The Game of Wrong, and Moral Psychology

What is this “justice” you speak of?

Looking forward to your reflections on teaching a MOOC. I suspect that they might be publishable in an actual peer-reviewed journal thingee, too.

Shouldn’t the games of right and wrong have strangers as players, and not family members?
I would also like to read on your MOOC experience.

Maybe there will be a duel at dawn with Eric Loomis?

Is there any way to download just the audio portion of the videos?

John – “But that doesn’t mean that ‘did you take THE WHOLE COURSE?’ therefore becomes some sort of hallowed standard for seriousness, or an indicator of whether johnny is learning.”

How do MOOCs determine if Johnny and Jenny are learning? That’s what I wonder about these massive courses.

Who pays your salary as you do this? Your university? It’s free, right? So no skin in the game/no debt to accrue to learn this way. But how does Coursera make the $$ needed to invest in teachers, technology, etc.? Or is there the idea that once a course is developed, no further investment needs to be made?

There are stats about brick and mortar colleges that are alarming – among them being the stat that about 60% of those who enroll in four year colleges graduate – in six years. That’s a lot of $$ and a lot of time – and a lot of people who drop out with a huge debt load without ever getting a degree. http://1.usa.gov/1fybiRg

Thanks John. I appreciate the info about your experience.

“It’s free for the students. No debt and no real credit. Just ‘for fun’ – and a certificate at the end that is really just a gold star.”

Sounds better than the student athletes at UNC-CH who got “As” just for signing up for no-show courses… flagship public university that makes millions on its student athletes fails to deliver its side of the deal.

As I’ve said on other posts, I’m new to higher ed, after many years in the private sector – it has been an utterly fascinating experience. I’m doubtful that MOOCs can deliver what college students need, in that so many students seem to need the specter of an “F” to be fully motivated to engage with the materials (and that works not at all for some students!) But I also feel that the stat that only 60% of students graduate in six years is a huge failure on the part of brick and mortar institutions. And the skyrocketing costs have reached a tipping point. Something’s got to change.

Main Street #15, I think you’ve hit the biggest area of failure for MOOCs as constituted, which is motivation.

I’ve spent the last couple of years immersed in both the literature of complaint and renewal of higher education (Bok, Bowen, Gray, Christiansen, Menand, et al) and in the studies of the system as it exists today (Archibald and Feldman, Pascarella, Ginsburg, Tuchman, Armstrong, et al), and if I had to synthesize both into a sentence, I’d say this:

The core question in all forms of education is Who cares?, as in “who cares that the student learns?”

There are three possible answers: I care. We care. They care.

I care is personal motivation, usually expressed in its positive form: “I like to learn. I like the feeling of autonomy, and competence.”

We care is one form of social motivation, usually expressed as “My friends are also studious, and respect the effort it takes to learn.” (One finding from the Pascarella reviews is that being around studious peers creates a significant boost in learning.)

They care is another form of social motivation, usually expressed as “I want to impress the teacher/my parents/mentor/authority figure.”

In addition to the three usual ways of expressing these characteristics, each form has a negative version (though we don’t like to talk about this much in the US since the 1960s.) The negative versions of the three answers to Who cares? are “I don’t want to feel dumb”, “I don’t want my friends to look down on me”, and “I don’t want to disappoint my parents.”

And in addition to that, each form has an extrinsic version (though we don’t like to talk about extrinsic motivations in the US academy either, having inherited the British academics’ horror of working for a living.) The extrinsic forms of I care are “I would like a better job than I could get with just a high school diploma” or “I am afraid I will be suck in a dead-end job without a diploma.” The extrinsic version of We care is that same logic applied to the ability to support a family, and They care is about social or financial position.

So there are a dozen or so levers we can use to motivate students, but right now, MOOCs et alia mainly rely on just one of that dozen: personal, positive and intrinsic motivation. Reliance on this type of motivation assumes that learning can be made just so gosh darn awesome that people will do what they need to do with a song in their heart. This is a weird mix of Silicon Valley upbeat libertarianism and “Each child is a special flower who will grow in the right soil” educational theory. (The shadow version of relying on personal, positive and intrinsic motivation is that people who fail to learn on their own when given high-quality materials in a ‘go at your own pace’ format can be safely ignored, because they clearly failed to be members in good standing of the Church of Awesome.)

When MOOCs suck for student completion, they suck mainly in assuming that positive, personal motivation is enough. This certainly works for the one person in twenty for whom the love of learning is enough (these are people whose fit with learning is analogous to gym rats’ fit with exercise), but the other 95% of use need something other than ‘Woo hoo!’ to keep us focussed.

However, when traditional forms of higher education suck (which they do at a rate that we practitioners do not like to admit), they suck mainly in assuming that personal, positive and intrinsic motivation is irrelevant, and can be substituted with either fear of bad outcomes or respect for us, their wonderful teachers.

Like you, Main Street, I came into the academy sideways from industry, so I never internalized the sense that we professors are magic, or that the world owes us a living. We’re just workers, we have a job to do, we are visibly doing that job worse with each passing year, given the return on our students’ respective investments.

One of the reasons I am betting that experiments like the one Holbo is just finishing will transform the academy is that I am betting that new experiments in scalable education will be able to expand the number of relevant answers to the question “Who cares?” faster and more cheaply than traditional education will be able to trigger the intrinsic motivations of the students.

“though we don’t like to talk about extrinsic motivations in the US academy either, having inherited the British academics’ horror of working for a living.”

The only people I’ve ever heard talk about “extrinsic motivations” are the Department of Education, the President, every college president ever, the accreditation world, all guidance counselors, and the entire US media. Every time education is described as an “investment” (blech)- which is every time education is written about anywhere- the universal assumption that education is mercenary or instrumental is entrenched.

You were great. The style was refreshing. The drawings are brilliant. I wish I had something intelligent to say, but I have only these compliments.

Two points.
On MOOCs: you have to ask yourself (as the “lecturer” for the course) what it is you are trying to achieve.
IF you are trying to replicate the college experience, MOOCs do that (to some extent, modulo interaction with other people, blah blah). BUT is replicating the college experience a sensible goal?

Speaking from my own experience, and that of my cadre of friends (university educated, in their thirties or forties) we are very interested in learning new things — but in a loose “get the big ideas” fashion, not in a detailed become an expert fashion. Rail against that all you like, but this is the reality of the human condition. I’ve reached 45 years old, I am a minor expert in my university discipline and my job discipline, AND I want to know something about history — all the history of all the world. And about biology — all the different facets of biology. And all the social sciences. And how petroleum is cracked. And what’s happening in nano tech. And paleontology. And … … …
The ONLY way to learn something about ALL these fields is to acquire what is admittedly a shallow quick knowledge.

But if that is the goal, MOOCs are now not an especially helpful system. They put way too much friction in between me and my goals. Something like iTunesU (especially iTunesU as it was five years ago, not the newer ever more MOOC’d version) is vastly preferable — I download the lectures as a podcast, I listen to them when I like on my schedule, when I’m rave enthusiastically to my friends, and we have interesting discussions on what new I’ve learned.
Basically this is the Teaching Company model of lectures.

It’s not my place to tell you how and where to put your lecturers. But I do think there is value in understanding (FULLY understanding) the audience for this material, so that you can decide exactly which part of that audience you feel it is you want to provide for.

