Does teaching matter at (American) research universities?

For several years I wrote an instructor-led course on Information Security. The students (or rather their employers) paid $800/day to attend a five day course in a class of 6-12 people, typically given by a person who was a full time instructor.

All the information in the $4000 course could have been obtained by reading books. I did not do a full crib from a textbook, but plenty in the industry do.

SoV that is the explanation for why costs have gone up so much in the past 2-4 years, not an explanation for why they have gone up so much in the last 20-30 years.

Qualification-inflation and the rising demand for degrees has to do with the fact that there are too few professional jobs compared to the number of people willing and able to do them in most advanced industrial societies. Essentially, there is a problem of elite overproduction or, if you like, the knowledge economy has failed to deliver. As an undergrad, I knew many a student who had no interest in their course and were simply itching to be finished and into the job market. Improving teaching quality is unfortunately irrelevant to these people. The really sad thing is that there are those who are both committed to their subject and hope to use a degree as a springboard towards a professional career. Many will be disappointed by low teaching standards and devalued qualifications.

Seems to me you’ve answered the question. Given that (1) elite American universities have been very successful in recent decades in all the metrics relevant to their survival and growth — income, prestige, etc. — and (2) elite American universities place a very low priority on teaching, it follows that (3) teaching is not an important part of what elite American universities do.

This is a very reasonable conclusion.

The only reason it seems surprising, the deep-seated ideology that says the vast inequalities around us must be somehow necessary or in the best interests of everyone. So we are told that people’s very different access to the good things of life is simply compensation for their separable, quantifiable distinct contributions to production. Rather than what they really are, conventional and more or less arbitrary claims on an irreducibly social product.

Obviously the main convention creating the illusion that social production can be broken up into separate individual contributions is private property, and it’s also the main convention assigning shares of the product unequally to different people. But under capitalism private property tends to concentrate without limit, a process that leads intense class conflict and instability. (That’s Marx, but also history.) So successful capitalist societies end up developing supplemental systems to help allocate claims on the social product and positions of privilege.

Everyone knows in real life that the relationship college-degree -> better-job is direct, there’s no greater-skills term in between. But when we talk about this in the abstract we’re supposed to forget everything we know from our own experience and accept the cant about human capital.

From this point of view, it really doesn’t matter what universities teach, or if they teach at all. It’s pure surplusage. All that’s required is (1) the supply of degrees match up reasonably well, in number and in differentiation, with the privileged positions to be allocated; (2) access to degrees be restricted enough by class to give the currently privileged reasonable confidence that their children will retain their status (this need not be absolute); and (3) be generally accepted as legitimate. That universities ended up filling this role is probably a historical accident, though. One could imagine various other forms of quasi-property that would fulfill the same function. And to be fair, it’s certainly a good thing that research centers turned out to be the ones handing out the rent-collection tickets and not, say, the military or the church.

This critique of various courses, that the classroom (or lecture hall) instruction doesn’t furnish anything that isn’t in the textbook, does not have much validity, for several reasons. First, people learn in different ways: some learn better from solitary reading, some from lectures. Second, each individual will probably learn something more effectively by being exposed to it repeatedly through various media (i.e., both the reading and the lectures). Third, it can be hard to find the spare time, energy, and zeal to learn something thoroughly just from solitary reading. Fourth, even if a person has basically learned the material from the book, it is likely that he or she may have at least one question along the way, which the instructor can answer (remember, for every person who raises his or her hand and asks a question, there are five others who had the same question and are now instructed).

Does teaching matter at (American) research universities?

No. Research does.

This has been another edition of simple answers to simple questions. (And Harry’s contention that teaching quality might affect an otherwise marginal tenure decision doesn’t change anything. Tiebreakers, that which affects only marginal cases, by definition aren’t central.)

SLACs are different, of course. If you want to be taught, go to Williams rather than Harvard. The rationale behind sending someone to Harvard (or any other major research university) is they will rub up against really really smart people and this contact is more important than any formal teaching which might have occurred.

Just another quick point on “tuition costs rising so rapidly”. This statement is correct but should be handled with caution. Many universities in U.S. now offer substantial financial help (together with Fafsa of course). It seems that more and more they are price-discriminating among students, extracting more and more of the surplus from students (buyers). This is actually a great redistributive scheme (conditional on being able to get accepted at a good university). But for this reason it might be a bit misleading to talk about increasing tuition without mentioning this fact.

Medical schools have adopted a two-track model: there are ‘Professors’ and ‘Clinical Professors’. The former are researchers, often PhDs or MD/PhDs, and evaluated on publications and grants. The latter are teachers and administrators and usually MDs. They are expected to write, but chapters in textbooks are acceptable. They are evaluated on teaching and those evaluations matter for their promotion. There is a status difference favoring the ‘Professors’, but only inside the academy; no one else knows or cares. If there is a pay differential it may favor the clinicians, and their career ladders can lead to prestigious hospital or medical school jobs. On the whole, I think the system works.

As Lemuel suggests the fundamental problem is that we live under a system in which a “market” decides what educational practice is. I happen to think that rising tuition costs and the consequent debt burden of students strengthens the credentialing function of higher education compared to the learning function.

This is not, of course, only a function of “teaching” (ie the involvement of the teacher in student learning), it is also a function of the expectation and goals the students themselves have. It is sad but undeniable that the majority of students are well aware of the function universities play in this society (as described by Lemuel); as a result in any given non-honours course I teach the majority of students will be concerned about primarily one thing, their grade. (It may well be this is a particular problem in mathematics courses, for various reasons. Note also I’m not blaming the students for this, it is only rational behaviour on their part given societal norms in capitalism.) In other words, “teaching” and “learning” can’t be separated – if we gave a big bonus tomorrow to every professor who teaches well by some miraculously discovered objective standard I doubt it would affect the learning success (whatever that would be, a whole different issue) of the majority of students.

Harry, yes, I am pretty sure real tuition costs, not just the nominal costs, have risen substantially recently, at least in U.S.. My point was different though. Suppose you want to price-discriminate among students. Assume for simplicity you can do this perfectly (this does not really matter to the quality of the argument). Then a student shows up to “buy” a product from your university (i.e. applies) and you can gauge his willingness to pay for it. To the most willingness to pay (usually the richest) you charge the highest amount. To those less willingness to pay, you charge what they are willing to pay and you, as a university, cover the difference b/w that amount and the full tuition costs, i.e. the amount paid by the richest guy. In this model, the “face value” tuition cost is the amount the richest guy pays. In this sense, I thought the statement might be a bit misleading in that, in this model, it is possible that not everyone (or not even the average guy) ends up paying more and more for college.

I thought I had seen Mankiw making this argument. Indeed, see his point 4 here:

http://tinyurl.com/377n3k9

Let me add that I see this as a qualification to your statement, not as a rebuttal.

I’ve dated two professors at top tier research universities. They hated teaching and tried to avoid it as much as possible. That was their own preference. They could have chosen otherwise.

SoV rightly comments on the redistribution of educational costs from society in general to students, as we have collectively decided that there is no such thing as a “common good” (by “we”, I mean the majority of people who vote in most states). @Sebastian, this has been going on for much longer than jut the last 2-4 years.

In addition, schools have been called on to provide more and more services. How many schools put together the infrastructure and planning to be able to respond to a gunman with an assault rifle on campus 20 years ago? To support large numbers of students who had spent most of their development on medication?

Regarding “institutions” like the University of Phoenix, I cannot comment directly on quality of instruction. However, in computing, I can say that their curriculum could at best be described as freshman year repeated four times in four different languages.

Weichi,

I think you touch on an important point. People are making normative claims based on the assumption that the role of educational institutions ought to be primarily focused on teaching. What is the product? Should it be quality of instruction, or quality of economic outcome. I suspect many people are implicitly relying on the assumption that the purpose of college is to teach people to become better thinkers, etc. However, over the past 50 years or so, the purpose of (higher) education has been to track various people into different economic classes.

