Showing posts with label John Kenneth Galbraith. Show all posts
Showing posts with label John Kenneth Galbraith. Show all posts

Tuesday, April 3, 2018

Don't Go To College, Says Kurt Schlichter; And By God, He May Be Right!

Kurt Schlichter wrote a sprightly essay for Townhall last month, arguing vigorously that young people should just skip college. "What passes for 'education' today is nothing of the sort," Schlichter writes, "and what calls itself 'academia' is really just a venal trade guild packed with mediocrities desperately trying to keep fooling people into forking over $60,000 a year--usually obtained via ruinous borrowing that ties a financial anchor around the defrauded grads' necks for the rest of their lives."

Who can disagree? As Schlichter says, "much of academia's product is largely garbage," particularly in the liberal arts. People are now graduating with English degrees without having read Shakespeare, or without knowing how to spell Shakespeare, for that matter.

Of course higher education argues ad nauseam that a degree in liberal arts has some intrinsic worth. As John Kenneth Galbraith put it years ago:
Education is, most of all, for the enlargement and the enjoyment of life. It is education that opens the window for the individual on the pleasures of language, literature, art, music, the diversities and idiosyncrasies of the world scene. The well-educated over the years and centuries have never doubted their superior reward; it is greater educational opportunity that makes general and widespread this reward.
 But who believes that anymore? Administrators at small liberal arts colleges purr seductively about the value of a liberal education while they lay off history professors to beef up their MBA programs-where the real money is. And ever so earnestly, they defend inflated tuition prices even as they discount their tuition rates by half.

Really, why pay good money for a liberal arts degree? Why study American literature if professors cannot identify a canon of great American writers? Why read Faulkner, Hawthorne, Henry James, Melville, or Fitzgerald if the English faculty writes them all off as a bunch of dead, white, misogynistic and racist males?

And in truth, I would not advise a young person to invest much time in reading William Faulkner or Henry James. Or Steinbeck, for that matter, although The Grapes of Wrath speaks to me as a great book, probably because I am a descendant of Okies.  

In fact, American writers are still writing great books, maybe better books than the ones our old professors said we must read. T.C. Boyle's Tortilla Curtain is as searing a book as you will ever read about being a despised refugee in America, every bit as good as The Grapes of Wrath. And although The Great Gatsby may be the great American novel, Tom Wolf's Bonfire of the Vanities, a more contemporary tale, describes the emptiness of wealth just as movingly as Fitzgerald's classic.

Today, American society has become so diverse that it makes no sense to argue that there are great American novels that everyone should read or even an accepted narrative of American history that everyone should learn. I read Marquis James' Pulitzer Prize winning biography of Andrew Jackson and was convinced Jackson was a great American. But we may take Old Hickory off the $20 bill; and if we do, he won't be coming back.

I read Douglas Southall Freeman's multi-volume biography of Robert E. Lee and concluded that General Lee was a decent man. But New Orleans ripped Lee's statue of its pedestal at Lee's Circle, and Lee definitely won't be coming back. 

Maybe we should all construct our own personal canon of great books, our own personal narrative of history.  As a Catholic, for example, I consider the Philadelphia Bible Riots every bit as important as the so-called Boston Massacre, but few people would agree with me. And for me, the great coming-of-age novel is not Catcher in the Rye by that sleazebag J.D. Salinger, but Richard Bradford's Red Sky at Morning, a book about being young in northern New Mexico during World War II.

But if we are all free to construct our own canon of literature and our own narrative of history, which liberal arts professors are basically arguing we should do, then why the hell should we pay sixty grand a year for our kids to attend some moldy liberal arts college in the upper Midwest?

Because the colleges need your money, I suppose. And if you don't have sixty grand, don't worry. The government is quite willing to loan it to you.

References

Kurt Schlichter. Don't Go To College, Townhall, March 22, 2018.



Tuesday, April 11, 2017

Why borrow money to get a college education? John Kenneth Galbraith, education and The Good Society

More than 40 million Americans are burdened by student loans; and collectively, they hold $1.4 trillion in student-loan debt. A great many of these people are finding it difficult to repay what they borrowed. Last year, Americans defaulted from the government's direct lending program at the rate of 3,000 a day. About 8 million people  are in default on their loans. Almost 6 million are unable to repay their loans over the standard 10-year repayment period and have enrolled in income-driven repayment plans that stretch their monthly payments over 20 or 25 years.

Why should Americans go into debt to get a college education? Is a college degree so valuable that it makes sense to borrow money to get one--even when it might take a person a quarter of a century to repay the debt?

The higher education industry argues ad nauseam that workers with college degrees make more money than people who have no degrees--about a million dollars on average over their working lifetimes. But of course, this bald statement does not explain why going to college has gotten so expensive or why a college degree is useful beyond its power to raise lifetime income.

