America's education problem

I've been reading (and writing) a lot lately about the increasing failures of the American education system, and the reasons behind those failures. I previously posted a video with Ken Robinson addressing the roots of the problem, and I also wrote at length about the impacts of student loan debt, the shortcomings of the "liberal arts" approach, our attempts to throw money at the problem, and the unintended consequences of those actions.

It's a topic that's clearly gaining more traction by the day, and one that is also the subject of a new documentary from Davis Guggenheim. Our education problem is a complex one, one that forces us to ask hard questions about ourselves and what we are actually educating people to do.

In that vein, I was incredibly drawn to this op-ed in the National Post (Canada), written by author George Jonas. The whole thing is worth a read (as is often the case here, it's not an article that is easily excerpted), but I'll try to give the gist of his argument.

A reader wants to know why the educational system that served him so well in England and Canada 50 years ago is letting down today’s graduates so badly. As a post-doctoral fellow, he writes, he arrived in Canada, debt-free, with offers to do research in any field he fancied, or just about. A graduate today may not only be debt-ridden, but forced to take a job in a laundromat because s/he can’t find academic employment. “What has changed in 50 years to make things so much worse?” Mr. T. wants me to tell him.

Mr. T’s question reminds me of the alchemist’s dilemma. In medieval Europe, alchemists spent an inordinate amount of time trying to turn base metals into gold. It was a foolish quest, not only because it couldn’t be done, but because success would have defeated its purpose. Had alchemists managed to do what they set out to accomplish, gold would have become valueless.

Something close to it happened to education, I believe. Having discovered the economic value of diplomas, social engineers reacted to it like alchemists reacted to the economic value of gold. Since PhDs earn more money than high school dropouts, they reasoned, why not turn as many high school dropouts as possible into PhDs?

It seemed like a good idea at the time. Perhaps it was, but as a result we’ve proportionately more job applicants in relation to the post-doctoral positions available today than we’ve had high-school dropouts looking for agricultural or construction jobs 50 years ago.

Educating people for economic advantage diminishes the economic advantage of education. That’s why we see PhDs slinging hamburgers every so often, and can expect to see more as time goes by.

Jonas is definitely onto something. We've got an educational system that is producing more college graduates every year, and yet Guggenheim's documentary argues that this generation will be less literate than the generation before it.

What we've seen is not a better educated population, but a process of academic inflation (appropriate, since we're seeing inflation everywhere these days). An undergraduate degree today is what a high school education was 40 years ago, much like a movie ticket used to cost a dollar and a Coke used to cost a quarter. An increase in the number of dollars doesn't necessarily imply an increase in real wealth, and an increase in the number of degrees granted doesn't necessarily imply an increase in actual intelligence or capability. We've simply changed the meaning of the degree.

I think this has serious implications for potential fixes to the educational system. Simply getting more people to go to college isn't necessarily doing anything. As Jonas writes, "Advantage derives from rarity, for minds no less than metals. That’s the juncture where gold and learning meet. Award PhDs until they become as common as brass, and their value will decline until they’ll be worth no more than brass — maybe less, because PhDs can’t be used for bathroom taps or doorknobs."

Well put.


[National Post]