MDC @19, fair enough. I was trying to make a narrower point than the one I wrote.

What I should have said was that the members of my tribe (tenured professors at well-off colleges and universities) do not like to talk about extrinsic motivation, a point I think is reinforced not once but twice by your list. The first, minor point, is that none of the people you describe talking about extrinsic motivation are faculty.

The more serious underlining of my point comes in your own horror of even considering that education might be an investment. Yet what else could it be? If the expenditure of time, money and effort is not an investment, what is it? And if the outcome of the students’ investment of time, money and effort can’t be assessed in their increased capabilities, how can it be assessed? And if weighing present cost against expected future value isn’t amenable to instrumental calculations, why not?

Indeed, we don’t just invite students to make instrumental calculations, we require them to do so, from the moment they first have to decide which colleges to apply to, all the way through their assessment of the last elective they take in their final semester.

These measurements are complex, and as with all institutional goods, include incommensurable kinds of value. (“I learned how to solve differential equations” is hard to measure vs. “I discovered a lifelong love of the visual arts” vs. “I met my closest friends there.”) But the people we are paid to help are making decisions based on the effect they hope we will have on their lives.

We (me and my tenured tribe) don’t like to talk about this, because it hurts our feelings. (Like many institutions whose organizational model predates democracy, we never really got over the conviction that we are secretly priests.) But does it not strike you as curious that college presidents, included on your list of the feckless and faithless, are drawn from the ranks of faculty? What do you think happens to them, these former faculty members, that they fairly uniformly abandon the idea that our institutions should provide no value that could be called instrumental?

“what is the point of spending all that money on a college education, if it is not an investment?”

” If the expenditure of time, money and effort is not an investment, what is it? ”

At its best, a deeply valuable consumable, a high pleasure, a constituent of human flourishing. What if one’s studies afford insight into important truths? This would be intrinsically worthwhile. I’ll concede that many students don’t get this kind of experience. But I think were a wealthy enough society that we should be able to offer it to those who want it.

I suppose there’s also:

3. The soccer model. For little kids, you show them some skills implicitly, and then let them run around and play (the balance between these depending on the program). Some will take the opportunity to get better, slowly or quickly, and some won’t really. At some point, they get sorted into talented and less talented (although for a while there are still plenty of opportunities for the less talented to keep participating), and this is pretty much going to happen according to skill- and interest-level, but it’s the kids themselves who do the sorting.

The soccer model seems like an ideal-type of how education tends to actually happen when there’s a general belief that no one’s really going to be told they’ll never kick a soccer ball around again, and there’s little desire for an ultra-elitist piano-lesson model.

I think there is a lot of sense in education as a societal investment because our system needs a lot of redundancy in order not to have to keep re-inventing the wheel with every generation (about 20-30 years?). There may not be so much sense in higher education as an individual investment.

As far as music instruction, Kodaly’s method was developed to work in group lessons, though he devised it as a preparation for supplementary individual piano, or other instrument lessons to be taken later. It is a cumulative method, based on folk music, that begins in nursery school with hand gestures taught to accompany very simplest musical intervals, gradually becoming more complex as the grades advance and adding harmony and rhythm. This is a video of Hungarian primary school children sight-singing a choral piece by Mendelssohnn that they have never seen before. http://youtu.be/PdaY2E3BL1M

I understand that to learn solfège, it really needs to be done on a daily basis, preferably in a classroom, over a period of years. There is a lot to be said for group lessons, IMO, because they are much more fun. There are several videos about the Kodaly method on the web.

“it doesn’t make any sense even on it’s own terms”

Huh? Because if it’s not mercenary, it’s not worth doing? Sounds incoherent to me. We make money in order to live, right? We don’t live in order to make money.

I like Bianca’s analogies. Here’s another: one thing that has contributed much to my happiness is the National Park system. It hasn’t put food on the table or paid the bills, it has simply allowed me and my family to spend time in beautiful nature. I’ve counted that as intrinsically good. In the absence of our park system, it would be easy to say that the only people who can afford to lounge about in the choicest parcels of nature are the (decadent) wealthy, so we shouldn’t care about those sorts of goods. But in fact, thanks to the parks, many working class families like my own were able to enjoy views previously available only to the Rockefellers.

The pleasures of education rank higher, I think, than the pleasures of natural beauty. But they both are forms of leisure. You’re right that most colleges aren’t set up for the job of serious leisure (which, in this case, has nothing to do with partying). I don’t vouch for whatever racket they’re running.

Clay Shirky @ 36 (The merely middle-class students who thought that joining the party pathway would allow them to achieve the same outcomes as the socialites all come to grief.)

However, this is the plot of The Great Gatsby, and in fact of all Fitzgerald’s life, which seems to suggest that it isn’t new and isn’t outcome-driven.

Thanks for the response John. I’m all in favor of putting learning materials out there for free (I actually do that myself, wink wink) but obviously I am suspicious of the MOOC/e-learning hype. The fundamental problem with present-day education debate is that while the status quo is highly problematic, the “reform” direction pushed by the corporate and political mainstream (which are all touting the panacea of e-learning) is fairly certain to make things worse. What is lacking is a visible progressive reform agenda.

I have heard (can’t verify) that the ability to play the piano used to be a requirement for being an elementary school teacher. My grandmother went back to work just before the depression so they could buy a piano and her daughters could have piano lessons, something my grandfather didn’t think necessary. It was a good thing, too, because my grandfather lost everything in the crash and my grandmother’s teaching job saved the family from being thrown out on the street. Her job meant they were even able to help other relatives who weren’t so lucky.

Haven’t read every word in the thread, but re the “spiritual benefits” stuff:
The notion that there is one kind of U.S. university, Type X, where one goes to make connections, become a member of the power elite etc etc, and another, Type Y, where one goes if one is mainly interested in getting a good liberal education, is really bullshit. It’s too clear a demarcation for what exists in reality. And by extension the picking out of a third type, Type Z, as a ‘party school’ is also prob. a bit overdone.

Not to say there aren’t significant differences betw institutions, of course, but they don’t fall neatly into these stereotypical, stupid categories, imho.

@Bianca #50:

The Trow is too weird to fit any one narrative (including mine, of course), so yes, The Problem of Feminism is in there, as is, sub-rosa, The Problem of Jews, both of which forces helped weaken the Anglo Old-Boy network Trow’s family rests in.

The oddest part of the book (well, an oddest part) is that it is elegiac for the East Coast publishing mainstream without the author’s actually having liked that mainstream very much, which brings in the even more sub rosa issue, The Problem of The Gays (the one problematic class of which Trow was a member.) There’s an odd reminiscence of New York after the 60s broke everything, nights at Studio 54 with a kind of fun-house version of Lady Astor’s list, all of which the author participated in.

Yet by the 1980s, he seems disoriented by the fact that his own participation in that scene helped weaken the mainstream. Like a gentrifier who is mystified that gentrification didn’t stop when he moved to the neighborhood, the book reads to me like Trow’s grappling with the idea that Studio 54 (and The Factory and Max’s Kansas City etc etc) weren’t actually counter-culture anymore, they were the culture of New York City (the center of his world), and that the bacchanal that took place in the 1970s wasn’t oppositional so much as corrosive, and that he was part of the corrosion.

The book is one of these rare instances where, when the author says “The Golden Age is Over”, he really means it as a flat description of what happened, rather than as a jeremiad, and he even includes himself in that change.

