We live in turbulent times for higher education.
Some have proposed that this turbulence has arisen from a perceived lack of value. Simply put, people—and especially people in their late teens—don’t value college anymore. But a simple thought experiment will show that this is false. Imagine any young person you know, including those who have, in fact, opted not to attend college, and ask them this question: “Would you attend college if it were free?” Pose this question to their parents, too, slightly modified: “Would you send your child to college if it were free?” The overwhelming answer, I’d be willing to bet, is “Of course! Sign us up!” (That’s how the parents would respond, anyway. Their children would probably say, “Fire! I’d be delulu not to!”)
So college has value. But maybe it doesn’t have much value, especially compared to the cost. College isn’t cheap in any of its forms. Some have proposed that, when compared to the relative increase in lifetime earning power that comes with your degree, the math just doesn’t make sense. However, the evidence doesn’t bear this out. Historically, college graduates end up earning more than their non-degreed peers and more than enough to pay back any loans they might have taken out to pay for their education. SNC in particular boasts an extremely low loan default rate, which means that our graduates get out into the world and get jobs that are enough to live on and repay their loans.
So college has value, and even if we narrow our concern to financial value, the historical data strongly suggests your degree is worth the money. The problem, I aver, is not a value problem or a money problem. It’s a history problem. More precisely, we are losing our trust in history, our confidence that the future will continue to be like the past. This is likely for many reasons, political and economic uncertainty among them. Much of the source of this uncertainty is—or at least should be—fueled by artificial intelligence. The technology that promised us talking refrigerators and robot vacuum cleaners now threatens to disrupt a capitalist system based on the value of work by making work obsolete.
Attending college in such a world is an act of courage. You are betting on humanity and yourselves. You are defying the Rise of the Machines and the Evangelists of Transhumanism. You are declaring that human beings have value no matter what, and that making the most of your human mind and its capacities is one of the best things you can do with yourself. Is joining the SNC community, including the Honors community, a smart move? I think it is. Is it the right move? I know it is.
Thank you, each and every one of you, for making the right move. Thank you for braving the turbulence and having the courage for college.
I am very glad to see the issue of the turbulent state of education being discussed here. Over the past three years of being a student at St. Norbert College, I have also been pondering why education has become so volatile today. As such, this discussion is very important to me, so in the spirit of philosophical investigation, I want to contribute some of my thoughts in response to this essay. In particular, I want to address the point of whether or not students would attend college if it were free. While I do think some people would opt to attend college if it were free, I believe that many others would still elect not to pursue higher education due to the high effort and total economic cost in exchange for relatively low perceived value.
The idea of knowledge acquisition requiring high effort was discussed as early as Plato. Through his famous cave allegory in the Republic, Plato illustrates how learning is painful by comparing the process of learning to looking toward the sun (Plato 1133). In the cave allegory, the prisoners in the cave, confined to their flawed perceptions of reality symbolized by shadows on the wall, are only able to see the true nature of reality by leaving the cave and looking toward the source of these false shadows, the sun. I have not looked directly at the sun myself–only in pictures, but I would imagine that such an experience would hurt. To Plato, this pain is the price of learning; acquiring knowledge hurts.
This sentiment can still be seen today. For many college students, learning requires high effort and focus that is often coupled with self-sacrifice through pains like sleep deprivation in favor of studying, combing through highly complex texts and problems, and frustration when working through difficult questions. Despite frequently professing a love of learning, when I am actively solving a challenging math problem or trying to comprehend a convoluted text, I often get frustrated in the moment and only feel the satisfaction of learning once I have finished the learning process. Generally, while I think humans do have curiosity that inclines them toward learning, actually acquiring knowledge can still be a painful process.
If the pain and effort of learning itself was not enough to dissuade someone from pursuing higher education, there are economic costs associated with attending college. I am not familiar enough with the financial aspects of higher education to make any claim as to whether or not college is too expensive to be worth pursuing. However, when I say “economic costs”, I am not only referring to the financial or accounting costs; there are implicit costs associated with attending college that strengthen the barriers to a college education. For example, for someone who aims to start a family, going to college can set back their goal by several years if their studies require too much of their time and attention. As another example, consider graduate school. Many graduate school programs can offer tuition waivers and other options to students to make their education practically free, financially speaking. But many students still decide not to apply for these graduate programs due to costs like the time commitment or the intense workload. Thus, these implicit opportunity costs can also be a contributing factor to the already steep accounting cost of attending college.
We have considered the high costs of education, but is the perceived value of education high enough to outweigh these costs? First, we will consider whether or not education is instrumentally valuable. Does education provide any good external to itself? I argue that most people would not see enough instrumental value in education to justify the cost. Educational ventures like research have not been prioritized lately, and without the ability to apply one’s knowledge toward learning new results through research, there has been less incentive toward getting an education for finding new results in a field.
Furthermore, one of the obstacles to higher education mentioned in this essay is the rise of AI. Many students realize that AI is frequently used to complete assignments on behalf of a student. And I believe that the main reason for this choice that students would offer is that, practically speaking, they have no need to know the content of the assignment to get the result they need. If one has access to AI that can already find the result they want, why do they need to put forth time and effort just to come up with the same result? These concerns lead one to wonder what practical outcome a college education would have, which can lead to a further devaluation of the effects an education brings.
If education is not seen as instrumentally valuable, is higher education instead seen as intrinsically valuable? Again, I argue that most people do not find higher education intrinsically valuable. For our hyper-productive and goal-driven American culture, education is often seen as a process of accreditation rather than an end in itself. Many solely want the education that will get them the career or certification they want; what is the point in going to school for something that one will never use in the future?
Normally, this question would be answered with the argument that education gets one closer to their future goals. But this view sees education as an instrumental good, and as previously mentioned, education is largely no longer seen as an instrumental good due to the lack of incentives for attending college at the moment. We have encountered a highly restrictive dilemma: culturally, higher education is not seen as intrinsically valuable, but practically, higher education does not provide enough rewards or incentives to be instrumentally valuable.
So what can be done to alleviate this problem? In my view, there are three options. First, the costs of higher education can be lowered to meet the benefits of higher education. But if one is to do due diligence to their subject of study, immense time and effort will always be necessary to learn a subject, so even lowering the financial cost of college will not eliminate the implicit costs associated with college (though it would still likely be beneficial). Second, higher education can be further incentivized to boost its instrumental value. But without major changes to the economy, this task will be difficult.
Third, our culture can attempt to embrace education and view it as intrinsically valuable. While this option would require significant cultural shifts to be effective in aggregate, on an individual level, recognizing the intrinsic value of education is much more feasible. Maintaining curiosity, asking questions, doing research, and studying a topic one is passionate about are all fantastic methods of shifting one’s mind toward the intrinsic value of study. This type of mental shift can be the difference between attending and not attending college, and regardless of what the roots of this educational turbulence may be, this recognition of the value of education can ignite the spark of curiosity that makes the pursuit of knowledge so fulfilling.
References
Plato. “Republic.” Plato: Complete Works, edited by John M. Cooper and D.S. Hutchinson, translated by G.M.A. Grube and rev. C.D.C. Reeve, Hackett, 1997, pp. 971-1224.