The Purpose of Higher Education and the Myth of Job Training

By Julian Dunraven, J.D., M.P.A.   

If you ask almost anyone why they would go to college, the answer is likely to be that they value the better career options they believe going to college offers.  They would be right to say so.  Studies consistently show that those with college educations tend to earn more money over a lifetime than those without college education.  Unfortunately, this seems to reinforce the widespread and erroneous belief that college is or should be job training.  

 

These days, any new college applicant who announces a major in the Arts—or even Sciences—will inevitably face endless fretting from family and friends over what to do with such a study, followed by suggestions for something more “practical,” like Engineering or Business instead.  The assumption is that one’s field of study should translate directly into career utility.  Even some otherwise esteemed professors, like Dr. Bryan Caplan of George Mason University’s Economics Department, now lament that the faculties of higher education are woefully bereft of “real world experience,” and might serve the career training function better if they were forced to get real jobs themselves.  

Caplan points out that academics, insulated within the Ivory Tower of universities, provide incredibly poor training in skill acquisition through their lectures.  He further insists that the format of academia (going to class at will, turning in a few papers, and taking a final exam) is nearly useless for teaching good work habits.  He also reminds us of enormous piles of evidence demonstrating that professors and classroom lectures often do not teach people how to think so much as how to parrot the professor.  Instead, he argues that higher education merely serves a signaling function to employers, something I would call a gauntlet proving, that a prospective employee knows how to put in the required work and follow directives.  

For a student merely looking to find employment, what one studies at university is almost irrelevant.   In the end, nothing really matters save that you have the diploma that proves you ran the gauntlet while others did not or could not.  A student so tested by a university, will then be hired by an employer. Actual job skills will be learned on the job through experience.  That signaling function, as Caplan points out, does indeed mean that greater career success is a consequence of higher education, but it is not the purpose or intent of higher education itself, and does not mean professors should reorient themselves to that function.  While Caplan is quite correct that higher education provides poor career training, he entirely misses the point of higher education in general—as do most people.

It is true that most people are unlikely to ever directly use courses in History, Philosophy, or Anthropology during their careers.  But they were never intended to be so utilitarian.  Indeed, the notion of college as career training is quite modern, and grows out of the same Progressive movement that first shaped public education into the K-12 system originally designed to train factory workers.  Higher Education was intended for a different type of social engineering.    

College is supposed to help those charged with governing society, whether they are professionals, business executives, government agents—or simple citizens. It should provide an understanding of the government, the culture, its social bonds and markets, and its exalted principles. It should give these community leaders the tools to understand the problems people have faced before, are facing, and will face, as well as provide ideas for how to solve some of those problems through a breadth of understanding and cross disciplinary research. To do this, however, requires that colleges actually believe in something, and that professors actually profess truth. Our modern universities largely reject universal principles or truth, and discount the idea of universal ethics, instead promoting a banal multiplicity of perspectives—to no apparent end. Thus, its moral worth eliminated, higher education is left with the meager utility for job training. This is a tragedy.  

What use is studying Rome, the British Empire, and the American experiment to the mere job of a modern business executive who finds it much more useful to study marketing? We know the answer to that only when we see the ignorance and apathy of the people faced with the collusion of government and social media companies to accommodate universal surveillance, not just in China, but here in the U.S.A. Does this violate the Constitution and basic human freedom?  Certainly. But what earthly use is the Constitution, anyway, when we know the utility of safety and of government favor? 

This is not training for mere careers; it is training for being moral leaders among the citizenry.  It is the necessary statesmanship required for the survival of any republic.  Such education is necessary, not to teach individuals how to function in business, but what vigilance they need to keep over their society and government to do business at all.  

Some might object that exploring such concepts is best done by the professions, where knowledge specialization is vital, and it is easy to see the connection between curriculum and the associated career paths.  Those who go onto become professors and researchers, attorneys, or physicians quite reasonably engage in esoteric study, but the rest of society should focus on being productive.   Once we isolate such knowledge though, who would ever heed whatever wisdom it could offer?  If the intellectual elite only spoke to one another, what real influence would they have on society?  They rely upon undergraduates to study their ideas, and bring them out into the citizenry.  These students then disseminate their knowledge to their associates, providing an ethical framework for their businesses, perspective on the role of government to friends and family, and a better understanding of the framework of society itself, by which we protect our fundamental principles.  

I happen to be one of those professors Caplan so admires; beyond my academic career, I have a “real” job as a business attorney.  I am sure this experience adds some welcome flavor to my classes. Yet, I did not start teaching because I thought people needed better job training.  Indeed, the most job training I have ever seen anyone take from college is a thorough knowledge base; they invariably get their actual skills in employment.  Rather, I began teaching because I noticed such a profound lack of ethics and moral reasoning in the workforce, as well as complete ignorance of the history and governing principles that afforded them the opportunity to pedal their labor at all.  These ideas do not develop from skill training, but from those anti-utilitarian subjects like History, Philosophy, and Political Science.  This is the sort of thing managers and executives—college graduates— are supposed to be instilling into their staff and corporate culture, but it is largely absent.

I am the first to admit, however, that colleges are failing in this vital duty.  Our bizarre notion of higher education as job training has resulted in an equally erroneous idea that everyone should thus go to college.  Such universalism destroys the ability of colleges to convey the few skills they should be instilling (such as research, analytics, writing, communication, etc.) as they are forced to lower standards to matriculate the masses.  Moreover, fueled by an endless supply of printed student loan money ready to fund anyone who wants to attend, the colleges no longer have to offer courses of substance or principle at all, but are free to indulge in whimsical nonsense.  Indeed, for most students, who care nothing for education, and have no incentive to care about the value of their tuition, but merely seek to earn their diplomas to enter the workforce, the absurd classes without accountability are the most appealing. 

This is all, of course, profoundly wrong.  Even so, the solution is not to capitulate, and call for professors to be better job trainers.  Rather, we might think of cutting off the free flowing federal student loans.  It would limit the population to those who would serve as true opinion leaders, those who truly valued education enough to put effort into getting there. More, it would restore accountability to the universities, lower the bloated tuition, and vastly improve standards all in one blow.

I agree that higher education has devolved into wretchedness.  I agree that it is now provides such limited utility that it is reduced to a signaling function for employment. What breaks my heart is that its own denizens have now come to see job training as its purpose!  What else is there, they ask? Only the very body and soul of human liberty.