But the real reason to read it is that it weirdly hypnotic, if you are in the right mood. For months after I read it, I wanted to write like that, until I realized that (as with, say, Bill Burroughs and Naked Lunch) the writing style was suited to exactly one book, and couldn’t be easily re-used, even by Trow himself.

As for IU, those girls mostly weren’t upper class, not in the way you’d describe such a thing in NYC or SF or LA. Their parents were doctors and lawyers and, in the most notable case, a CFO. They were not venture capitalists, hedge fund partners, or CEO’s of multi-nationals or post-IPO internet firms. So the language gets a bit confusing, because she’s talking about children of the 10%, not the 1%. They were still getting drunk in parking lots in the Midwest, not in private houses in Aspen.

If you have an idea for turning higher education into a free, public leisure good – well, we’d all love to see the plans.

I don’t know about leisure but tertiary education is free (or almost free) in many countries – and it should be. I find the idea of spending $80.000

I don’t know about leisure but tertiary education is free (or almost free) in many countries

This. Much of the discussion of Higher Ed. by self-styled reformers, especially those of the “we must destroy the village in order to save it!” persuasion, reminds me of discussions of health care. It pointedly ignores the fact that other societies seem to have figured out a way to manage it in a way that is, while not perfect, at least reasonably functional.

It’s not inevitable that post-secondary education leaves people with crippling debt loads. It happened that way in the U.S. for a reason.

The simplest and easiest solution would be to expand the free public education system another 4 years. I ran some rough numbers and it looks like it could be done fairly cheaply. 3 states (Oregon, Tennessee, and Mississippi) are currently working on making community colleges free; both California and NYC had free colleges in the past.

Bianca:

Not sure about the “introvert” part. Anyway, the analogous case against leisure would be that since music lessons can’t get you a husband anymore, we should abandon music instruction for those who can’t already pay for it. Because what else could it be good for, if it’s not an investment?

@mdc #61, I think you’re using the word ‘investment’ in a funny way. Learning to play the piano is always an investment, as in “to use, give, or devote (time, talent, etc.), as for a purpose or to achieve something.”

It’s mostly not an investment with a monetary payoff, but that doesn’t stop it’s being an investment, and it doesn’t stop the calculation of the student and their parents being “Will present investment of time and energy be worth the future increase in capabilities?”

To take one of the famous arguments about higher ed, when Harvard stopped forcing its students to study Greek, the president of Princeton wrote a fairly epic rant complaining about the change, but what charles Eliot had understood was that knowing a bit of Greek was simply less valuable, as an acquired capability, than it used to be, and that this decrease was significant enough to be worth clawing back the time and energy previously devoted to it.

You seem to want every calculation of present effort against future value to be about money, but many such calculations are not, including learning to play the piano. The fact that those calculations are not mercenary does not make them any less about investment and payoff.

There is no abstract sense in which it is “good” to play the piano (or speak Greek or be able to solve differential equations.) Those capabilities are good only inasmuch as they increase your freedom to do things you need or want to do in your life.

So of course if playing the piano now has a less useful effect on, say, finding a mate, that means that, without some compensating improvement elsewhere, that playing the piano has become less valuable.

mdc:
I don’t understand your “introvert” comment, and I think you’re arguing with Random Lurker, who I quoted, not with me.

Clay Shirky @63
There is no abstract sense in which it is “good” to play the piano (or speak Greek or be able to solve differential equations.) Those capabilities are good only inasmuch as they increase your freedom to do things you need or want to do in your life.

There is a tension between this statement and one of the stated or implicit justifications for distribution requirements (or ‘general education’ etc), namely that it’s good, in an ‘abstract’ sense, to have some acquaintance with a range of subjects or to be minimally culturally and/or scientifically literate (whether such requirements succeed in accomplishing that goal is a separate question, to which the answer, I suppose, very often might be no). While I’m sure it’s possible to justify such requirements in terms of valuable (for whatever reason) ‘capabilities,’ my impression is that that is only one of the ways in which U.S. universities justify them now.

Btw, the other day I was walking on a street and saw an ad on the side of a busstop for a local (i.e., in the general region) university which was all about how the analytical skills imparted by this place were valued by employers. So I recognize that the ‘abstract’ justifications for higher ed., to the extent they still exist, are prob. fading away or eroding under the pressure of various, obvious forces. But the abstract justifications aren’t quite extinct yet, istm.

“Those capabilities are good only inasmuch as they increase your freedom to do things you need or want to do in your life.”

I don’t think any capability can be good unless exercising it is good. Some activities are good in themselves, and for some of these, you acquire capability on them by doing them. But the point of learning to play the piano is not ‘to be good at playing the piano’, it is to play piano well.

You really seem to be presupposing that no activity is intrinsically valuable.

And Bianca, I didn’t think I was arguing w you at all.

@Academic Lurker #64,

Archibald and Feldman have the most complete accounting for the cost dynamics of higher education I know of, in Why Does College Cost So Much (http://www.amazon.com/Why-Does-College-Cost-Much/dp/0199744505, and capsule summary: http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2010/10/19/feldman)

They follow the rising cost (not price) of higher education, and they note that colleges, like any institution that used skilled labor as a non-tradeable input and measures its output in terms of time invested (e.g. the credit-hour), will suffer from Baumol’s cost disease. It costs more to go to Ball State this year than last, and will cost more again next year than this, for the same reason those dynamics apply to seeing a Twins game or attending the Santa Fe opera.

So A+F says three different things about UC price (not cost) over the decades you show. The first is that in 1975, the year in which state subsidy peaked and began falling rapidly (http://goo.gl/9tetW), inflation had dealt such a blow to tradeable-sector productivity that college costs remained flat, and didn’t begin rising until 1979. So for the earliest part of the chart you, point to, price was relatively flat because cost was flat.

Then, from 1982-1990 or so, college prices stayed relatively flat because, after a sharp increase in price during the recession of the early 1980s, colleges subsidized the price with other adaptations, principally increasing contingent labor and student:teacher ratio. These adaptations kept cost disease temporarily at bay by changing the underlying product to be less reliant on tenured faculty in small classes.

(When the US News college list, which is highly dependent on S:T ratio, launched, there were two UC universities in the top 10 — Berkeley and UCLA. Now there are no UC — or even public — schools in the top 25. This is emphatically not to say that US News measures educational quality, just that, given the things it does measure, the total evacuation of public institutions from the top of its list gives you an idea of the cost-saving dynamics at work.)

And then Phase III, starting in 1990s, where, as you note, the price dam burst. What happened to public schools, whose price rise has been later but more dramatic than private schools, is that state legislatures, even California’s, gave up on the idea that it could continually subsidize costs out of either tax base or increasing class sizes, so they allowed price to began converging towards cost.

Against the thought that this is mere politics and could easily be reversed, it’s worth noting that cost (not price) is increasing throughout 4 year colleges at a compound rate of a bit over 7%, which means it is doubling about every 10 years. Even if California were to commit to reset tuition and fees to status quo ante for some recent year, cost disease would reverse most of that relief in relatively short order.

St. Johns does not require books to be read in the original languages, as far as I know. I gathered it was professors and not students and their families that first rebelled against being made to demonstrate reading competence in languages other than English in order to earn a doctorate, if Gerald Graff is to be believed (though admittedly this is a horrible simplification, based on my imperfect memory). I don’t think language requirements have been dropped in other countries, though. I would like to read Marketplace of Ideas.

