The Future Of Education

It is a well-worn maxim that in this country people achieve via education. Its generally true in life; people with a college degree are more prosperous than those without, with some notable exceptions. Americans tend to elevate those who have persevered despite convention - those who have succeeded by their tremendous work ethic and force of will are more respected than those in similar positions who traveled the more direct route.

The truth of the matter is that the number of people who succeed in life solely on their own merit is very small. Society wants to see that degree on your resume. It is important as a symbol that you have made the effort and been through the process, and the reason its important is because the people reading the resume have the same experience and expect it from those they wish to hire. In this respect society has conditioned itself to value education not for education's sake but for the promise of future returns that are only indirectly related to having the degree.

Educational institutions, on the other hand, are fully invested in selling the education for the sake of the education. They have to be, otherwise all the tangential fluff built into achieving an education would be valueless, and then the perceived value of the education would fall short of the experience.

Consider "general education credits." Every four-year public college requires some number of G.E.s to graduate. But G.E.s are just fluff that distract students from the core coursework that leads to the desired degree. Do I really need to learn how to play golf and volleyball to build a SQL query? And how does Music Appreciation or Film or Biology of Aging help me discern project scope? These are not trick questions. Universities bone up on G.E.s so they can justify all manner of expenditures, from professor's salaries to new buildings to overhead and everything in between. If they can't keep pushing the volume of fluff then they would fail to support the need for more and more money from students and taxpayers. In this way public colleges are self-perpetuating redundancies. The critical element to their ability to continue operating within this model is the lie of prestige.

Public colleges compete with each other for the best faculty and the best students. And because people who have previously graduated from those institutions want to raise their own stature, they consider their educational experience superior and seek candidates from the same, creating a perceived value for that institution that can influence perspective students. The value is almost baseless, and yet the university latches on to it as a reason they are better than the next school down the road. They can then say just about anything and expect to receive endless taxpayer dollars, most of which, when you really boil it down, is meaningless to the ultimate goal of the typical student.

But so what? Colleges have been selling the value of the education as-is for generations. Why does anyone care what the actual value is? There are two primary reasons. First is that education is the number-one expense for almost every state in the country. I live in Wisconsin, where the budget for education, including K-12, accounts for a full third of all state expenditures - more than $10 Billion annually! It's no secret that Republicans have been trying to promote alternatives to public schools for more than two decades, but the education lie is so ingrained in the public psyche that liberal scare tactics continue to subdue efforts to privatize K-12 or even allow fundamental choice in where children can go to school. The teacher's union in this state also wields far too much influence, and decades of liberal-mindedness with respect to government provided and controlled education has resulted in the incestuous corruption that is the inevitable end to all such endeavors.

The second reason is that the philosophy of education is changing as economies globalize. All but one of the programmers around me are either from India or Bangladesh. In those countries the competition for a quality life is so severe that young people are focused like a laser on achievement. Distractions lead to failure, and that includes wasting time taking G.E.s. As our workforce looks for the best candidates for today's skilled jobs, foreign talent is often given priority consideration, and justifiably so. Four-year colleges are not built to fuel this workforce, and the academic elite often work actively against it. Technical schools were supposed to offer this alternative, but society does not treat an Associate's Degree as having equivalent value to a Bachelor's Degree, regardless of what is actually learned.

The new battleground is secular private colleges. The University of Phoenix is not going away, and its scaring the pomp and circumstance out of the public institutions. Today on NPR the lead story was about the increased enrollment at for-profit colleges. There is a fierce demand right now among people who are looking to get an education without all the fluff and get into the workforce and on with their lives, and as community colleges fill up, private colleges are opening more doors. This is an obvious threat to the status quo; government does not control these and as a result loses some of its control over the people who attend them. More disturbing is the thick fabric of elitism that has been cultivated among academia for hundreds of years does not exist at private educational institutions, where professors and administrators are employees, and subject to the demands of the business of education instead of the fantasy of public institutions imbuing students with great knowledge and wisdom, almost as if by osmosis.

The NPR report was predictably negative toward the University of Phoenix. They brought out an "Expert on education" - and we know she's an expert because she wrote a book about it - who said, "There's no incentive to provide a quality education." Now if by "education" she was referring to the style-over-substance approach employed liberally by major public universities, then she's probably right. But the intent of the sound byte was to say that what students are taught at for-profits is not as good as their public counterparts.

Only a liberal could try to make this argument, because liberals always fail to trust the market force of competition. Every time. In fact, the opposite is true - it's public colleges and professors with tenure who have absolutely zero incentive to teach their students anything useful. Once you commit to a particular source of education you as the consumer have absolutely no control or influence over the quality of that education. And since the supply of education is rationed by the state, perspective students are limited in choice, and must either settle for what's available or pay significantly more to try to go out of state. In a real sense, the NPR "expert" was using the tired old liberal trick of attacking her enemy by using what she knows to be the fatal flaws of her ally. This is so when her opponents say her argument is ridiculous she can dismiss it out of hand.

The biggest problem liberals have right now is that they cannot meet the demand, and by their own words cannot risk denying someone an opportunity for education, so private colleges like the University of Phoenix will continue to expand enrollment and also lure quality teachers whose interest extends beyond academic elitist cronyism away from public institutions. The balance of education is slowly shifting, and for the better.

In the long run the result will be a better skilled, more equipped American workforce to compete globally in the 21st Century. It will also mean less reliance on the state, and less direct control by liberals over developing minds through curriculum. And beyond just the educational considerations it should translate directly to government spending restraint as the shift moves more toward private and away from public funding of higher education. At least it ought to.

These are all excellent goals worth fighting for, and one of the main reasons why all is not lost in America.