Now, I don’t quite understand the ultimate point you are trying to make (or maybe I do, but I’m guessing you mean something more than your simple argument). There seems to be missing a premise in your argument , namely, that education is a product, or at least relevantly similar to something that can be improved in the same manner that a computer program can . If I may generalize, educators tend to think of education as a public good that ought to be immunized from the whims of the market, and it’s unclear what quantitative productivity gains can be had from knowing about Socrates, or Locke, or any of the humanities for that matter. I doubt that any technology could be developed that could produce more productive thinkers other than better access to libraries and journals.

“Over the long term, technology has led to large productivity improvements in much of the economy, but this has not happened in education.”

But why not? Why hasn’t competition forced the rationalization of higher ed? I believe that the reason is the federally guaranteed student loan program, which makes it possible for schools to extract maximum value from each student’s projected life-long income stream. The federal guarantee means that the lender does not need to care whether the value added by the education is sufficient to justify the investment. Only the student and his or her family have an incentive to do that, and they are completely unqualified, and get no help in doing it. As long as the loan money is there, the schools can continue to raise tuition faster than the rate of inflation. The fact that the student is unwittingly taking on crushing debt that will prevent him or her from starting a family or owning a home for many years is of no concern to the university.

As for teaching, the average professor at a research institution makes a Soviet-style bargain with the students: I will pretend to teach, and you will pretend to study. Grade inflation insures that there are no consequences to not learning, while making life easier on the professor – it is much harder to sort a stack of 10-page papers into five piles, A through F, than it is to sort them into two piles, A and B. The students think this is just fine, not knowing what they don’t know. They persuade themselves that it doesn’t matter, since what they are really after is the credential, not the education, and the easy grading policy gives them more time to drink. It should be the professors’ job to persuade them of the value of a liberal education. Instead, the rampant careerism of the students gives the professors permission in their own minds to sneer at them and to feel justified in not even trying to educate them.

Having written off the students as callow, crass, and stupid, the professor may now devote him or herself to research. The product of this work is, for the vast majority of professors, of no importance to anyone. Out of all the historians and philosophers and literature professors in the US, only a handful will ever produce work of lasting value. And of these, only a very few will write more than one book or article that will be read ten years from now. Most professors are hobbyists, and their scholarship is no different from the output of Sunday painters and community theater enthusiasts. It may be nice work, in a way, but there’s no possible justification for charging students $50,000 a year to subsidize it.

There is a status difference favoring the ‘Professors’, but only inside the academy; no one else knows or cares.

what oceans of human joy and misery are contained in that little sentence!

Grade inflation insures that there are no consequences to not learning

CITATION NEEDED

Why is the “credential” of an undergraduate degree from an “elite” university so important when it’s increasingly apparent that said degree has less and less value on the job market—and that more and more often, you need graduate/professional school to find a job remotely connected to your ambitions?

As pointed out today by Yglesias, an undergraduate degree actually has significant and growing value on the US job market, as measured by the average income of graduates and non-graduates.
http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2010/05/the-growing-college-premium.php

Separate issues:
1) jobs that required a BA 30 years ago now require an MA
2) the rising cost of a degree means that there is a lower RoI on a BA now than there was before

— these may or may not be the case, but they don’t alter the fact that an undergraduate degree does not have “less and less” but actually “more and more” value on the job market.

i work at a prestige private r1 that you have all heard of. (in the much-maligned 1995 nrc ranking it was in the top 15).

we talk about teaching all of the time. we talk about it in the department. we hear about it from the dean’s office. we compete with other departments to have better enrollments.

i supervise my ta’s sections, at least once per ta per semester. i sit in on classes taught by junior faculty and write reports for their folders. i have seen excellent teaching save the tenure case of a candidate whose research was very good (one book with oup, a dozen articles) but not quite good enough on its own (some of the referees wrote negative reports about it). i have seen the same difference made for a promotion to full professor. teaching is taken very seriously here, and good teaching is rewarded.

there may be universities where teaching counts for nothing. there may even be departments or programs within my university where teaching counts for nothing. but in my department, and throughout arts and sciences, teaching is taken very seriously.

that’s not to say that we have good metrics for it, or that we do as much training and experimentation as we should. we should definitely do more. but there is a pervasive and emphatic message that teaching matters.

d^2 @ 27:

what oceans of human joy and misery are contained in that little sentence!

And comedy too! You would have loved the College of Medicine debates, with the ‘Clinical Professors’ fighting to drop the adjective from the title, and ‘Professors’ fighting to keep it. All Malvolios, all the way down.

I taught at a “semi-elite” liberal arts college (perhaps not quite as close to the elite as it likes to think) and the experience convinced me that much of what passes for the storied quality of teaching at such institutions is a mirage. Sucking up to the students and keeping them happy so they coughed up good scores on the all-important evaluation forms (with the inevitably accompanying grade inflation and content deflation) were what was valued, with precious little thought given to how much they were actually learning. I much prefer being a forensic scientist, where I feel like I’m actually doing something socially useful.

I’ll soon be sending my daughter off to the honors program (which enrolls a small number of students with elite-level academic qualifications, houses them together, and gives them lots of goodies not available to “regular” students) at a solid but not “elite” research-intensive state university, on a scholarship that covers everything but food and books for all 4 years. Now THAT is value for money. I’m a single parent on a modest government salary and could only laugh bitterly at the amounts of money private institutions imagined I could cough up (let’s see, do I stop eating or stop paying my mortgage for 4 years?), on top of outrageous amounts of student loans. Screw them.

#26 – “If you can get into an R1 Uni, maybe you don’t need good teaching?”

This is so clueless and arrogant that it’s all I can do not to start ranting and raving.

Carnegie doesn’t use the R1/R2 scheme anymore, but the last time it did, the R1 ranking included such shining lights of the intellectual firmament as Arizona State, Wayne State, Rutgers, Temple, U of Cincinnati, and Purdue. Are you really claiming that any student who can gain admission to Cincinnati is a budding Einstein who is too smart to be taught anything? Do you really believe that the social utility of these institutions is in the value of the research their professors do, and not the education of their students?

Well, perhaps you do believe that. I don’t doubt that many professors tell themselves variants of this story: the good students teach themselves and as for the rest, well, they’re getting their credential. And all I can say is that you have no right to demand that teenagers mortgage themselves until middle age to pay you to do your precious research if you don’t intend to provide anything of value to them.

See, I’m ranting.

http://www.washington.edu/tools/universities94.html

Hey, don’t be dissin’ Cincinnati, that the place I’m sending my kid. ;)

Seriously, it’s a top 25 public university in external research funding and yet (non-honors) admission there is not exactly difficult, so what you said. But at least we’ll be getting the upgraded version of their product and not going into hock for it.

What Ragtime just said, x1000. I saw exactly that kind of thing all the time in an institution that tried to treat these stupid forms as gospel.

@43.2–

it is not my employer’s identity i am trying to conceal, but my own.

for various reasons. you know–we academic mall-ninjas try to stay invisible.

@34:As pointed out today by Yglesias, an undergraduate degree actually has significant and growing value on the US job market, as measured by the average income of graduates and non-graduates.

It’s not controversial, I think, that the average lifetime income of BA-holders is higher than that of non-graduates (and that the gap may be widening). But implicit in the comment @3 — to which 34 was responding — is a different question, namely: do graduates of “elite” institutions have higher average incomes than graduates of “non-elite” institutions? The answer to this question is much less intuitively clear, at least to me, and I’d be interested to be pointed in the direction of some evidence on this question (and by evidence I mean hard evidence, as in data, not assertions). I imagine such evidence exists, and presumably someone here knows where it can most easily be located.