If one is studying “great books” (based on Oxford “greats”), most were not written in English.

@Harold:
If one is studying “great books” (based on Oxford “greats”), most were not written in English.

Of course, but St. John’s is mostly (or entirely) an undergraduate college, and it’s not going to require all its undergraduates to read Homer in Greek, Hegel in German, Tolstoy in Russian, etc. But graduate school is a different matter, and, for example, if you’re getting a PhD in history you have to know the relevant languages for your research. You made it sound as if all language requirements for everyone had been abolished, which isn’t the case.

@77 I have no prescription to suggest as far as undergrad requirements. The more I read about it, the more baffling it seems. However, if students are going to spend their entire undergrad career reading “Great Books”, then you’d think they would be entitled to have a tiny little taste at least of the real deal and not be offered a fake. It seems a little sad to restrict this knowledge to the professorial class.

(Ok. I confess that deep down in my heart of hearts I secretly feel omitting the study of languages is a sin. But that’s just me. If people don’t want to and don’t feel they need to it’s useless to force them.)

Clay:

I don’t follow the point of the thought experiment. My point was just that the capability for piano playing is only good if piano playing is good. The latter might be good for turning a buck on the concert circuit, or catching a husband, but these aren’t the only possible reasons it is valued. Many people like it (cf the Liszt quote above) in itself!

“Intrinsically” good means good in itself. It doesn’t mean unconditionally good (good under any condition), or universally good (good for all), or most highly or completely good (summum bonum). Socrates’ first example of an intrinsic good in the Republic (the OP!) is, I believe, good smells.

I recently saved up to go to a fancy lunch, and it was one of the best afternoons I’ve had for a while. It wasn’t unconditionally good (there’s lots I wouldn’t have sacrificed for it- it wasn’t priceless), nor universally good (the bread pudding with whiskey sauce would be bad for a diabetic, and the martinis would be bad for an alcoholic), nor was it the highest good, to say the least (it didn’t fulfill me completely, alas). But I didn’t value it for the sake of something else- it was intrinsically good.

Also, purveying intrinsic goods does not prevent the teaching academics who do so from being mere workers, anymore than the chef who made my meal. Those teachers are high-end service workers.

Clay @72:

I think you’ve misunderstood Rorty. Yes, he says there’s no summum bonum nor anything intrinsically valuable. But he doesn’t mean, as you seem to suggest, that that means he thinks nothing is more valuable than anything (or everything) else, nor even that there’s no point in trying to persuade another person that something is valuable, or even supremely valuable. What he means is that there is no difference in meaning between “valuable” and “intrinsically valuable,” since nothing (bracketing our biological endowment) is intrinsic, ie, embedded in or deducible from “human nature.”

Rorty’s is a verbal and epistemological point. As he never tired of pointing out (or rather, as he kept pointing out even though he found it very tiresome to keep having to), he was not a relativist. He thought Marvell and Tolstoy and Proust and Nabokov and Orwell and wild orchids and (at least in his youth) Trotsky were all supremely valuable. He would certainly have said at the age of, say, thirty or forty that if he were given a choice of being changed by neurosurgery into 1) someone who had to shovel shit eight hours a day for subsistence wages and could then go home and read Tolstoy, Proust, etc. or 2) someone who made an extremely comfortable living “persuading children to eat Crunchies rather than Krispies” (as Dwight Macdonald described the 1940s version of the vocational aspirations of those college freshmen you cite who think the most important thing college will do for them is increase their earning power), he would unhesitatingly choose 1.

Which is to say, I think he would find your breezy dismissal of the notion that the purpose of a college education should be liberal learning rather than vocational training as irritating as I do. I think he would agree entirely with Random Lurker @46 that the first step toward any education reform worth the name is a societal commitment to full employment, and more generally, to a vastly more egalitarian and cooperative society. Of course, in a drastically unequal, insecure, competitive society, it’s understandable that students will gravitate toward business economics, pre-law, hotel administration, and other majors with a clearer prospect of monetary payoff, and will never discover what they’ve missed. Practically speaking, there will be no way of convincing them that they’ve missed anything — this is what Rorty meant by there not being any intrinsic — ie, rigorously demonstrable — good. But he would have been appalled by the notion that they hadn’t missed something invaluable.

By the way, you might be a little casual in flaunting your apparent certainty that the virtual disappearance of classical Greek from the college curriculum is no great loss. I can’t (alas) read Greek, but a lot of writers whose judgment I trust (Johnson, Arnold, Eliot, Wilson) seemed to think that it was one of life’s keenest pleasures.

Not to hijack the thread, but looking back at the OP, I wonder, if there was a form of the Wrong, would it be worth studying?

me@83: “you might be a little casual” should be “you might be a little less casual.”

mdc@84: He’d probably say “instrumental,” but he might well say “intrinsic,” if it were clear from the context that he meant “for its own sake,” just as he’d use “essential” in the same way we normally do without believing in essences as they’ve been conceived in the philosophical tradition. Not so long ago, the majority of philosophers used to believe in an invariant, immaterial “human nature,” in virtue of which all human beings had certain “intrinsic” or “essential” characteristics. This is the sense of “intrinsic” that pragmatists consider mischievous. I think Rorty would agree with you @81. I do, anyway.

In the case at hand, when Clay scoffs at “people claiming some sort of universalist justification for long-form European fiction and poetry written between The Long War and World War I,” Rorty would agree with him only for certain values of “universalist.” If what’s meant is that everyone endowed with human nature of the above-mentioned description will or at least should find reading 19th-century novels to be one of life’s great experiences, then Rorty would politely point out that human nature of the above-mentioned description is a metaphysical fiction. But he would certainly then go on to say that just about everyone, given average intelligence, a decent pre-school and primary-school education, and a minimum of leisure and economic security, would indeed find reading 19th-century novels one of life’s great experiences, especially if they were sensitively introduced to them in high school or college.

And that’s what I think too. I think it’s a damned rotten shame that a large and growing proportion of the young are so scared of not making a living that they choose dull courses in the desperate hope of someday getting dull jobs and paying off their crushing debts. Of course it’s not their fault. The level of insecurity and competitiveness in American society is pathologically high. That’s the fault of those who own the economy and have no use for an economically secure workforce that feels entitled to creative and autonomous, or at any rate not soul-sapping, work.

Of course this is idle prattle to free-market enthusiasts and techno-utopians. I’m not sure exactly where Clay stands, except that I’m sure he would ask who’s going to pay for all this creativity and autonomy. That’s another conversation, which unfortunately can’t begin until enough students understand what the increasingly business-oriented educational system is cheating them out of. They won’t find out from reading Wired.

Chatham: is it correct to coerce them into doing so by dangling a certificate they need for employment in front of them?

No, people shouldn’t need a liberal education in order to get a better job. That’s what professional and vocational education are for. They need a liberal education in order to have a better life, full of aesthetic and intellectual bliss. And why should everyone pay to make this better life available to everyone? Well, because … but we shouldn’t derail the thread.

