Mark Taylor makes some astute points about education, college loans, and graduate school in the United States:
The dirty secret of higher education is that without underpaid graduate students to help in laboratories and with teaching, universities couldn’t conduct research or even instruct their growing undergraduate populations. That’s one of the main reasons we still encourage people to enroll in doctoral programs. It is simply cheaper to provide graduate students with modest stipends and adjuncts with as little as $5,000 a course — with no benefits — than it is to hire full-time professors.
In other words, young people enroll in graduate programs, work hard for subsistence pay and assume huge debt burdens, all because of the illusory promise of faculty appointments. But their economical presence, coupled with the intransigence of tenure, ensures that there will always be too many candidates for too few openings.
I have always been a firm believer in acquiring knowledge for knowledge’s sake — a populace educated in liberal arts is one that, for obvious reasons, can contribute to society in general as well as helping the individuals themselves. But the fact remains that the returns on college and graduate school are growing smaller and smaller in exchange for a cost that is steadily increasing.
As I have written before, my generation was repeatedly told that we needed to get a college degree to become successful (at least in middle-class, white-collar terms). So everyone went to college. But as the supply of bachelor’s degrees skyrocketed, the value declined. (Supply and demand, anyone?) The job market was flooded with people with B.A.s in everything from English to history to literature. (Even if our studies would not pertain to our future jobs, our diplomas would supposedly prove that we had the ability to pursue something like a four-year degree seriously.)
In response, many of us chose to go to graduate school to gain a competitive advantage with our M.A.s in English or history or literature. So we were left with thousands of dollars in student-loan debt and degrees that, as Taylor notes, had little practical use. After all, not everyone who goes to graduate school for a degree in something other than law, business, or medicine wants to be a professor (even if there were many of those jobs available).
The solutions are simple. First, not every American should go to college. American culture has wrongly viewed white-collar jobs as inherently superior to blue-collar ones. (How many parents would have reacted with horror if their teenagers announced that they did not want to go to college?) There is nothing wrong with going to a technical school and learning a useful trade. Teenagers with aptitudes and interests in these fields should be helped and encouraged to go there. As Matt Damon’s character points out in “Good Will Hunting,” everything one can learn in college can be found at the local library. Such practices would allocate American society’s resources wisely. A functioning country needs plumbers and engineers along with managers and CEOs. If the demand for college would decrease, so would the cost for those who do study there.
Secondly, no one should go to graduate school for liberal arts in the hopes of helping their careers. More often than not, it is a waste of money. See again the point from “Good Will Hunting.” Graduate school should focus on law, medicine, and business as well as specialized fields like engineering. Programs in liberal arts should be downsized and geared towards a small, select group of high-achieving students who will be primed to take over the small number of professorships that will be available in the future.
As Taylor recommends later in his column, tenure needs to end as well. A lack of competition in any market — from the high-tech industry to higher education — only stifles growth and innovation. Moreover, my generation is suffering from a lack of natural turnover. In companies and lecture halls throughout the country, young workers and professors are unable to advance their careers because those in the older generations are refusing to retire. It is time for this to end. Without higher positions and increasing salaries, we will never be able to get married, raise families, and do all of the things that society needs us to accomplish.