@42, 43: you seem to have misunderstood me, perhaps I have also misunderstood what ‘R1’ means. Let me rephrase. A student who gets into Oxford is, by definition, brilliant, in the top 0.01%, or possibly 0.001% of any vague distribution of academic ability amongst their cohort. They literally do not need to be ‘taught’ in the way that less-gifted students do; yet their seat of learning is renowned for producing brilliant graduates. Those kids could be locked in the library for 3 years and never see an academic, and still be brighter, and better-informed, when they came out than most of their contemporaries.

The unfairness is that, if as I do you teach students who are far less ‘brilliant’ to begin with, you will never raise them to the standard that Oxford allegedly achieves, because Oxford isn’t achieving it at all, the students are. Which is not to say that bad teaching can’t prevent people achieving their potential, of course it can; but the best teaching can’t get people to surpass their potential.

50: ah, OK. interesting question. Apparently the answer is yes:
http://www.foxbusiness.com/story/personal-finance/on-topic/education/harvardshmarvard/

While graduates from all types of schools tend to increase their salaries as they progress through life, Ivy Leaguers do get a bump.
Lee offers this example: Right after graduation, the pay difference between Harvard University and University of Washington graduates is $15,000. But when those graduates hit midcareer in their 40s, the pay levels jumps to $85,000 to $125,000 — a difference of $40,000..

@ 52 & 53: Isn’t it a truism that when you put the top-tail students together, as at Oxford and Harvard, they will teach each other, regardless of variations in the effectiveness of individual faculty?

@56–

“truism” in the sense of “lots of people say it and others nod sagely”? sure.

but so far as “truism” in the sense of “true”? once again, we just lack the data.

Bloix- no need to apologize, I was being completely facetious. Many of the regular-admission students at schools like Cincinnati are frankly NOT particularly bright kids. That’s why it was especially important to me that the honors students are housed together and are given other opportunities to congregate with one another.

There is a major disconnect between what research universities want to produce and what the rest of society is willing to pay for. Outside of certain applied hard sciences and a few other areas, there is little demand for academic research. If research into Milton’s poetry or sex roles in ancient Assyria had to be funded directly, very little of it would get done. So people who know how to create new knowledge about Milton and Assyrian women have to get funded by offering to use some part of their accumulated intellectual capital to teach undergraduates the rudiments of English literature or ancient history. But these folk advance in their careers by doing what they are not paid to do, rather than what they are paid to do. Which are they more likely to do well, and which ill?
Not that I oppose this system, despite its built-in conflicts of interest and inefficiencies. I have no idea how else to accomplish its goals, and I do want those goals accomplished. Still, it would be prudent to appease the folk who are footing the bill for what we really want to do while hoping we give them something they want in return.

I am reminded of DougJ’s post at Balloon Juice about savviness:

When I first went to college [later revealed to be Harvard], I was surprised by the way the other students viewed everything as a system to try to beat. You didn’t take a class because the subject was interesting, you took it because the subject was fashionable, because the professor was about to become famous, etc. etc. It was important to be savvy, not curious. Curious was for weirdos and wall-flowers, savvy was for the winners.

In the discussion, one point that came out was how strongly this attitude is correlated with the presence of a MBA program at the school. (It may also correlate with a law school, but you’d have to do a multivariate analysis to see if you could separate the two factors.)

To me, it seems as though the conflict isn’t between “teaching” and “research”, it’s between institutions and forces that favor “savvy” credentialism and networking, and those that favor learning. MBA programs are all about the former, and their attitude tends to influence (or infect) the rest of the university — not least because the universities tend to be run by people with MBAs.

Conversely, I have been absolutely staggered by the teaching quality at my offspring’s SLAC-type school — much better across the board than I experienced at Princeton, even though I had some amazing, outstanding teachers and there was no MBA/law school to muddy the waters.

alex@52:

A student who gets into Oxford is, by definition, brilliant, in the top 0.01%, or possibly 0.001% of any vague distribution of academic ability amongst their cohort.

You’re being ironic, right?

Students who get into Oxford (or Harvard) are a carefully-calibrated mixture: those whose wealth and connections mean that they are going to succeed regardless of education, those who are poor-but-talented and will succeed once they develop connections with the first group, and a few who are brilliant enough to be interesting for the professors to talk to.

Doctor Science – “My Freshman Year” by anthropologist Cathy Small found the same sort of “savviness” at Northern Arizona University, a place as different from Harvard as you can possibly imagine.

PS- the “we” in #65 is rhetorical. I am not an educator. Also, I did not really serve in Viet Nam.

you seem to have misunderstood me, perhaps I have also misunderstood what ‘R1’ means. Let me rephrase. A student who gets into Oxford is, by definition, brilliant, in the top 0.01%, or possibly 0.001% of any vague distribution of academic ability amongst their cohort. They literally do not need to be ‘taught’ in the way that less-gifted students do; yet their seat of learning is renowned for producing brilliant graduates. Those kids could be locked in the library for 3 years and never see an academic, and still be brighter, and better-informed, when they came out than most of their contemporaries.

But doesn’t the traditional argument go towards “achieving potential” or some other such buzz phrase?

I can teach just about everyone “college algebra” (ie, the algebra you would have learned in high school had you been paying attention the four times you took it), and yes, any of these top performers can learn this on their own. Let’s move up to calculus with trigonometry: I couldn’t teach nearly as many of the original crop of students (though I hope I could get across the notions to most of them.) In this case, a lot of these top-performing kids could still learn the subject on their own, but there would be some gaps – not many – and some of the material would be misunderstood.

Let’s jump up to the graduate level: I could talk and wave my arms and make diagrams for eight hours a day, and the odds are that only two or three of those original students would understand more than a very little abstract algebra or could actually ever formally prove a proposition. And at this level even your best of the best are going to need some instruction and guidance. Sure, there’s always those one or two who would get it all by themselves, but that’s not the top one percent or even the top tenth of a percent – that’s more like a hundredth or a thousandth of a percent.

Doctor Science — Oxbridge is unlike the American elite elites, in that personal wealth and connections can no longer have any direct effects on whether you are admitted — all effects have to be mediated by quite narrow academic achievement and performance in an interview. This has done almost nothing to affect the proportions of posh kids getting in, but probably has done something to affect what happens to them in the previous 13 years. In terms of raw “natural” academic ability, sure, they are probably not in the top 0.x%, but in terms of narrow academic achievement they probably are. This is a change from when Cameron, Clegg and Johnson went to Oxbridge, and even then it was considerably more “meritocratic” than the US equivalents. Illustration of change over time: Prince Charles attended a Cambridge college, but neither of his sons had any prospect of doing so.

do graduates of “elite” institutions have higher average incomes than graduates of “non-elite” institutions? The answer to this question is much less intuitively clear, at least to me, and I’d be interested to be pointed in the direction of some evidence on this question

Yes. Malcolm Gladwell reported in the New Yorker that University of Pennsylvania (an mid-level Ivy) grads make more money than Penn State (a mid-level flagship state school) grads. He also reports that students who were admitted to Penn, but were also admitted and chose to go to Penn State (for whatever reason), made as much money as Penn grads.

So, Penn was not training their students better to make more money (or providing a better credential that allowed them to earn more.) Rather, they were simply good as selecting those students who would eventually earn the most.

http://www.learntoquestion.com/resources/database/archives/001429.html

Bloix @68:

Actually, it supports my argument: NAS and Harvard are *not* “as different as you can possibly imagine”, they both have Business Schools. IMHO one additional source of savvy infection, not discussed in the Balloon Juice thread, is a big-name athletic program: when the campus celebrities are purely and explicitly at college for the credentials, savvy credentialism gets even more prestige.