John Kenneth Galbraith: Education and The Good Society

About 20 years ago, John Kenneth Galbraith wrote a book titled The Good Society. Galbraith defined the good society as a society in which  "all of its citizens . . .  have personal liberty, basic well-being, racial and ethnic equality,[and] the opportunity for a rewarding life" (p. 4).

Galbraith argued that the achievement and sustenance of a good society depends on education. He devoted a chapter of his book to education, which, Galbraith wrote, was valuable in three senses.

A. Economic value of education

First, Galbraith acknowledged that education has economic value not only for the individual but for society as a whole. At the personal level, education enables individuals to raise their economic status.

To make this point, Galbraith pointed to the upward mobility of European migrants during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Most of these immigrants arrived in the United States in utter poverty; yet by the second or third generation, their descendants had scrambled into the middle class.

This remarkable achievement was made possible, Galbraith argued, by education. "For upward escape, either by the individual or by his or her children, education is the decisive agent," Galbraith wrote.

But education is also critical to society as a whole, Galbraith continued, because it contributes to societal stability. "For one thing,' Galbraith wrote, "education has a vital bearing on social peace and tranquility; it is education that provides the hope and the reality of escape from the lower, less-favored social and economic strata to those above."

B. Intrinsic value of education

Galbraith then went on to articulate the intangible rewards of education:
Education is, most of all, for the enlargement and the enjoyment of life. It is education that opens the window for the individual on the pleasures of language, literature, art, music, the diversities and idiosyncrasies of the world scene. The well-educated over the years and centuries have never doubted their superior reward; it  is greater educational opportunity that makes general and widespread this reward.
In this passage, Galbraith summarized perhaps what academicians across the country have been saying for years--that higher education, and liberal arts education in particular, enhances the quality of our lives.

C. Education is an indispensable component of a modern and complex democratic society


 Finally, Galbraith argued persuasively that education is necessary to maintain a modern and complex democratic society. As societies advance economically and accept more and more responsibility for social welfare, Galbraith wrote, the problems of government become more complex and diverse.
There must then be either a knowledgeable electorate intellectually abreast of these issues and decisions or a more or less total delegation of them to the state and its bureaucracy. Or there must be surrender to the voices of ignorance and error. These, in turn, are destructive of the social and political structure itself.
Further, Galbraith wrote, education not only makes democracy possible, it also makes it necessary. Democracy "is the natural consequence of education and economic development," he argued, because there is no other practical design for governing people, who because of their educational attainments, expect to be heard and cannot be kept in silent subjugation."

American higher education today is eroding The Good Society

I think almost everyone would agree with Galbraith that education has both economic and intrinsically life-enriching  benefits. But let's look at the state of higher education today--20 years after Galbraith wrote The Good Society.

First, the federal government allows for-profit colleges and schools to prey on unsophisticated young Americans, particularly those who are socioeconomically disadvantaged.  Millions have taken out student loans to pay for educational experiences that are overpriced and often do not lead to good jobs.  Consequently, students who attended for-profit schools have a five-year default rate of 47 percent. Meanwhile, many of the schools themselves have been charged with fraud.

Even reputable private liberal arts colleges are charging more for a liberal arts degree than the degree is worth in economic terms. It is simply indefensible for someone to pay $150,000 to $200,000 to get a four-year degree in history, English, sociology or philosophy.  People who borrow to attend these expensive institutions are often unable to pay off their loans over 10 years and are forced into income-driven repayment plans that obligate them to make loan payments for 20 and even 25 years. For these people, higher education was not a liberating experience; rather it became the instrument by which they became economically enslaved.

Perhaps more importantly, contemporary higher education has morphed into a distorted version of its former character. Today, students shout down speakers who espouse disfavored points of view on political or social issues. Our civilization's heritage of literature, history and philosophy are disparaged and dismissed as irrelevant and even racist.

Indeed, students now think they are more qualified to decide what is important to study than their professors.  At the University of Pennsylvania, for example, students took down an image of Shakespeare and replaced it with the photo of Audre Lorde an obscure black female writer.

Will Lorde's photo remain in a place of honor indefinitely? Not likely. The incoming freshman class may decide that another writer is more important than Shakespeare or Lorde.  

And if the freshman class chooses to discard Lorde's photo for another writer--perhaps someone who has more "likes" on Facebook--who are the faculty to demure? After all, students at some colleges are paying about $5,000 a seat to attend an undergraduate class. Shouldn't they have the absolute right to dictate what it is they want to study?

Tragically, education and the good society have become uncoupled. In fact, in some sort of bizarre reversal, education may now be eroding the Good Society rather than nurturing it.


John Kenneth Galbraith: some old white guy whose work you need not read


References

John Kenneth Galbraith. The Good Society: The Humane Agenda. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996.

Olivia Sylvester. Students remove Shakespeare portrait in English dept., aiming for inclusivityDaily Pennsylvanian, December 11, 2016.