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| Arthur C. Brooks President American Enterprise Institute |
In today's New York Times, Arthur C. Brooks tells the tale of how he got his correspondence B.A. and M.A. degrees for about $15,000, and how that's all he needed to launch his academic career, which propelled him to a professorship at Syracuse University and, ultimately, to the presidency of The American Enterprise Institute, a conservative Washington, D.C. think tank where Newt Gringrich and former George W. Bush war hawk Paul Wolfowitz have hung their hats.
His argument is the well worn you-don't-need-a-Harvard-education trope to succeed in this country, just drive, discipline, intelligence and desire.
But the real question is whether his correspondence course degree was valuable to him, or could he have succeeded without it?
Thomas Friedman has recently argued in a futurist article that bricks and mortar universities are a thing of the past. The prospect of online professors from Princeton and Stanford and MIT teaching thousands of eager students, hungry for knowledge, from all over the globe will send campus based residential colleges on to the ash heap of educational history.
What could the value of a college degree be? For that matter, when it comes to education, do you really need all those other students and all those teachers at all? Is there any value to a high school education, or is passing the GED exam the "equivalent" of a high school education?
So how do you place value on any academic degree and how do you place value on an education? Of course, the merit badge is quite different from the experience.
Well, there is the value in an institutional/certification sense: Many jobs simply require a college degree, any, college degree and make no distinction between a Harvard degree and a University of Phoenix on line degree. If your school is accredited, you can check off that box: Do you have an B.A.? For the man who worked on the line doing high tech welding at the General Electric plant, the guy who impressed his bosses and was put forward for a management position but was told, no he could not be in management because he did not have a B.A. degree, well, that correspondence course would have done the trick. It would have been worth money and career advancement to him.
Of course, most people would recognize the ridiculous nature of even having that requirement for a management position at a GE plant which makes airplane engines. Would someone who majored in drinking at State U be a better manager than the man who had demonstrated his worth over 15 years at that plant? But that's the stupidity of our thoughtless "human resource" establishment. During war, sergeants receive "battlefield commissions" for demonstrated leadership and worthiness, without having graduated from West Point or officers' candidate school. During war, the Army is concerned with demonstrated leadership, the certification process be damned. Lives are at stake.
Then there is the "cachet" value of a degree from a certain college. Where does a Harvard degree get you that a degree from the University of Wisconsin does not?
There are certain law firms which hire only from Harvard or Yale law schools. But one might ask: Would you really want to work at one of these firms?
Goldman Sacks and other highly competitive financial institutions may recruit only from Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Stanford, but one might ask, given the attrition of new recruits to these companies, is getting a job at one of these pressure cookers really such a plum? Is a job at Goldman a glittering prize, or a poison pill?
Medicine is much more egalitarian. Medicine looks for real talent more than bragging rights. Medical schools realize the process of selecting the freshman class at Harvard is flawed and pretty close to random. But the process of judging college students is better honed. Medical schools can look at college performance to judge who has talent. The most elite medical schools admit students from "no name" colleges, although a preponderance of the class at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons have been drawn from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Brown, Stanford. Out of 150 places in the first year class about 80 are drawn from those schools, but a mix come from of the Swarthmore, Vanderbilt, Berkeley, Smith tier schools, and then there are all those from the NYU, Georgetown, University of Michigan tier and then a few from the University of Maryland, Gettysburg College tier.
The old saw at Cornell was you better look out for the Brooklyn College students--they were admitted for a reason. Which is to say, some of the kids from Princeton got in because they came from Princeton, but the kids from Brooklyn College had to do something to really impress the admissions people.
If you are looking at college as an investment, risk/ benefit proposition, in terms of dollars and cents, it may be worth spending big bucks to go to Harvard, Yale or Princeton, if you are looking for a chance to get your foot in the door at Goldman, but for most jobs, it doesn't matter. But you may get a job interview more readily at Liberty Mutual insurance company if you majored in computer science at Carnegie Mellon than if you majored in economics at Harvard.
In fact, the engineering student from Drexel likely has better job prospects coming out of college than the English major from Harvard. It is not at all clear the engineer from Harvard has a better outlook than the engineer from Drexel.
If you want to go to medical school, any decent college will do, and in fact, you might are better off at the top of your class at Maryland than at the bottom of your class at Princeton. That's why you see so many Princeton grads at Albany or Downstate Medical School rather than at Harvard.
But beyond the cachet of a brand name college, what of the actual experience at a four year residential college? Is there value beyond dollars and cents to that?
"No power point presentation or elegant online lecture can make up for the surprise, the frisson, the spontaneous give-and-take of a spirited open-ended dialogue with another person," says Darryl Thompson, the provost of Pepperdine University.
The Phantom certainly recalls classes at college where that was true in spades, but likely there were only a dozen times over four years where that sort of frisson thing happened in a classroom.
For content heavy courses, especially in the sciences, the classes were large and little to and fro occurred and could just as well been televised or skyped and even as we speak many students at Columbia P&S do not attend lectures but simply look at the lecture on line.
At the Phantom's college, you could sit in the office of your professor and discuss topics, one on one, much as tutors at Oxford and Cambridge do. It was a small college and undergraduates were encouraged to visit professors during office hours. The Phantom well remembers a few electric sessions where the professor asked a question, the Phantom answered, only to be thwarted by another question following from that answer. That was real teaching and learning, but it happened only occasionally.
It was the courses where they taught you how to think, often an English class or a philosophy class, where you had to be there. And when you were there, and watched a professor who had total command of his subject ask the right questions, anticipate the answers and ask the next question, you came out of that class a changed human being and you kept talking about it with classmates for days afterwards.
There were as many bad, dreary, useless, destructive experiences in my college education as there were elevating, exhilarating soul changing experiences, at least if we are talking about only classroom experience.
The thing is, the positive experiences were worth suffering through the bad stuff. That was true for the Phantom, because his parents could afford to send him through an Ivy League college without breaking the bank. His mother worked to pay for his education, and it was affordable to a very middle class family, back in the sixties.
Now, the cost of college education is beyond the means of the middle class family.
The value of a college education in dollars in cents probably only makes sense for those who are not counting pennies.
But the data is not yet available to the public. It is not clear why inflation in college costs have increased 18% over the 5 years between 2006 and 2011 while overall inflation and incomes fell.
The Phantom's father told him, "That college punched your ticket and you got into medical school. That's enough to ask." That is the career argument, but it's not clear that really still holds true across our economy.
The real value of a college education is what changes occur inside the skull of the student, changes the Phantom's father might have dismissed with a harrumph.
But for those lucky few who had that awakening in college, there is no cynical dismissal. The transformation was too real to deny.
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