Chatham: Fair enough in turn, except that MOOCs, while better than nothing, are not the best way to teach philosophy, humanities, and the arts. Teaching the latter is far more difficult and important than teaching vocational/professional skills, which employers ought to pay for anyway, rather than us taxpayers training their workforce for them free of charge. Besides, it sends the wrong message to make vocational training the main, default purpose of college and humanities the optional, online curriculum. A culture is something you need to be socialized into, unlike a corporation.

Besides, the extraordinary surge in productivity we can expect (according to Wired et al) from information technology surely means that work for mere survival will become less and less important. Soon we’ll only need to work four hours a day. After all, the large, IT-driven productivity increases of recent decades have already resulted in a more secure and leisurely life for most American workforce, haven’t they?

George #83:

“I think he would find your breezy dismissal of the notion that the purpose of a college education should be liberal learning rather than vocational training as irritating as I do.”

I doubt that, if only on the grounds that I don’t think anyone is ever as irritated about that sort of thing as you.

And the wonderful thing about the death of a prophet (strong poet, if you prefer) is that after the funeral, everyone gets their own version to take home. So while your Rorty agrees with you (because he did love those orchids), mine agrees with me (because he abandoned his quest for certainty and eternity.) And as even your Rorty would tell you, there’s no way to get language in one hand and reality in the other and line them up, so we’re both just left with our readings of the material at hand.

So rather than pit our respective Rorty sockpuppets against one another, let me propose a more direct thought experiment, having to do with a conviction our Rortys share, which is that ‘intrinsically valuable’ is just a synonym for valuable.

You have the intuition that maybe Eliot’s abandoning mandatory Greek instruction at Harvard all those years ago was a great loss. So start with this (admittedly improbable) scenario: what if the world were actually the way it is? What if a world where societal commitment to full employment was not in the offing for anyone in high school in 2014, maybe even anyone currently in junior high either, and those graduates were given a short window of opportunity for education after high school.

In that world, you have a story to tell about how learning to read Greek will be more valuable than…what? What other activity does it displace, and what value will those students see in their lives? And given that those arguments were presumably in circulation when you were 18 as well, what makes you willing to recommend a path you didn’t take?

I think it’s somewhat unfortunate that this thread has polarized into two positions: C. Shirky’s on one side, mdc’s and geo’s on the other. Neither is quite right, imo.

Clay S. wrote @36:
College in the US has always had an explicitly vocational component, starting with the training of ministers in the 1600s, and the period immediately after WWII transformed that into the dominant theme of both our organizational forms and our funding.
It may be the dominant theme, but it’s not the only theme. There is room for more than one theme. It makes things messy and uncomfortable, but so what. And no one is proposing to revive mandatory Greek. That’s a strawman. Eliot was not only opposed to mandatory Greek but to mandatory anything (see his ‘free elective system’). Of course it caused controversy when he scrapped it b/c the classics had long been a big part of the education of the British (and to a lesser extent) American elites. That’s no longer true.

Clay S. has apparently been reading all the contemp. literature on U.S. higher education. What about A. Delbanco — read his? (I haven’t, but then I have no particular reason to.)

Sorry again: first line of second paragraph should be “… confronting me with a novel thought.”

Toot, toot:

https://www.bostonreview.net/books-ideas/head-and-heart-george-scialabba.

George #96:

Yes, it was clear that you were complaining about the debilitating effects of the American circumstance. I’d wrongly thought my tongue-in-cheek reply signaled that my response was not a particularly original thought, just one I wanted to hear you answer. (Also, I wrote a reply to #83 on a plane, and so hadn’t read #87 when I posted.)

So now, a more serious reply. You say:

“You surely have some idea, Clay, to what degree the world of work in contemporary America, outside the magic kingdoms of academia and Silicon Valley, shrivels the soul.”

I’m fortunate enough to live in the Ivory Tower (aka subsidized faculty housing in Manhattan), but I do have some sense of life outside it. I have one cousin who is a pig farmer and another who works manufacturing hubcaps, and a brother-in-law who’s lost his job twice in the last 10 years, and those are stories with relatively happy endings. Though I haven’t read Packer’s recent book (which I understand to be the best review of the misery of our fellow citizens today), my wife studies US poverty, so I know the outline of the crisis.

You then say:

“One can, as you seem resolved to do, help students and educators make the best feasible adjustment to that world. There certainly are far worse things one can do.”

I am, yes, trying to do just this. If I had to pick a single goal (I have more than one of course, but if I had to pick) I would say “I want to make higher education work better for the people using it for skills transfer.” (More on why in a minute.)

What makes me a polarizing figure in these conversations, small as they are, is that I am a tenured professor without having been socialized as one, and I have little patience for the pieties of my peers. It may make me more skeptical of the goals of a liberal education than I should be (my own education was decidedly in that mold), because I see so many other hypocrisies in the ranks of senior faculty.

In fact, the single biggest source of frustration my peers express about my stated views is not that I regard a liberal education as just one option among many (though I do do that), but rather that I regard the behavior and decisions of tenured faculty as a significant source of degradation of higher education for a majority of the students.

For people with jobs for life, tenured faculty can get awfully whiny; our current consensus conviction is that the administration is enriching themselves at our expense. I’ve looked at enough budgets from enough schools to convince myself that the only institutions of which is is really true are for-profits like Kaplans and Phoenix, whose business model is so abusive I believe it should be made illegal.

In non-profits, however, admin and staff costs largely rise with the size of the faculty and with the scale of our ambitions — new Centers must be staffed, new labs maintained. (The one significant rise in cost not tied to faculty ambition is better care-taking of students, as with new focus on mental health.) The net of all this is that savage cuts in both head count and remuneration of administration and staff would entail a loss of support services senior faculty would not tolerate, while still not being enough to fund a majority-tenure-track faculty and moderate student costs.

The subterranean cause of our current financial distress is cost disease, but it was made much much worse by our collective decision (or rather our forbears’) in the late 1940s, to allow for a massive expansion of higher education in the direction of job training, while being allowed to preserve the illusion that this was just business as usual, rather than a massive change in course. If there was a moment where your dream of college being for a liberal education died, it was 1947.

Since then, the basic hypocrisy of universities (and non-SLAC colleges) is that the tenured faculty have allowed the public and the government to pay us, on the assumption that our goal is to produce students bearing the fruits and certifications of an education useful in the world of work, even as we secretly assure one another than the money is being handed over to support us and our work outside the classroom.

You say:

“Or one can try to help people understand what political arrangements shape that world and account for the fact that their choices are so restricted. But that would mean getting ideological, and I fully understand that some people are allergic to ideology.”

I’m not allergic to ideology (one could hardly be a CT commenter with that allergy; you’d sneeze yourself to death), and my preferred way of improving live for US citizens low on the Maslovian hierarchy would be the creation of a basic income (sometimes called a guaranteed minimum income.) I prefer this in part because multi-ethnic societies have never been able to implement social democracy, and in part because I think that full employment is a unicorn, in market societies generally, but especially in market societies where cheap communications and machine labor are making the idea of a ‘non-tradeable sector’ largely illusory.

That, however, is a different conversation. In the one we’re having now, I think a big source of our disagreement is our respective time horizons. I face students every week, and I feel I am responsible for increasing what they are capable of in the world that awaits them this May.

This has made me very tolerant of the good being the enemy of the perfect, because I am worried that the trajectory we are putting those students on often doesn’t even satisfy the demands of being good enough to help them get jobs.

