Jill Lepore is a professor of history at Harvard University and a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine. In an interview, she describes how she almost left academia because of her dislike of the entire ethos that existed there. The last paragraph is telling.
I teach at a university where the preponderance of our undergraduates go into finance, consulting, and tech jobs that they are recruited for almost the moment that they arrive in Cambridge, and whose time, instead of being devoted to academics, is devoted to securing positions in those industries. The pleasing of their parents, and the pleasing of those students, is the economic engine of the college and therefore of the university, in a way that I do not think is consistent with what a university is for. There are universities now that are creating centers for open inquiry. What is a university if not a center for open inquiry? Why would we need such a center? That anyone suggests such a center should raise a lot of eyebrows.
One can understand that given the high cost of a college education in the US, students (and their parents) worry about getting a job after they graduate that will enable them to get out of debt. But many of the students who go to elite universities like Harvard already come from wealthy families who do not have that worry. For them, they see an elite college education as merely a ticket to rise even higher up the socio-economic ladder.
I am reading at the moment Bertrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy. In it he says that back in the days of the ancient Greek philosophers, many of them were itinerant teachers and students would pay them directly for their teaching, though some philosophers would teach for free. Since there were no grades and credentials awarded, the motivation for the students must have been simply the desire to learn from those they considered wise and knowledgeable.
I must say that it made me wistful to think that in the modern age, we may not be able to recover that attitude in academia. We seem to have gone too far down the road into making universities into one more branch of the corporate, capitalist world. Of course, the world where people are willing to pay simply to learn still exists but is outside universities. People are willing to pay for classes and courses to get knowledge and learn skills for which no grades are awarded, simply because of the desire to know or to be able to do things.
In my own teaching career, I often encountered faculty members who had become cynical about students, seeing them as only interested in grades. I did not share that attitude. I always went into my classes assuming that students were there because they wanted to learn and taught accordingly, with as few requirements as I could get away with, consistent with the overall policies of the university. Although I am sure that some students came into my courses merely seeking a grade, I refused to further feed that mindset and I hope I was able to change a few attitudes.
Nearly fifty years ago now.
Because I am a boomer, I was able to pay for my college degree with my newspaper route money. Most of my fellow students were paid for by their rather wealthy parents who could have paid for a better university than San José State University, but their womb-squirtings could not and did not qualify.
SJSU started out as a normal college, so it had a relatively large general education requirement even for someone like me whose major was a science degree. (I could have gotten any number of humanities fields as a minor by taking one more class just for existing at SJSU and getting any degree of any kind) I met a wide cross section of the students there.
What you are seeing and saying is nothing new. They were there as an expression of their privilege, didn’t understand the POV of someone who was literally paying their own tuition because they had to and might want to get value out of it, and to get that ‘Mercedez Benz milage grillbadge’ equivalent that is a diploma. Many of them tried for harder degrees (that they weren’t interested in) and ended up in English, Business, or Psychology (that they weren’t interested in) because ‘actually learning something’ was irrelevant.
I would say instead that universities were the privilege markers in the US for a good long while, and only became for learning when Sputnik was launched. That particular battle is now over and we’re now importing all our scientists, coders, and engineers. So return to the status quo.
Nearly 40 years ago, Gen X at nothing-fancy state U: thanks in part to St. Ronnie Raygun ripping funding from schools, the average student would have to work 900 hours at minimum wage just to pay for the semester*, when the previous generation had free tuition. Semesters were 16 weeks (15 weeks of instruction + 1 week of finals). Working fulltime 40 hours/week x 16 weeks is only 640 hours--therefore, even working fulltime during the semesters wasn’t enough simply to pay tuition. Books and incidentals (parking, meal plans, etc.) added to the cost. Even with some petty scholarships and grants, I often worked 60 hours/week at a patchwork of part-time, no-benefit jobs--pretty much year-round.
Given the cost of college, most people were focused on getting a degree that would net them a good job afterwards. The problems Gen X had were that the first half of the cohort graduated into St. Ronnie’s recession, and even when things improved, the massive block of the Boomers ahead of us meant we couldn’t even get hired at starting rates, so we were called “slackers” for taking what McJobs we could get--bookstores, record stores, temp workers, etc.
It’s not any better now, which is one reason the more focused students are focused on majors that will lead them to jobs.
* I did have friends who went to San Diego State (SDSU) and and the U of CA at San Francisco (UCSF) and they paid something goofy like 30/credit hour, so a standard 15-credit-load semester would be $450 (225 hours of work), with incidentals added.
i taught physics as an adjunct at two different midwest universities. a vast majority of students were there to learn. but there was talk amongst the faculty that we were seeing more and more students going for the grade, with the rational that since they are paying, they should get A’s and a degree. also, more and more parents were calling to ask why their child got a C on a test or whatever. in my day (Gen X) that was unheard of.
When you’re dealing with these “elite” universities, it’s very often not even really about the grade -- it’s about networking and recruitment. You want a job in finance, you go to somewhere like the London School of Economics -- not for the education, but because that’s where the big players go to get their interns, and a good internship is the key to unlocking a high-flying career. Importantly, the recruitment for internships happens before any grades are awarded, and is mostly on the basis of personal connections and extra-curricular activities.