Harry @72: I stand corrected. I had no idea that things at Oxbridge had changed so much in the past generation.

Do you think this change has been a factor in the current woes of the British education system? Part of the admissions dance of the American Ivies is to placate wealthy, powerful alumni (and donors) by ensuring that their children continue to benefit. If British higher education doesn’t support the status quo as it used to, perhaps the status quo doesn’t feel like supporting higher ed.

dr. sci. @77–

“the network of friends, associates, teachers, etc., that expands out from a top-ranked university”

don’t forget spouses. one reason you send your kids to the right schools is so that they’ll marry the right people. even if they don’t marry during college (and the right people generally don’t), they are likely to marry the right person from their school a few years down the road, or the right sibling of their right dorm-mate.

these are mating-age humans. also, marrying age. as you get older, it looks more and more like part of what parents are paying for is a selective dating-service. here again, the connection between the quality of the teaching and the provision of the service that people pay for is pretty indirect.

So we’ve pretty much agreed that “elite” universities are not really educational institutions, but rather, something more like Almack’s?

Blink. Well, no, not that I can see. We’re still at the “how do you define added value” stage.

kid bitzer:

This is almost embarrassingly true. It does bring into focus why colleges are (rightly) concerned about deviations from a 50:50 sex ratio: they don’t feel they can *say* “and we offer an ideal marriage market”, but it’s implicit.

chris:

It’s not *all* they are, but the Almack’s-type function — which was always there for women’s liberal arts colleges anyway — has become more generally important. And the fact is that in human history the value of an education comes and goes, but the value of the Right Sort of marriage is universal.

Doctor Science:

Well, there are a lot of different job markets out there. As an engineer, I can say that this was pretty much irrelevant in the link between my college experience and career. You develop business connections during your career, not as an undergraduate. I can also say with a high level of confidence that it doesn’t really matter in law or medicine either for the vast majority. You just need to get into the right law or med school. Banking, sometimes, maybe. Business… well, that’s really what the MBA is for, not undergrad. I doubt that connections building is all that important at the undergraduate level and I also doubt that it’s a driving factor in applicant decision-making.

DS (76) — I don;t think its a factor, because private support was a trivial part of the funding for elites even in earlier days, and because, ironically, it seems that Oxbridge is still relatively immune to what is going on right now. I think the roots of the current crisis are in the massive expansion in the 80s and 90s, which was far too quick for institutions to manage, and the long-term financing consequences of which governments were unwilling to face up to. The coming increase in tuition costs (real and nominal) is, I think, the inevitable consequence of those decisions, and will go some way to ameliorating the current situation, but will bring all sorts of unwelcome problems of its own..

The reality of what they actually provide to their students is considerably more mundane than the hype, and its cost-effectiveness to heavily indebted non-wealthy students is questionable to say the least.

Well, didn’t Harvard promise that students with family income under 70K would have a free ride? I’m pretty sure that tuition assistance applies further up the income ladder as well. I don’t know what the actual financial burden of different types of education are today, but I don’t really believe that debt is the primary concern here.

Well, didn’t Harvard promise that students with family income under 70K would have a free ride?

Yes, and a few schools have followed suit, but only a few. Debt is still a huge concern even at institutions only a little below Harvard’s prestige (and admissions difficulty) level so this is a quantitatively trivial improvement in the lot of the overall population even just of the most highly-qualified students. Trust me, I know this up close and personal from my daughter’s financial aid offers.

“The core value of an elite university is the Old Child Network. ”

I disagree strenuously. I know lots of upper middle class professionals (I am one myself), and can fairly claim to be a dull normal son of old New Haven (being a lawyer at a big firm). I have never met a fellow professional who had useful contacts dating from college or even law school. There are several reasons, most notably that the number of people in New York City likely to be professionally useful (i.e., in my case, people who dispose considerable amounts of legal work related to real estate finance) isn’t more than one hundred, and there’s no reason to think that any of them was even at college with me. Meanwhile, the people I did meet in college are doctors, or investment bankers who do something other than real estate finance, or lawyers at other firms who are competitors, or government functionaries, or professors–all of them useless.

What a top college does is guarantee that your resume will always be put on the top of the pile and looked at seriously. That is worth the cost.

Way back upthread somebody mentioned the importance of learning from fellow students. I think this aspect needs more emphasis. Forty years ago I went to a place that’s perennially in the top ten of the small liberal arts college list. I came from a small town, where I’d been the whiz kid, and had before never met so many smart people in my life. I learned hugely from them. No book-reading could have accomplished that.

That said, the networking aspect was true back then and still is, I think. I know doors were opened to me on account of where I went to college; I sent my daughter to a Seven Sister’s school, and I’m quite certain she’s also reaped benefits from her special bit of parchment. It’s not really fair, I suppose, but there it is.

The thing about credentialing though is that if you’re headed for any kind of graduate or professional school and your performance and recommendations at a decent but non-upper-crust undergraduate institution are up to snuff, you can get into a top grad school and get your door-opening credential from that. Like my developmental biologist, Northwestern-professor sister who went to Rochester on a full ride and then got her Ph.D. at Harvard and did her postdoc at Caltech. (I refer to her as “the real scientist in the family.”)

So unless your undergrad degree is intended to be terminal there’s still no good reason to go neck-deep in hock for the credential.

@94:

I see your distinction. I meant what you’re calling “credentialing.” Things may have changed in the past 20 years, but when I served a couple of tours on medical school admissions committees back then the credential helped. A lot. Again, it’s not completely fair, but it is real.

The credential helps if you’re a somewhat marginal applicant. I was a rather indifferent student at Harvard and being from there certainly got me admitted to Ph.D. programs I wouldn’t have gotten into with a similar track record at Enormous State University or Mediocre Bucolic College. But if you’re really good you’ll get into top grad schools from anywhere. And at least in science at some point you have to start demonstrating that you’re really good or your career is going nowhere, credentials or no credentials.

Ragtime @74: thanks for the reference/link to the Gladwell piece.

87: My point is simply that over the last 40 years there have been no technological advances that allow a professor to teach Socrates and Locke to more students each semester, or any advances that allow a professor to teach Locke more effectively to the same number of students…Therefore the cost of being taught Socrates and Locke by a professors should go up.

Is this actually true, though? I should say at this point that I didn’t study philosophy, so feel free to shoot these down, but I can think of a few advances that might have helped.

Watching or listening to lectures online
Emailing essays – faster turnaround and better workflow management
Email contact with students – more efficient, faster
Word processing – essays easier to read and faster to produce than typewritten or handwritten
Cheap or free photocopying or scanning of documents
Texts and papers available in electronic form – more robust, faster to look up references by electronically searching the text, not limited by number of available hard copies
Library catalogues available on line – less time spent looking through the shelves for books that may not even be there
Better books! Surely the last 40 years have seen the publication of better-written commentaries etc which explain things more clearly… or is everyone still using sources from the 1960s and earlier?

Though I’m quite ready to agree that technology has had less impact on philosophy than on other questions…

@78 kid bitzer:

definitely agree.

jq@107–

sorry, “credentialism” = which hypothesis?

the fact that goldman sachs does not hire 17-year-olds does indeed raise problems for credentialism, if that is the hypothesis that nothing whatsoever happens to spotty teenagers in the four years until they turn 21. if they were just as immature and spotty four years later, and unchanged in every other emotional and intellectual way, then employers would indeed be irrational to leave them hanging on the vine.

otherwise, employers’ behavior only shows that they think *some* improvement has occurred in their four years in college, not that it is this rather than that improvement.

seriously, i have lost track: i had thought that “credentialism” came into this conversation with a meaning something like, “viewed from the standpoint of a prospective student or parent thereof, the main marginal value that you receive from moving up the prestige food-chain consists in being able to boast about a fancier pedigree, not in being taught more or exposed to better teaching.”

that’s a hypothesis about why and how it is worth more to go to princeton than to arizona state, and it says, “it’s not better teaching. it’s not the increase in learning (from teachers or students). it’s not a better social network, or better spousal selection (those have been hived off as separate hypotheses). it is strictly the difference in value of the phrase “b.a., princeton”, as opposed to “b.a. az state”, attached to you for the rest of your life”.

i have not been one of the advocates of the credentialism-hypothesis. but i somehow feel that you are using it in a slightly different way in your rebuttal than its proponents have been using it.