I don’t mean the time horizon is the only difference, though. We obviously have deep philosophical senses of higher education as well. I do not believe our work has a purpose or an essence or a core. I believe it has only two things: rationales and habits, and those have changed radically over time.

The most recent radical change, in this country, was that we transformed ourselves into institutions whose rationale and habits (and funding and population) are focused on training and certification for managerial jobs. We don’t have to like that deal (it was negotiated by our elders, not us), but we can’t cancel it without returning the money, and the idea of tenured faculty sharing any of the financial pain we are currently forcing on to contingent faculty or our own students seems to be a non-starter.

I recognize that I could take the olive branch option here, and say that I, too, think it’s “a damned rotten shame that a large and growing proportion of the young are so scared of not making a living that they choose dull courses”, because that is of course a shame.

But to be honest, if I had to make a list of shameful things that happen at US colleges, this particular complaint wouldn’t appear in the single digits — I’ll reserve things that are a damned rotten shame for the students who spend years with us and get debt but no capabilities that would help them earn their way out of it.

My peers seem to think that the future of higher education is best framed as the question “Whither Oberlin?”, but I am actually far more worried about the students at the Community College of San Francisco than about the SLACs, which will emerge from the spread of scalable education with a more differentiated product, which they can offer for a higher price, to a more global population.

So here’s what I want: a college education that produces something that employers will treat as analogous to a BA in Business or Computer Science or Health Services, that takes three years and costs less than $10,000.

If such a thing were to succeed, it would cause many mediocre departments of History and English to implode, because the grad students (who currently get PhDs but no jobs as professors) will no longer be needed to teach the distribution requirements of the students who go elsewhere for those skills. I don’t regard such an implosion as the goal of a cheap, scalable transfer of workplace capabilities, but if it happens, I won’t regard it as much of a tragedy either.

Clay Shirky:
The most recent radical change, in this country, was that we transformed ourselves into institutions whose rationale and habits (and funding and population) are focused on training and certification for managerial jobs.

Cards on the table: I don’t have an academic job and therefore don’t esp. care whom I may inadvertently offend in the academy.

Now to the comment. Training and certification are two different things. There is an arrangement of sorts in which many employers demand bachelor’s degrees because they claim or pretend to think that such degrees certify something; however, whatever a degree in English, German, history, pol science, philosophy, int’l studies, anthropology, or maybe even biology certifies is not, I would think, a set of specific job-related skills, most of which are presumably learned on the job. The ‘official’ line, perhaps sometimes accurate but often probably no more than a myth, is that the aforementioned kinds of degrees indicate the holder might have acquired certain (hard-to-pin-down) qualities (insert the usual clichés about critical thinking or whatever) that employers claim or pretend to find useful.

However, is there any actual evidence that someone with a bachelor’s degree in a liberal-arts subject is better equipped to do job X than a high school graduate who is able to write a grammatical sentence (which some of them, albeit perhaps a minority, can)? If there is no such solid evidence (and how would one even implement the necessary experiment to generate such evidence?), then the whole certification thing is, at best, dubious, and at worst an elaborate charade. It serves the interests of universities and colleges if a bachelor’s degree is seen as ‘needed’ for certain kinds of employment, but it doesn’t really serve anyone else’s interests. At any rate, it certainly doesn’t serve the interests of those students who (1) don’t care about intellectual pursuits and don’t want a liberal education, (2) are in college only b/c their parents or someone else has told them they “have to” be, and (3) are, for whatever reason, going through the motions of studying a liberal-arts subject.

So if Clay S. is right that the “rationale and habits” of U.S. universities are “focused on training and certification for managerial jobs” and that this has been the case since 1947 (!), then the system would appear to be quite screwed up, since apart from more or less explicitly job-oriented programs such as (to take C.S.’s examples) Business or Computer Science or Health Services, univs don’t offer actual job training, for ‘managerial’ jobs or otherwise. (Of course I realize that a great many students major in Business, Computer Science, and Health Services or something like that, but a lot of students don’t. And even if the latter group is only 15 or 20 percent of the total, it’s still quite large in absolute terms.)

Working backwards, @John #106,

I have read or participated in every thread here about college cost mentioning Baumol’s cost disease that I know of (https://crookedtimber.org/2003/11/04/vacuum-packed-cassoulet/, https://crookedtimber.org/2012/10/25/try-try-again-higher-education-and-theory-of-the-second-best/, https://crookedtimber.org/2012/10/24/the-cost-of-higher-education/), and the two commonest objections were that BCD can’t explain the US higher ed phenomenon because prices at public colleges were flat and then spiked, or because there has been no astounding rise in professor’s salaries.

In the face of the work done by Archibald and Feldman, I am not persuaded by either of these objections. In the former case, people often confuse tuition for the cost of college rather than the price — in a field as variably subsidized as higher ed, we would not expect steady rises in cost to be accompanied by steady rises in price.

And, as A&F make clear, the BCD effect from compensation on those organizations is not mainly about senior teacher’s wages, but is instead spread among: increases in administrative and staff headcount, as managerial complexity rises; increases in wages and benefits for those employees, as they become more skilled; substitutions of high- for low-cost labor, in the form of increasing reliance on adjuncts and other contingent faculty; increases in student:teacher ratios, to spread cost among more payers; and, as always in the US, dramatic increases in health care costs for all employees.

On critical thinking, Pascarella and Terenzini have the best review of the research to date (http://www.amazon.com/How-College-Affects-Students-Research/dp/0787910449), and they don’t find much evidence for a general category of ‘critical thinking’, nor do they find much evidence for a subject-specific tropism for the bundle of skills that gets grouped together under that name.

Instead, what they find is that critical thinking is not tied to subjects so much as teaching methods. It is possible to teach the 19th century novel in a way that does little to improve critical thinking, while it is possible to teach bench science in a way that does. This conflicts, as Derek Bok likes to point out, with almost all traditions of self-examination in the academy, which concern content and sequence of courses (which have very little effect on reflexive thinking, per P&Ts literature review) and rarely involve either examining theory or research into effective teaching, and almost never examine any give professor’s actual behavior in the classroom with an eye towards reviewing effectiveness.

If P&T are right, then any nod to ‘critical thinking’ is going to make headway only inasmuch as it involves an institution altering how its faculty teaches, rather than merely altering what they teach.

@LFC, this is in part the answer to your question as well. There is in fact evidence that college produces, on average, predictable positive outcomes on student abilities, along several dimensions. (Again, the most comprehensive literature review is Pascarella and Terenzini’s by far.) There are a sizable minority of students who exhibit little or no progress, but given that average progress is positive, this means that the students not on the party pathway or stuck in a lousy school are actually seeing real positive gains.

As for the idea that “a great many students” major in the sorts of categories I mentioned, this is true, but I don’t think that puts the case strongly enough. Something like 5 out of 6 students major in degrees like these — as Michael Berube likes to point out, the “crisis in the humanities” actually happened in the 1970s and 80s, when the percentage of students majoring in the humanities fell to something like 17%, and has stayed there ever since.

@Random #104, I should have said ‘jobs in managerial industries.’ The general turn from relatively predictable and replaceable labor, as with agriculture and simple manufacturing, to larger and more complex and highly managed organizations after WWII, created an appetite for better trained workers, even if they were not originally hired as managers.

