More and more, entering college students tie their choices of degree program and curriculum to its immediate prospects for employment and salary. Those choices have too often become narrowly utilitarian, and oriented too much to short-term horizons. Too often, they forego a broader education and the valuable skill set offered in the liberal arts. There the focus is more on analytical reading, critical thinking and effective writing about the world from a science, social science, humanities, mathematics and historical perspective. And that provides the kinds of knowledge and skills that make you better and wiser at whatever you choose to do professionally, and in serving your family and community, too. More, it just opens more horizons for exploration and enjoyment, for life-long learning and better understandings.
It’s easy to understand the phenomenon. It also makes some sense, even if only along a very narrow path of thinking and decision making for the here and now. Given the increasingly out-of-reach cost of higher education for low- and middle-income families and students, and given the realities of a struggling economy and the lack of jobs for college graduates, it‘s even more understandable.
The fact that there are now educational research data available that reveal which degree programs and which majors usually command the highest salaries is only fueling the march to misguided notions of a higher education experience and its value. Of course, that is not the purpose of this research and data, but that is the purpose to which it has too often been misappropriated.
A recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education addresses both these issues: the narrow thinking about what constitutes a good education, and the misappropriation of data that supports it. It begins with a hypothetical job interview:
"I'm in it for the money," she explains. "I make all my choices on the basis of how much I can expect to earn. I chose my major based on earnings reports. I applied for this particular position because you pay more than any other company in the region. Actually, I'm a bit sorry that I didn't stop with a two-year degree, since I read in the newspaper last week that I could have made almost as much in my first job with half the time spent on college. I hate thinking about all the time I wasted."
You have no difficulty deciding not to hire this new graduate. The job applicant who arrives talking money first, money only, lacks common sense, and career sense, too. And yet our candid candidate did nothing more than parrot—with chilling accuracy and very recent data—the current national dialogue about what really matters in college.
---“The Narrowing of the American Mind,” by Carol Geary Schneider, The Chronicle of Higher Education (10.22.12)
But Ms. Schneider understands fully the social and economic backdrop for the expansion of this kind of thinking among prospective and new college students. And while she sees great potential value in the broader sets of data that research will produce, she is very concerned about its narrow, short-term application by prospective or new college students. From the article:
With Americans now experiencing acute anxiety over jobs, money, and our larger future, policy analysis and public discussion of higher education—from the White House down—have focused with laser-like intensity on the connections between college and earnings. The U.S. Department of Education has led this effort with its "gainful employment" regulations—ostensibly aimed at for-profit excess, but all too clearly a blunt instrument waiting to be used on all parts of postsecondary education.
Over the past year, numerous wage studies have analyzed which majors correlate with the highest earnings. And last month, the American Institutes for Research [AIR] helped produce an even more finely honed analysis, which ties specific programs—for example, business or health—in specific Tennessee colleges to the wages that graduates earned when they entered the job market. Virginia has announced its own program-level wage-data system, and other states are poised to follow.
The larger development behind the AIR study is the emergence of unit-record systems that can tie together, over time, information about an individual student's educational history and other parts of her postgraduate history, including employment. Speaking only for myself—the Association of American Colleges and Universities has taken no position on unit-record systems—this is potentially a very positive development. Given the importance of higher education to America's ability to compete, we urgently need the capacity to track achievement by individuals, and not just by institution.
There is good reason to worry, however, that if these systems focus on only a few data points—such as students' major fields and salary levels—they will end up distracting attention from the very components that matter most in education: individual opportunity, the health of our democracy, and economic vitality and resilience.
And Ms. Schneider also points up the problems with an approach to higher education that is more likely to fulfill short-term income hopes than the best long-term interest of the individual and the nation. The article, in closing:
The basic problem with the recent spate of wage studies is that they start not with a full analysis of what society needs from its commitment to college, but rather with data sets that are now available and can be correlated…
The fact is that society needs many kinds of talent and knowledge development from the nation's colleges. This is a global century, so wherever a student enrolls and whatever the major, college needs to help build citizens' global intelligence—the knowledge and skills to navigate an era of economic interdependence and cross-cultural intersection. This is a science- and technology-fueled century, so everyone needs science, technology, and mathematical savvy and experience. This is a democracy, so students' ability to engage in collaborative civic problem solving is, in the long run, just as important as their capacity to engage in job-related problem solving. This is an economy where innovation is all-important, so students must develop adaptive and problem-solving skills in addition to critical thinking and quantitative capacities.
In short, whatever students choose as their particular majors, we need to ensure that their choices—majors and core studies combined—help them develop all these capacities. We need to make sure, in short, that college provides students with an opportunity-creating education—a liberal and liberating education—and not just with knowledge specific to a particular field.
Even if we focus strictly on the learning needed for success in the economy, employers who advise the Association of American Colleges and Universities' work on educational quality emphasize that the major is only a part of the job-success equation. What they really want to know, they say, both in national surveys and in focus groups, is whether a graduate can tackle new questions and complex problems. Have graduates developed the capacities and commitment not simply to apply what they learned in their majors, but rather to keep pace with the dizzying pace of change in every field, in organizational ecologies, and in the wider society? Are graduates ready for a lifetime of new learning that will challenge them to make connections across many kinds of evidence and many areas of endeavor?
Wage studies that look only at the graduate's choice of major may well accelerate the narrowing of the American mind at the very moment in history when multidimensional learning—liberal learning—has become essential to success.
[Carol Geary Schneider is president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities.]
Amen, and Amen.
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