@109–

but here again, chrisy, i feel like i have lost track of the hypothesis under consideration.
“college performance can be predicted well from entry scores and iq tests” is usually a claim about *grades*, i.e. whether johnny will get a 4.0 or a 2.8, a first or a third. notice that we have not yet said whether johnny is attending princeton or paducah.

i don’t think anyone upthread was arguing that the important credential in credentialism is your grade point average. quite the opposite: i thought the credentialists were claiming that a gentleman’s c from yale will get you further (in the city, or higher academics, or however) than straight a’s from yuma.

so i just don’t know what “credentialism” jq is rebutting.

Library catalogues available on line – less time spent looking through the shelves for books that may not even be there
Better books! Surely the last 40 years have seen the publication of better-written commentaries etc which explain things more clearly… or is everyone still using sources from the 1960s and earlier?

While it may be true that there is some improvement in the presentation of the material over time, I don’t think it’s really that much of a factor. In fact, many of my colleagues have bemoaned the fact that we can’t just choose one book for algebra, one book for calculus, etc, and then stick with it. In undergraduate mathematics, at least, things just change that fast.

Many people have already brought up the fact that a college education exposes you to other people and that this promotes an atmosphere of sorts that is valuable in and of itself. I would like to be more specific in this regard and tell my students that the very best thing they can do to get good grades is to consistently study (and that includes doing homework) together in groups of two or three. More than four and it gets really hard to get everyone together. Further, I say, don’t study with people making straight A’s if you’re a C student, as you’ll end up just copying their work, and will be totally at sea during exams, and contrariwise, don’t study with people who are doing much worse than you; the key is to help each other out at about the same rate (for the under-20 set, I privately advise the girls not to include any guys unless they already know them fairly well.)

Now, this is the sort of advice I give to math students and I think the collegial atmosphere really helps in this regard. The same would pertain to chemistry, engineering, etc, or so I would imagine. My question, since there seem to be so many humanities people here, is, does this sort of situation also apply to political science, history, literature, etc?

The influence on me doing this was Derek Bok, who reports that this is how the sciences do it and that weaker students in particular gain from it.

It can be so, but the downside is when the strongest student (me, in the instance I’m thinking of) gets so frustrated by the lack of input from the rest of the group and the looming deadline that they just do the damn assignment and hand it in with everybody’s name on it.

The influence on me doing this was Derek Bok, who reports that this is how the sciences do it and that weaker students in particular gain from it.

It can be so, but the downside is when the strongest student (me, in the instance I’m thinking of) gets so frustrated by the lack of input from the rest of the group and the looming deadline that they just do the damn assignment and hand it in with everybody’s name on it.

That is certainly a problem we have in the sciences as well. One of the things that helps in this regard is to keep the groups small. I’ve found that when you have groups of more than four, meeting times are constrained and often what happens is that people just end up copying off the most diligent students in the group. It gets their homework done, but they don’t tend to do nearly as well when exam time rolls around. Also, students in my classes tend not to have an idea of where they stand until after the first exam; it’s only after they get their grades back that they ask what they can do to improve and I reiterate what I’ve said the first day. At this point though, I can usually make fairly good recommendations on how to partner up.

I suspect this might be harder to do in the humanities where subjects tend not to be quite so modular.

The evidence against credentialism is, in my view, overwhelming

There seems to be some disagreement about the meaning of credentialism, so let me spell out version I’m arguing for (I think others here would say something similar, but maybe not.)

1.There are fewer privileged (high-paying, etc.) positions than people capable of filling them.
2.People who occupy those positions want security of tenure and, more importantly, a good chance of seeing their children in similar positions.
3.This can be achieved by making the right to hold a privileged position a form of quasi-property, inalienable but effectively more or less heritable.
4.College degrees are to a first approximation such quasi-property (the main form of it in the US.)
5.Therefore, the education one receives in the course of getting the degree has no relationship to its value.

This might be all wrong but your arguments don’t help show that.

since college performance can be predicted well from entry scores and IQ tests, the hypothesis requires that employers are uniformly stupid. A single smart employer could make offers to successful applicants to good colleges, getting them at a wage that reflects a huge saving in college costs and years wasted.

So is it also impossible that executives at American companies are overpaid? Being an economist, you seem to be using “stupid” mean “failing to act like rational profit maximizers in a world where employees are simply inputs to a production function.” In that sense, yes, absolutely employers are stupid – or as I would prefer to put it, are social organisms, not just instances of minimizing a derivative, and are run by human beings from a particular culture. The interests of the shareholders qua shareholders is to minimize labor costs, including the wages of managers and professionals. The interest of managers and professionals is to limit access to their positions to people like themselves. The idea that the former wins out over the latter invariably and completely seems like one of those zombie ideas somebody should write a book about.

the college premium rises with time since graduation. So, credentialism only makes sense in the context of a labor market where lifetime chances are determined very early on, with entry to a rigidly fixed career track. US in the 50s and Japan today maybe, but not the US now.

I’m pretty sure that even in Tom Peters’ America, the jobs you have held previously exert a pretty strong influence on the job you will get next.

people who can reasonably expect to be self-employed (for example in a family business) nonetheless go to college at about the same rate as future employees

This, on the other hand, is a valid point. There’s no need for credentialism when status is inherited directly in the form of private property. But people employed in a family business are such a small proportion of the population that it’s plausible they are just being passively carried along by the culture around them. Now, if you could point to a case where most middle-class jobs were in family businesses but the cost, prevalence and content of college education was similar to that in the contemporary US, then credentialism would be in real trouble. But in my view, the declining importance of family businesses and the rising importance of college degrees and other credentials are two sides of the same process. As indeed C. Wright Mills argued 50 years ago.

There are several discussions going on, in only one of which, relating to credentialism, am I qualified to participate.

Lemuel Pritikin’s formulation is not very persuasive to me. I would put it this way:

1. It is very difficult to identify, a priori, good employees for jobs that involve reading, analysis, and judgment (what I believe Robert Reich called “symbol manipulation”).
2. Those jobs generally pay better than jobs that don’t involve such skills, so everyone wants such jobs, both for themselves and for their children.
3. Empirically, we observe that employers tend to prefer, in hiring for those sorts of jobs, people with degrees from fancy colleges and universities.
4. Therefore, people want degrees from fancy universities, not because of anything that happens at the universities in question, but for extrinsic reasons. (Of course, there might be intrinsic reasons too, but the credentialist theory says that they are less important drivers of demand.)

A question arises as to why item 3 is true. Is it because something happens at fancy universities that makes their graduates better symbol manipulators? Or is it because those universities admitted people who were better symbol manipulators already? Or, if both factors are operating, which is more important? Malcolm Gladwell references some studies suggesting that there is no empirical evidence supporting the first theory. Prof. Quiggin suggests that the second theory cannot be the whole story, because employers could figure out who are the best employees by measuring the attributes at issue directly, rather than outsourcing the job to college admissions officers.

Doctor Science,

Yeah, my last step could have been put better. What I was trying to say was that there is no useful sense in which the content of a college education constitutes a set of skills that, transferred to the student through the process of teaching, increase their contribution to the production process. The premium paid to (elite) college graduates has entirely other origins.