The way in which these institutions function as recruitment centres for powerful and well-paid jobs, and how that process works, is an important element of Gary Stevenson‘s book The Trading Game. He came from a poor, working-class background, went to LSE and did very well, but he only managed to get the internship that was critical to his career by winning a card game organised by Citibank.
@3, Robbo, for Gen X--at least in the USA--there was a PSA on tv at 10 pm to remind parents that they *had* children, and to ask themselves if they knew where those kids were. The parents weren’t hand-holding their kids or calling the schools about grades. A lot of Gen X heard a variation of, “When you’re18, you’re out of the house. I don’t care where you go--the military, college, jail, whatever.” I don’t remember my university days as being so much about grades as simply about passing and getting credit for the class.
As for it leading to jobs, in my first job out of college, I worked with an MIT grad. It occurred to me that we were both doing the same job and getting paid the same. Then again, MIT is more of a tech-y school and not so much a place to go to network.
Again, in the USA, there is a cohort that goes to a particular university because of their sports programs. They hope to win the proverbial lottery by getting selected by a professional sportsballs team.
I’m regularly infuriated by attitudes like the one in the post. I’m pretty sure there did exist, briefly, a halcyon age where anyone who wanted to (and who met the extremely rigorous intellectual requirements) could go to university and study a subject that inspired them.
That time was over before I first applied to go to university in 1987. At that time, university fees for qualifying UK students were paid for by the state. On top of that, you could get a maintenance grant to pay for your food and rent and books and stuff while you were studying, so you didn’t have to get a job and could concentrate (leading to the joke: “What’s green and takes a week to drink? A grant cheque.”). But even with all that in place, a poor working class student such as myself didn’t have the luxury of studying something like English Literature or Classics or other things I would class as hobbies. University was the only place you could get the kind of qualification that would get you into a profession -- medicine, law, engineering. There were of course students who did do the “hobby” subjects, but it didn’t take even my naive self long to notice there was a common factor among the ones who did -- independent wealth. These people didn’t really care what they did for a job after graduation -- daddy would sort that out when the time came. There was the very occasional exception, working class kids who had been conned onto a course that ended with the word “studies”, and those people usually ended up becoming teachers because they couldn’t get the jobs they’d been told about when applying (since those are heavily policed by the independently wealthy).
Tories cut grants and introduced loans and tuition fees. Tony Blair insisted more and more people “needed” to go to university -- one of his view malign legacies for this country -- so standards dropped, institutions and courses multiplied, and inequality meant that the practical upshot was just that millions more poor working class people found themselves with a lifetime of debt and nothing worthwhile to show for it.
Academia still exists, but it exists close to the form it had when the word was coined -- a luxury good just for those who can already afford it. There is a tiny minority of working class people who manage, from time to time, to slip through the barricades and into upward mobility, but more and more those doors are being closed by the wealthy.
The dependence of universities on the ability to charge huge fees to international students mean it isn’t even our own home-grown super-rich who are crowding poor kids out of a higher education -- it’s well-heeled foreigners who see a degree from a western university as having some cachet. You can’t blame the institutions for securing their continued existence by following the money.
As I say -- there was a fairly brief window, roughly between world war 2 and the elections of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, where society at least tried to bring about meritocracy, and offered an academic education to people able to appreciate it and offered employment opportunities to people with that background that didn’t involve the phrase “do you want fries with that?”. Those two and the ones who followed them put paid to that. The aftermath will outlive me.
@6 sonof…
For many years now, when someone complains to me about how lousy things are (in comparison to what they could be or were), I always answer with “Thank Ronald Reagan”. I guess I should add MT, but that wouldn’t resonate so much on this side of the pond. Never forget that RR was the person who mainstreamed the idea that government is always bad (starting with his infamous “nine most terrifying words”: I’m from the government and I’m here to help). He is directly responsible for the widespread anarcho-capitalist ethos we see today. These are folks who see government as having a single job: maintaining a military that will keep the world in line so that corporations can safely make profits.
QFT -- but police as much as military. Inside every “libertarian” and “anarcho-capitalist” is a fascist just itching to come out.
@KG, 8:
Two observations:
To anyone from a civilised country, given the way they’re equipped and the way they operate and have done for years, police in the US are functionally indistinguishable from the military forces of an occupying power, especially if your skin isn’t pale enough.
And in case you’ve not been following the news, the current government is actively engaged into trying to deploy the actual military to carry out police work within US borders. Granted there’s pushback… but THE GOVERNMENT ARE TRYING, and I for one wouldn’t bet against them getting their way at some point.
The university has become nothing more than corporate training, in the past done by the company which had just hired you. Most, but not all required nothing more than a high school diploma. Now that training cost has been shifted to the state and students themselves. The universities’ admission screening now serves as corporate America’s pre-employment screening. They’re drawn to the ivies’ students because they’ve already done the screening work for them.
Now we’re seeing unpaid internships as well. So you pay for your corporate training, and then for your employment as well.