the purpose of a college degree

There is so much talk about the importance of a college education that it was interesting to see an article critical of college education, "Higher Education Conformity" by Barbara Ehrenreich. She uses as her starting point the case of Marilee Jones, who by all accounts was an outstanding administrator at MIT. But it came to light that she lied about holding three degrees, so MIT terminated her. Ehrenreich concludes that the real purpose of higher education is to teach conformity and saddle students with debt so they will be complacent workers.

I'm not really in agreement with Ehrenreich here, though she does bring up some good points. I did especially enjoy this statement: "Whatever else you learn in college, you learn to sit still for long periods while appearing to be awake. And whatever else you do in a white collar job, most of the time you'll be sitting and feigning attention."

There is, I believe, a fundamental contradiction at the heart of American higher education. One force is the dedication to education, which primarily means liberal education in the classical sense. That is, learning about the world in a way that is appropriate for free citizens, which in past eras was not the majority of the population. The other opposing force is training for technical and professional employment; these are more limited in their scope. Another way to look at the tension is between abstract and specific knowledge--liberal education is abstract, and professional education is specific.

In the US, we have basically one mechanism for delivering post-secondary education, and that is the 4-year college or university. (Community colleges are largely seen as a stepping-stone to a 4-year degree, not as an end in themselves.) The professional education is in greater demand, so it tends to swallow up the liberal education aspect. At the same time, professional students are forced to suffer through general (liberal) education classes.

This contradiction--or overloading of the university system--is, I believe, responsible for the related unsavory trends of managing universities like corporations and treating students as consumers. But back to Ehrenreich: when thinkers first began to suggest universal education, during the Industrial Revolution in Europe, the explicit goal was to prepare students to be cogs in a machine. This influence remains with us today and further complicates discussions of the purposes and problems of education.

Even so, I feel that making education available to everyone is the proper thing to do, but Ehrenreich is correct that not every job requires a 4-year degree.