But you are absolutely right that it doesn’t follow from that that the content of the education doesn’t support the value of the degree by other routes. And I think the particular route you describe is very persuasive.

So, right.

Then, relative to X going to Princeton and getting a job from an employer who cares about the credential, Z and X can reach a mutually beneficial deal where X goes to Paducah, and Z and X share the savings in tuition etc.

I think this is harder than you seem to think. Suppose I am X and have just received my acceptance letter from Princeton, when I receive a phone call from a hiring officer of Z Corp. Since Z wants to capture part of the savings, they’re going to pay me less than they would pay a Princeton grad, but I can start earning it now and avoid/reduce the student loans.

This looks good, at first (as long as the expected salary difference isn’t too big, which incidentally means that Z Corp. isn’t saving all that much). But what if Z Corp. goes out of business, I just can’t stand the boss or other coworkers, etc.? Then I’m back on the street with no degree (or a Paducah degree) and I probably have to reapply to Princeton to see if I can get in.

If I have the Paducah degree then I may or may not even be able to get in to Princeton — would they accept someone who has already graduated somewhere else? — let alone the cost of two sets of student loans, one of which is Princeton-sized. Being path-dependency-locked into a degree that is perceived as inferior by all employers except Z is a very serious risk.

If I work for Z for 10 years and then it goes under, or if I just want the prospect of being headhunted to use as leverage in my recurring salary negotiations with Z, then the Princeton degree is still valuable to me — since, ex hypothesi, most employers do not behave like Z.

In order for the deal to be as secure as you seem to think, I would need Z to guarantee my *entire future career* in a way that would make the Princeton degree worthless to me — which they can’t possibly credibly do, because it’s too far in the future. (Put my entire future salary in escrow so I’ll get it even if Z goes bankrupt? Guarantee that even against the prospect that I may be fired by Z? Even if that’s legal, I bet it won’t be cost-effective for Z.)

And even that is only considering the easily quantified economic factors — if universities provide a social credential as well as an economic one, then X is sacrificing the prestige of a Princeton degree as well as the economic value, and will probably need to be compensated for that too, which further eats into Z’s potential profit from this strategy.

Otherwise, the credentialism story only stands up if completing a degree at Princeton provides information about ability that isn’t contained in the fact of admission to Princeton.

Well, if Princeton has a graduation rate less than 100%, of course it does. Some people will drop out, some will develop alcohol or drug problems and then drop out, some may flunk out (with or without alcohol and drug problems), a few may even commit suicide. An employer who waits for graduation isn’t getting any of those, so if those outcomes are due to anything other than pure chance, then the graduate’s demonstrated ability to avoid them provides information. Which *still* has nothing to do with the quality of the teaching.

Putting aside the issue of elite vs non-elite universities for the moment, I once heard a person who runs his own business and thus is involved in a lot of hiring decisions talk about the value of a college degree.

He said that he was basically looking for evidence that a potential employee could start something and see it through to the finish, could meet deadlines, could work without constant supervision & etc.

In high school, everything is compulsory, and you’re constantly monitored by teachers, parents & etc. College, on the other hand, provides you with copious opportunities to flake out and slack off. If you manage to graduate in 4 years that’s evidence that, to a first approximation, you’re a responsible and reliable person.

John, you do realize your argument is the same one often deployed to show that racial discrimination can’t exist in hiring? Not similar to, it’s the exact same argument. So let me ask you straight out: do you think that non-whites have ever faced discrimination in the workplace, or is it a priori impossible that employers have been systematically “stupid” in that way?

Claim 1: Given the information that 17yo X has been accepted at, say, Princeton + some low cost tests, we can accurately predict X’s final grade at Princeton

I don’t see what this has to do with anything. How would the credentialism argument be stronger if grades were not correlated with standardized test scores?

Claim 3: At least one employer, Z, wants to make profits and likes hiring productive workers at the lowest possible cost

Well of course there is. Lots of them. This is only a problem if you add Claim 4, which you haven’t but which is implicit in your whole argument: that over time the Z firms will outcompete the others until they constitute the whole labor market. The only reason you keep saying credentialism requires all firms to be “stupid” in the same way is that you are assuming a fairly strong form of perfect competition in which only a single profit-maximizing solution to the firm’s hiring decision is possible. As a card-carrying neoclassical economist, you are supposed to think that, I guess, but you need to spell it out for your argument to work. (And seriously — you might not run into so many zombies if you didn’t insist on living in the haunted graveyard.)

And of course you didn’t respond to my argument that the desire of firm owners to lower labor costs is counterbalanced by the desire of privileged groups of workers to restrict entry to their jobs. How come? Again, do you think it’s literally impossible that there could be any systematic forces on the labor market except for profit maximization? if so, that’s a much stronger — and less plausible — assumption than anything we credentialists are guilty of.

And your “all times in the last two centuries at least, in all countries” is just bluster. No one thinks the social function of higher education was the same in, let’s say, the UK in 1840 as it is in the US today. Not even you — you’re just being silly here.

There was, way back, some mention of student debt and somebody claimed that “nobody becomes burdened with debt at Harvard (unless they have very rich and very unhelpful parents)”. That kind of claim is very surprising but maybe the people posting here have little connection to that part of the US education experience. I read about this some years ago and can’t give you the reference right away but studies of student indebtedness showed not only a huge increase in the student debt of low-income students, but an even bigger increase in the debt burden of middle-class including upper-middle class students. Some of you here must be living in fantasy land.

109: “if the content of the degree is immaterial, it would be mutually beneficial if the 17 year olds spent four years working in retail to get the corners rubbed off them, and also acquiring a degree of financial independence and better life skills than they’re likely to pick up in universities;”

Despite JQs comments, this thread has been heavily US-centered. It might help to remind people that the US system is not the only one existing. It is a pecularity of the US-type education/credentialing system that college is regarded as the single, and mandatory, entry ticket to better paying jobs. In Germany it would be not at all unusual that a bank would hire a young Gymnasium or even Realschule graduate directly and give them the training they think appropriate, in the form of an apprenticeship. That apprenticeship is accepted as a credential by all employers so there is no concern that the individual would be bonded to the employer. It is also worth reminding the US commenters here (and JQ) that the correlation observed in the US between the cost of the education (whether subsidized or not) and the earnings of the graduate is not a universal law. There is no such correlation in Germany and I believe France and many other countries. In many countries, there is also no distinction conferred by attending so-called elite institutions. Many of these observations are really US specific (although there seems to be a tendency towards copying certain aspects of the US system in other countries) and this seems to be in need of an explanation.

piglet — I said that. I stand by it. Follow what I say, and you’ll see that it I restrict it to a very small number of students. It may be that you and I are operating with different definitions of very rich and very unhelpful. But, basically, if you are paying anything close to sticker price at Harvard your parents can afford to pay it out of pocket, so if you get into debt its because they’re not helping (or because you are spending money on something else). But, as I emphasize, that’s not true elsewhere.

Also, everything you say in 131 is true. I relativised the entire post to the US….

P.S. I’m not shedding tears for the upper middle class, just pointing out the fact. The surge in education cost contributes greatly to the middle class squeeze, there’s no denying it.

In many countries, there is also no distinction conferred by attending so-called elite institutions.

You mention France in the previous sentence. I doubt that what you say in this sentence is true of France (bearing in mind that the elite institutions there are not universities, but hautes ecoles.)

kid bitzer, you are obviously right that Harvard alone won’t change the national statistic either way. You are also right about reduced support for state institutions. Still, the statistic that I referred to noted an increasing student debt burden for all income groups, especially middle class and including upper middle class. And I just did the google trick to come up with this:
The Burden of Borrowing: A Report on the Rising Rates of Student Loan Debt
March 2002, By Tracey King and Ellynne Bannon
http://www.pirg.org/highered/BurdenofBorrowing.pdf

Thirty-nine percent (39%) of student borrowers now graduate with unmanageable levels of debt, meaning that their monthly payments are more than 8% of their monthly incomes. According to new data from the Department of Education’s National Postsecondary Student Aid Study (NPSAS), not only are the majority of students turning to loans to finance college, but debt levels are also escalating. In 1999-2000, 64% of students graduated with student loan debt, and the average student loan debt has nearly doubled over the past eight years to $16,928.

