores, but adds that it’s “not conducive to thinking, problem-solving or creativity” — the skills that have allowed American workers to maintain their productivity edge.
The citizen gap
However enlightened and forward-looking employers are in their aspirations, we ought to remember that American higher education wasn’t designed exclusively, or even primarily, to serve their needs.
The animating idea behind college for the masses was to train Americans to run their own society. Historically, equipping students to become better engineers and managers came after equipping them to be better citizens and voters.
So the assertion that Michigan’s colleges and universities aren’t producing enough engineers or health professionals (whatever a newly minted “health professional” looks like) isn’t the half of it. The more serious problem is that they’re producing too few voters, and too few Facebook users who can discriminate between a documented news story and an urban legend or Onion satire.
We won’t get higher education’s priorities right until we start aligning them with the needs of self-government as well as those of employers. Democracy is confronting its own talent crisis, and colleges and universities are an indispensable part of the solution.
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