Are universities destroying the economy?March 24, 2008
My degree is hanging on the wall, but every time it enters my field of vision I am reminded of a post-secondary education spent dreaming of building something real, something with my name on the cover. I have always hated school, but not for the reasons you might expect. I love learning new things, but learning on my own or in the workforce has proven to be much more effective than a formal education. The vast majority of my daily activities are informed and guided by knowledge earned on my own time, in my own way, for a fraction of the cost in dollars and days, relative to my university education. Other than mainstream recognition and a feeling of achievement as I framed that ridiculous $20,000 piece of paper, university education for me has proven to be a colossal waste of time. I did well, but I did well mostly regurgitating and repeating ideas and processes developed by other people for other purposes. As I wondered from lecture to lecture, I was confident I already knew enough about my discipline to enter the workforce because I cared enough to learn on my own. Hanging around for all those years just to rubber stamp my knowledge was incredibly frustrating. Exposure to a broad base of material is obviously necessary to build a solid base of understanding in any discipline, but it’s painfully useless for people who have no interest in jumping through the various bureaucratic educational hoops required to get the societal acceptance associated with a degree, which is unfortunately required to get one foot through any door. When students have no interest in a certain topic, even if they manage to pick up a few useful pieces of information during a course, they will likely forget everything a few weeks after the exam anyway. And if by some miracle they manage to retain a tiny bit of knowledge, the likelihood it will be useful in the workforce is quite low. People need a broad base of understanding to be competent in many disciplines, I get that, but I am posing a much broader societal question. If the people who are likely to absorb that knowledge would have done so with or without a formal education, and those who will not absorb that knowledge never need it anyway, does it make economic sense to send millions of people in their prime to educational institutions that will leave them with a negligible net increase in knowledge and ability? Wouldn’t it make more sense to concentrate more resources per student on the few students who actually want to be there and will actually benefit from the experience? Do we really need to educate everyone as though they will enter academia? How about some more projects and hands on experience? I’m not arguing against education. I am asking if it makes sense to educate, often at public expense, millions of people who will achieve no more with a degree than was possible without a degree. People who are as healthy as they will ever be, as energetic as they will ever be, as mobile as they will ever be, and as willing to work for less than they will ever be. If you want find a primary reason manufacturing has moved abroad, maybe you should start here. Imagine how many cars and televisions we could have produced with an army of university students working happily for $10/hour, full time, in shifts around the clock. The socialist idea that everybody should get an education is destroying this country and it’s destroying the universities. The infrastructure required to give an equal opportunity to millions of first year students has a cost. In order to pay those bills, educational institutions around the country are forced to either lower standards or pass undeserving students to continue the stream of tuition dollars a little longer. Honestly, if I felt as though my degree actually certified that I learned something, maybe I would have cared. There was a time university graduates actually knew something, those days are gone. In time, as more people are exposed to our army of educated morons the mainstream recognition once associated with an undergraduate degree will disappear altogether, and people will then be forced to waste even more time in post-graduate studies just to begin their careers at the bottom. What a waste.
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Um.. Where to start…
I agreed with you until about halfway through but:
1. People go to University so that they do not end up manufacturing for $10/hour. I agree they could probably do most jobs without the University, or with a lot less, but the people who were looking for $10/hour manufacturing jobs are the ones with no college to begin with.
2. I disagree that the ‘The socialist idea that everybody should get an education is destroying this country’. You must draw a line somewhere. Should people be taught to read? At some point socialism and education helps the economy, and at some point perhaps it can be too much.
However, I don’t think the problem is that.
I would say, it isn’t that we have gone too far with education, it’s that the whole system is stupid.
Instead of having kids forced to take subjects they don’t care about, memorize what a professor talks about for hours and do a test, they should be able to choose what they are INTERESTED in and given the facilities (internet, etc.) to learn about that. This is akin to I believe the Waldorf concept of education.
Instead of forcing the same bland old-fashioned curriculum on everyone, give them a chance to choose things, have fun with it, and be interested, and learn their own way/pace, before you make them hate learning from an early age.
I certainly do not agree that the economy would be improved by forcing everyone into low-level manufacturing jobs at an early age. That is the 18th Century. If America wants to succeed and move forward in the 21st Century we need to give our kids time to experiment and explore and become the leaders of the new economy.
To get any sort of reasonable job with a physics degree you already have to have either a PHD or a bachelors with 5 years experience in whatever you are applying to do. It is insane. I saw a lot of people in the humanities that did not need a degree to go where they are going, but in the hard core sciences that kind of education really does matter I think. Unfortunately a degree in a technical field is useless after 5-7 years. My BS degree is worthless except as a key to a masters program.