Seventy-one percent (71%) of all dependent student borrowers from families with incomes less than $20,000 graduated with student loan debt, compared to 44% of students from families with incomes more than $100,000. … Over the last eight years, there has been a rapid increase in the percentage of wealthier students who borrow. The percentage of dependent students with incomes of $100,000 or more who borrowed student loans quadrupled from 1992-93 to 1999-2000, and the percentage of those with incomes between $80,000 and $99,999 who borrowed more than doubled over the same time period.

The report doesn’t differentiate within the $100,000+ income group. $100,000 may be a low threshold for upper middle class but I believe that those have to pay full at Harvard.

“I’d be amazed—really astonished – if families earning exactly $100k were paying anything close to sticker price at Harvard”

Can anybody clarify what the income cutoff is for paying full at Harvard? Couldn’t find that in a quick google. Is there data about the income distribution of Harvard students?

@142–

i agree that there is no need for jumping down throats, and i’m sorry if i came off that harshly. it’s intended only as gentle teasing. (and, yes, i assume it was the real quiggin).

i should also reiterate that i am not a proponent of the “credentialist” hypothesis myself. i have quite a lot of my professional self-esteem tied up in the pretense that professors at princeton (and the like) are imparting wisdom to their students unattainable elsewhere. it’s why my own training was so unapproachably superb, and why my own teaching is worth all of the hard-earned money of those hard-pressed middle-class parents.

The best evidence against credentialism probably comes from the study of Penn St graduates who were also accepted at Penn but chose not to attend doing similarly well in the market place as graduates of Penn. It was referenced somewhere earlier in the thread. Of course, if that result is truly robust, there is nothing elite colleges are offering that is worth the cost.

But I think people pay for the higher prestige school primarily because they think the education will be better (whether that is true or not). If students do think this way, they still may not care much about the teaching. An elite school is presumed to have a better course catalogue (people who are up to it take honors courses for a reason) and getting the degree is presumed to demonstrate a superior mastery of the material.

On a separate line, I don’t think quasi-property in the sense that Lemuel is thinking is really part of the equation. Rich parents have rich kids because they guide them down the right path and provide assistance where needed. There are mechanisms to limit social mobility while appearing to have a meritocracy without having to rely on quasi-property rights.

LP, the Chicago-style discrimination argument needs Claim 4, but I don’t. In the absence of Claim 4, the outcome (assuming no state intervention either to enforce or prevent discrimination) will be that some employers will discriminate and others won’t, and that, on the whole, those who don’t will do better. Regions where discrimination is more extensive will do worse than those where it is rare. Blacks will do worse than equally qualified whites, but not as badly as under legally (or extra-legally) enforced segregation. That seems to me to be a reasonably accurate description of how things went in the US before the Civil Rights Act.

I only want to argue that, if college education is really useless except as a (redundant) measure of ability*, at least some employers should be cashing in on the opportunity to hire workers more cheaply, just as some employers were willing to break the color line, often against the resistance of their existing employees. So, where are the examples?

* This is the version of credentialism with which I’m familiar in Australia, since the big distinction is between those with and without degrees, rather than between universities. I don’t think the extension to “Paducah gives as good an education as Princeton” changes the argument much, but I admit that I’m on unfamiliar territory here.

So, where are the examples?

Every company that hires from somewhere other than top-tier schools, that is to say, most of them.

What am I missing?

I think Doctor Science @119 has it about right. To firm this up, I’d say that, on average the value of the credential is about equal to the value added in education[1], but since this is hard to measure, there is a labor market cross-subsidy from Sotomayers (those who work hard and learn a lot, but don’t, at least initially capture the full labor market return) to Bushes (those who slide through on minimum effort, but still get OK grades). Since Bushes generally pay more, the institutions don’t have an incentive to grade very accurately (and in fact, grade inflation has been led by private institutions).

Note that this is almost exactly opposite to the usual credentialist story, where the college acts as a screen for inherent ability.

fn1. Here I mean “market value added”, and bracket the question of how this relates to social values.

I admit I don’t know what credentialism means. If it means an MBA is a better candidate for managing a group of experienced software developers than another experienced software developer, it’s wrong. If it means a newly minted Ph.D. ought to be brought in to supervise the work of an M.S. with 25 successful years on similar projects, it’s wrong. True, a 1981 B.S.E.E. with some programming work is less impressive than the same person with a 1988 M.S. from Clark, but if credentialism says he’s preferable (on grounds other than being a “good fit”) to a 1985 computer science B.S. from MIT, then it’s wrong. Similarly, a graduate of a program that produces really good corporate employees but assumes they will never take on more responsibility may be great for some people, but if they fail when they are asked to take on more responsibility, there is something wrong there–I would prefer someone who might be a difficult employee at times but doesn’t expect everything to be done for her.

“Alito, Sotomayor and Kagan’s successes appear purely meritocratic:”

Not in the least. Each benefitted from the role as representatives or defenders of specific positions. The number of intellectually qualified candidates is very large, including a number much more qualified intellectually if not politically. Justices of the Supreme Court are rarely geniuses. I thought that was understood by now. Alito is a conservative whose interests fit well with those who chose him. Sotomayor’s and Kagan’s positions parallel Obama’s: a stronger executive and what’s now called moderate law and order policy.
Sotomayor and Kagan both benefitted in terms of gender and ethnicity, as Thomas and, as we know now, Scalia did: Reagan thought an Italian-American was a great idea. Kagan is more a politician than a scholar, which is no sin. Jack Balkin called it early for her.

#152 “I’d say that, on average the value of the credential is about equal to the value added in education” That’s incredibly self-serving from an academic among other academics invested in the moral and intellectual authority of simple elitism within a bureaucratic regime. I think again it was Balkin who pointed out that you don’t want geniuses on Supreme Court precisely because geniuses are outliers and you want a court whose conflicts match those of society at large. All bureaucracies are political before intellectual. To see otherwise is to ignore their weakness and their strength: their importance as representative of the community at large rather than as some sort of “truth” producing machine.

As it stands now the academy is a bubble economy precisely because of the confusion between idealism and functionalism. Academics now talk about ideas and “ideal” functions as a way to stay both superior and up-to-date, while the un-ideal world beats them at every turn. At the same time they measure absolute brilliance in the terms of functional bureaucracy so they dumb themselves down even more. Brilliance is now more likely to appear outside the academy because preconceptions are a hindrance in a crisis, and what is the academy teaching these days but preconceptions, not the least of its own authority?

To end where this post began: teaching may not be self-interest but it’s noble. The sense that nobility or the choice to help others is not even discussed is a mark of how far we’ve come to mark the mediocre as the inevitable and the mastery of the mediocre by intellectuals as the ideal.

Clod:

In saying that the Supreme Tigers successes “appears purely meritocratic”, I meant that they rose through the class system substantially on their merits. They were all well to the bottom of their Princeton classes economically and got through largely on scholarships (plus loans, but Sotomayor’s family couldn’t even have paid those). They were all in the top of their classes academically, and Sotomayor was one of the outstanding students of her year. She has said that she thinks she got in via “Affirmative Action”, but I think she’s wrong.