Clay: thanks for your long, well-reasoned, and good-natured reply. I now understand better and continue to admire your determination to rescue students from an often crushingly expensive education which doesn’t leave them with decent job prospects. Insofar as your senior colleagues in the humanities care less about their students’ burdens than for preserving their own perks, you’re right to despise them. You’re right too, of course, about wanting to keep the perfect from being the enemy of the good. It would certainly be good for most students, compared with the present worst-of-both-worlds, to have “a college education that produces something that employers will treat as analogous to a BA in Business or Computer Science or Health Services, that takes three years and costs less than $10,000.” Best of luck with that.

But it’s that “different conversation” — the one you keep ruling out of court, about whether social democracy, full employment, and the preservation of non-commodified areas of life — that I keep wanting to have with you. It may be different, but it’s not unrelated. Fighting for the best possible accommodation to business domination of education, employment policy, and pretty much every other sphere of social activity is worthwhile, no doubt, but in much the same way that climate change mitigation is worthwhile. I can understand and possibly even admire someone who says: “Look, we’ll never get off the fossil-fuel habit; the forces on the other side are invincible. Let’s just concentrate on preparing for the tsunamis and crop failures and droughts and refugees and all the other catastrophes.” Better to be prepared for catastrophes than not to be, of course. But one should at least have the intellectual honesty to say while doing so: “You know, these future catastrophes are the result of some political arrangements that are in some people’s interest but not in most people’s. They’d be very hard to change, so we’d best prepare for the worst, but we might at least also give some thought to changing them.”

Maybe there need to be “institutions whose rationale and habits (and funding and population) are focused on training and certification for managerial jobs.” But that’s not to say that that training and certification ought to be the purpose of publicly supported post-secondary education. Maybe if we could get the 1 percent to pay a fair share of taxes, but since we can’t seem to, should we pay to subsidize their workforce too? And “we” didn’t transform the economy and polity from the moderate pluralism of 1945-1980 to the plutocracy of 2000-present. Oversimplification for oversimplification, it would be truer to say that the Business Roundtable and the US Chamber of Commerce are responsible for this transformation than that we or our “our elders” are. I don’t say one shouldn’t try to help people make the best of a bad lot. But one should tell them why their lot is bad. They deserve that much.

First, though, one has to understand, oneself, that it’s bad. I don’t think one can understand this without recognizing just how invaluable, how spiritually nourishing, it is to read great novels and poetry (not necessarily in Greek) and/or get some fairly substantial understanding of science and its development. Only then does one have a right to tell them: “Sorry, very hard luck, but make the best of it. I’ll help.”

Anyway, henceforth I’ll cease hectoring you, and will even wish you success. Just don’t take Tolstoy’s name in vain anymore, OK?

@109:

Who was it that said that youth is wasted on the young, (GBS)? Something of the same goes for education. I’m not objecting to vocational training, (though that can occur in all kinds of ways, especially on the job and not solely at public, nor individual expense). But eventually education should be rendered available to all who have achieved the capacity for it, across a lifetime, not just reduced to an economic commodity.

Without in any way endorsing Arnold’s particular viewpoint, I get the impression that many adults seem to have lost confidence that they have anything of value or interest to impart to the young, and while the over confidence and pomposity of the Victorian era may be ridiculous, is it possible we have gone too far in the direction of diffidence?

C. Shirky:
“So here’s what I want: a college education that produces something that employers will treat as analogous to a BA in Business or Computer Science or Health Services, that takes three years and costs less than $10,000.”

There’s a big problem with that vision: you are saying that the value of college education depends on what “employers” value. It’s a problem not because it’s insulting to the professoriate. It’s a problem because it’s far from clear what kind of education is really valued by employers (a category which obviously is quite heterogeneous). If employers really were looking for better job skills, they would train their workforce better. They might even establish a system of vocational training as is found in many European countries. But that’s not what they do. Empirically, employers are willing to pay a premium to (some) college graduates and a higher premium to those of prestigious institutions. But why? Certainly not because of the “job skills” and even less because of all the “critical thinking” baloney (employers want docile conformists; when they claim the opposite, they are lying). The best theory I have been able to come up with is that capitalism (like any stratified social system) needs a sorting mechanism. For historical reasons, in the US, the college system has come to be that sorting machine. The pretense is that that mechanism is “meritocratic”; it patently isn’t (parents’ SES remains the best predictor of academic success) but what matters is its social acceptance, which is remarkably high.

Here’s the problem for anybody wishing to improve their students’ job market appeal: you are up against a sorting machine. The best you can do is try to get that individual student ranked a bit higher in the system. But it’s zero sum. Try all you might to “transfer skills” to your students, you are not going to increase the number of decent slots available for them. Right now, the good slots are exceedingly rare, which explains all the hand-wringing about the need to “better prepare students for the job market”. It’s a fallacy, and a pretty obvious one: better “job preparation” cannot improve job market that is and remains poor.

@114 TM
“It’s a fallacy, and a pretty obvious one: better “job preparation” cannot improve job market that is and remains poor.”

Not knowing your background I’ll take a chance and suppose you haven’t done a lot of job hiring in your life or you wouldn’t have said this in exactly this way. The biggest expense of a bad hire is not the salary that you pay the person who turns out to not be able to cut it – rather its the drain on resources this person becomes while they thrash around trying to make it work and others try to help them make it work before deciding to hire someone else and start again at point zero.

Better preparation reduces this hiring friction and most definitely increases the willingness to hire new grads rather than those that already have experience. Its true in jobs ranging from construction to professionals and is why so many employers demand “a minimum X years of experience” before hiring.

Tons of companies, particularly larger ones, very specifically recognize that no matter how well credentialed a new college grad is, they will need to do a lot of internal training and it will probably be +1 year before the hire will produce much return on the salary and benefits they are being paid (this does vary by profession to be sure).

This is certainly true in most professional jobs – doctors, lawyers, accountancy, finance and all have pretty well defined training sequences to both develop the hire and insulate the firm from any growing pains and all induct thousands of new grads every year. Part of the reason its thousands is that they know that despite their best efforts many will wash out in less than five years – which is also part of preparation a university can do. Kinda sucks to be an accounting major (for example) thinking that’s a “smart” degree to have only to find out that they hate dping the sort of jobs accountants do and would rather do something else, for which they now lack qualification.

I agree completely with your assertion that colleges are a giant sorting mechanism, but the reason they are is that for some professions some universities simply do a better job of preparation. Employers don’t owe new grads a job and only need to “take a chance” on those where there is a good potential for success. Since students pay top dollar to universities on the expectation that they will be prepared they have a right to expect that to be the case to the extent they’ve held up their end of the bargain (i.e. worked hard and tried to learn).

I’m with Clay Shirky: what we have now is a vocational system pretending to be something else.

Here’s my thought experiment: who would the “real college experience” (four plus years of gaining deep knowledge of interesting things, exploration of the good, true, and beautiful throughout history, etc) get as students if it were of no more job market/social status to have done it than there was in being a good enough violinist to play with a community orchestra, or a bridge life master.

My guess is that it would not look much at all like today’s university.

I have a lot of respect for the clarity of Clay Shirky’s thinking, but I also think that such clarity comes at a price. It leaves out — or sweeps under the rug — imponderables of all sorts which don’t seem to amount to much considered in isolation, but taken together are a real threat to his thesis.