I think Sotomayor is a great example of a process Jerome Karabel described in his book The Chosen: the elite universities knew that change was coming, and it was important for the new faces in the American power structure have some of the old labels: “Bottled at Princeton” or “Bottled at Harvard”. The strength of the Expensive Higher Education brand, as it were, depended both on helping those who *should* succeed, and making sure that those who *would* succeed regardless (because of their inherited money and family) still passed through their gates. And they had to make these decisions 20-30 years in advance.

What is also clear in retrospect is how close the Expensive Higher Education brand came to catastrophic failure. Think of what these people have in common: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Paul Allen, Steve Wozniak, Michael Dell, Ted Waitt & Mike Hammond (founders of Gateway).

Three things: a. they now have great heaping steaming piles of first-generation money, b. which they got in a technical/intellectual industry, and c. they were *college drop-outs* (Woz eventually went back under a pseudonym to get his, but that was after the great heaping steaming piles). There is no “Bottled By” label on some of the greatest American fortunes, and it’s not because they couldn’t go to college, it’s because they tried it and rejected it.

@153:A few years ago, when the endowment topped $30 billion, some state and federal legislators started looking into whether Harvard actually qualified as a charitable institution (charities are supposed to spend at least 5% of assets annually on their stated purpose). Harvard got worried — to quiet the criticism it decided to dump some cash out the door by increasing financial aid to middle-class customers.

Harvard’s financial aid initiatives probably had more than one motive. Quieting criticism about hoarding the endowment might have been a factor, but Summers at the time issued a long letter sounding an alarm about the growing underrepresentation of students from low and moderate-income families at expensive/selective/elite (choose your adjective) institutions. Whatever the sources of this concern — and the basically self-interested considerations mentioned in 158 no doubt played a role — there is no reason to think the concern itself was not real. Otherwise they could have just shoveled some cash out the door (to use Bloix’s phrase) to quiet the critical legislators and not bothered with the accompanying lengthy statement about the deleterious consequences of increasing inequality in access, etc.

Landru,
You misunderstood me re. the natural sciences. It seems to me a student who doesn’t learn anything in a science class simply hasn’t learned anything new. She hasn’t learned a lot of things that aren’t so (that g=800 m/s^2, for instance). And non-majors don’t take, for example, math-heavy courses and simply flunk, but rather take suitable courses that teach the same material simplified, or teach about the same material.

Whereas if a student being taught by a poor teacher hears someone say, as LP did above, that the US is an aristocracy, and believes it is literally true, harm has been done. Are you arguing that this kind of thing is really what goes on? Because I did not encounter anything like this from any humanities instructor I ever had, and I hope you’ll forgive me if I don’t consider claims from angry-sounding Internet people with silly pseudonyms (and no specifics) to be especially terrific evidence.

Bianca Steele – some years ago, when I was a law clerk to a federal judge, we had a summer intern who was a law student from a reasonably good 2nd tier law school, and we gave her a habeas petition to work on. So she told me all about how habeas really didn’t make any difference and it was a liberal manipulation that simply disguised the true power relationships in society. I don’t remember the jargon precisely but this was what her left-wing critical legal studies criminal law professor was teaching her – that habeas didn’t make any difference. Now, I suppose in some sense, habeas doesn’t make any difference: the prisons are filled with non-violent drug offenders who don’t belong there. But in another sense habeas is the only thing that stands between us and fascism. And the teacher was not communicating the bedrock protection that habeas guarantees. This was all well before 9/11, but this student had been rendered incapable of defending liberalism from the attacks from the right because she had been instructed only in attacks on liberalism from the left . This wasn’t merely poor teaching – it was pernicious, and the instructor in that class was in my view an evil person.

@155:

Two questions. 1) Have you ever actually thought hard about power relations (and the way that specialized physical sciences might be caught up or contribute to them)? 2) Did you fail to notice how “familiarity with quantitative methods” contributed to the fundamental failures involved in the GFC?

Steve:
You say some professors were teaching–undergraduates–disrespect for truth and objectivity. Who? I’m not talking about incommensurability between two different models for light (who cares), or cultural anthropologists saying the differences between cultures are important to recognize, or late night bull sessions about “existentialism” with the kind of people who put bandannas on their dorm room ceilings, and I’m not talking about trawling the journals and finding analyses that seem absurd. At best I can find a few references (not quite gushing but close), say in the “further reading” sections of books that are often by scholars about as solidly on the left as it’s possible to be, to broad overviews by people with no discernible philosophical or political commitments, claiming that science is emotionally unstable or something and modern objectivity is about to collapse.

I get annoyed, too, by humanities scholars who burnish their claims to “right” thinking by insisting that only Steven Jay Gould can teach the politically correct truth about evolutionary thinking, or who write biographies of scientific figures that confuse individuals’ intelligence with the morality of the future use to which their work would be put. But that is absolutely not relativism.

@ john.c.halasz at #166

I certainly know something about how physical sciences are caught up with our internal power relations, and it’s not a pretty picture. Scientists being comparatively vulgar (and I mean that in a nice way) our power relations are relatively easy to decode. Today, you need only follow the circuitry of money. The subject of the original post here was, how does a research department or administration evaluate faculty performance, and how is teaching valued relative to other kinds of ratings of scholarship? In physical sciences, I would say that this whole process has been very efficiently boiled down: as a faculty at a research school, your status goes with how much overhead funding you’ve pulled in, plain and simple. It’s not that teaching doesn’t register very highly, it’s that it isn’t even connected to the meter. All important judgements about research faculty have effectively been outsourced to the funding agencies. (I exaggerate a bit for brevity, but not nearly as much as you might hope.) I can’t speak for life sciences first hand, but have no reason to believe that the same isn’t true there.

So I agree that human power relations are important, and that studying, appreciating and understanding them is also important. But I think these efforts should be in service to the main goal of getting at reality as best we can; as opposed to (what I think of as) the po-mo view that access to reality will always be so hopelessly compromised that one would be foolish/naive even to try.

Re: realists and the GFC, it’s an interesting question and I will try to address it later. All I will say for the moment is that for financiers, the primary objects they consider are not the patterns of Nature but the behaviors of other people; not “what is this thing’s utility?” but “what will someone else pay for it?”.

@169
Undergraduates and practitioners of the physical sciences and engineering read Critical Inquiry? Surely in our modern, liberal era we are more specialized than that.

Seriously, I doubt Latour writes the same way for the Polytechnique students he teaches some practical sociology, for teachers of sociology to engineering students, or for his colleagues who are philosophers. What is the significance of the fact that an issue on “criticism” can include Latour as well as Wayne Booth and Sander Gilman?

JQ:

To LP and others, it’s the universality[1] among developed capitalist countries of (a) high returns to university education and (b) claims about credentialism that makes me doubt that there a historically conditioned low-level credentialist equilibrium. fn1. Maybe Germany is a counterexample, but I don’t think so.

Part of the problem is that your hypothesis isn’t that well defined. Are you arguing for an objective value of university education per se, or for the objective value of “elite” education, or both? Let me try a concrete example. A law degree does provide high returns, especially in the US. It does so both because law practitioners need the specialized training, and because they need the credential to be allowed to practice. A law firm could not hire somebody without a degree but they could, in line with your argument, approach individuals that have been admitted to a high prestige law school and persuade them to attend a cheaper, lower prestige institution. The problems are obvious: first, the high prestige degree represents a portable and lasting value to the candidate that the law firm cannot compensate for. Second, it also represents a value to the law firm, which can boast the qualification of its attorneys vis a vis its high-paying clients. Once a culture of credentialism is deeply entrenched, it becomes self-propagating. I would argue that in most real-world cases, there is little or no upside for a business to try to ignore the cultural bias and swim against the tide. You are underestimating the degree to which the cultural and institutional framework determines these outcomes. And I would argue that there ARE counterexamples based on different institutional frameworks (and I doubt that Germany is the outlier here and the US the norm).