Geo, to his credit, takes Clay to task for his neglect of those impoderables, even at the risk of seeming an old fuddy-duddy in such forward leaning company. Although I’m not as certain as Geo is of the value of classical Greek, intrinsic or otherwise, I agree that any agency which helps us forge ourselves at some distance from the implacable hammers of Moloch’s smithy is worth supporting.

I agree that present system of higher education is afflicted by wretched excess, that the responsibility for it can’t be laid at anyone’s door in particular, and that reform is both necessary and inevitable. Economic determinism disguised as pragmatism, though, is a bridge too far for me.

The Temp Name @117
Shirky just wants universities destroyed.

This charge borders on the absurd, since Shirky has said explicitly that he sees liberal education as “an option,” which means exactly what it says, I presume. Of course, in practice “liberal education” also often or mainly serves the credentialing — not vocational — function mentioned above. (Along the way to the credential, someone might actually get a liberal education — or, of course — not. It depends.)

Wm Timberman:
I agree that any agency which helps us forge ourselves at some distance from the implacable hammers of Moloch’s smithy is worth supporting.

You can tell WT had a liberal education, what w/ the echoes of Joyce. ;)

LFC @ 124

What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls
and ate up their brains and imagination?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable
dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys
sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!

Not Joyce.

PS: Difficult formatting, so I’m not sure if this blockquote is going to look right after I push the Submit button. Apologies if it gets screwed.

I was thinking of “I go to forge in the smithy of my soul” etc.
(Whatever. Sorry for derail.)

LFC @ 128

Echoes. Imponderables, none of which appear anywhere in the Big Data of the Race to the Top. What to do about that? This thread, and the one about my experiences with a MOOC, are milestones, I think. There’s much more to be done, of course — as always….

TM @ 131
If every one of Krugman’s blog posts is now supposed to be authoritative on its face until proved otherwise, he’d be better off stopping now. I hope he doesn’t believe that and would be appalled.

My comment was more addressed to LFC than to you, as LFC seemed to be claiming to agree with you–actually with half a sentence by you, or at least a word by you–without giving more detail. I take back “unsupported assertion” since you did give a lot of detail about how you came to your conclusion.

LFC @ 121

I’m intentionally not disinguishing vocational aducation and job-market credentialling; I think that they are (for purposes of discussing “what is college for?”) versions of the same thing.

bianca steele @ 125
The idea that there’s some amorphous white-collar kind of “skill” that can be mysteriously acquired, in college or anywhere else, and then wielded on the job, is a fantasy.

I’m quite convinced that there is: it’s called “social status.”

TJ, seriously, you mean that companies would hire more college grads but unfortunately their writing and presentation skills are substandard so they have no choice but to go on hiring experienced professionals? I’m not disputing that the skills of many grads could be better. Of course they could. But that is not the point of the whole credentialing and sorting machine, now is it?

@136
I thought that’s what we were collectively addressing – what is the point of the credentialing and sorting machine. My thought is that every kid that comes throught he machine should have some reasonably ’employable’ skills regardless of what particular major they pursue and if more such units cranked through the machine there would be a greater willingness on the part of employers to higher the output.

The alternative case, as I try to digest the strand (of which there seem to be a few branches), is that the output doesn’t much matter since its only credentialing anyway – employers only hire the rich kids or the Ivy league kids or whatever.

I agree credentialing is certaintly part of what gets bestowed by the process, but if that were the only thing how would the ‘poor kids’ ever get jobs. There are any number of employers that say I’d rather have the top 5 kids from big state U than the bottom 5 from rich kids liberal arts school and they’ve reached that conclusion by having hired both and having gotten better outcomes from the former. The pros and cons of each do vary by profession fields like public accounting tend to be more egalitarian, fields like investment banking often less so.

You seem to suggest that freshly minted college grads are never hired when in fact thousands get hired every year from all levels of the university hirearchy. Those who aren’t placing their fair share should be asking themselevs why their “product” isn’t sellling.

TJ, I’m not suggesting that no grads ever get hired or that only the rich kids get hired. My beef with the way you frame the issue is that I observe that there are plenty of smart, educated people out there (not only fresh grads) who have those skills employers keep talking about – good writing, presentation, critical thinking, some of them even know how to use a spread sheet – and many of them find it very hard to get decent jobs. I find grotesque the idea that if only colleges reformed their curricula to become more employer friendly, then the job market would improve.

re aesthetic pleasure and beauty

Unless I’m missing something, I think people are running with quite parochial perspectives here.
Is there an aesthtic pleasure to writing computer code ? A beauty to linear algebra ?
Altough I know neither, I’d leave Richard Feynman answer:

“I have a friend who’s an artist and has sometimes taken a view which I don’t agree with very well. He’ll hold up a flower and say “look how beautiful it is,” and I’ll agree. Then he says “I as an artist can see how beautiful this is but you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing,” and I think that he’s kind of nutty. First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me too, I believe. Although I may not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is … I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. I mean it’s not just beauty at this dimension, at one centimeter; there’s also beauty at smaller dimensions, the inner structure, also the processes. The fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds. I don’t understand how it subtracts.”

This is probably irrelevant. But I like the quote.

relatedly – i remember a friend telling me he used to drive out from the city into the country to ‘tip cows’.. i listened, acknowledged, and then explained this was a myth. Cows just get up.
Science.

There are many problems with cow tipping. Standing sleeping is one (false) premise.The inability to rise another.

I am a cow.

Give me some milk or else go home.

@George #109,

I was traveling and disconnected, and then the thread got all cow-tipping-y, so I’ll just say I take your point about not labeling mere accommodations to a discomforting present as ideal situations.

And given the increasingly widespread conversation about both social democracy and basic income, I imagine we’ll have a chance to have that conversation someday soon.

There are lots of good comments on this thread, even amongst some (as is natural) bitter internet argumentation – and as someone upthread notes, I think there’s more agreement on underlying factors than meets the eye here.

Some underlying factors that caught my eye:

1) College costs have gone up too much for students – but at the same time a big part of the problem is that there aren’t enough jobs and not enough good jobs to justify educational costs, even at a lower rate. No changes at the college level can fix this, the economy/society is the level where part of this problem resides.

2) Once we notice that college is importantly about signalling and sorting, there’s a danger that MOOCs pretend to be about “learning skills” and don’t acknowledge that they will be categorised in the signalling and sorting as well – and not necessarily for the better – esp. in the “Piketty age.”

3) I do some teaching at a for-profit institution. It’s morally ambiguous because there are always mismatches between the aim of parents (who do a lot of the paying) VS the aims of students; and the realities of what it costs to make people fit for the jobs that would justify the costs VS the need for the venture to make money.

What’s clear to me is that for many of the students, what would benefit them the most is not so much a MOOC, but 2 more years of high school. When you talk about sorting out thinking, writing and math things, it’s the grading and the feedback and human commitment to explanation that seems to make the difference. It seems to me that high-school does the whole feedback intensive teaching at a lower cost than universities. (Of course there may be social reasons that you can’t make this model work.) Maybe 2 more years of high school and then MOOCs for job-related content.

e.g. So you want to be a bookkeeper? Take this MOOC on basic accounting content. – BUT before you do that, you better be able to read, write, do math and logical thinking and problem solving.

@bianca:
I’ll retract that part of my comment at 141. (I’m not sure “fantasy” = “falsified metaphysical explanation,” but since I don’t have the energy or time for such a debate right now, I’ll let it go.)