“Decrying the faults of higher education is awkward … for all of us, since our credentials are nonrefundable and our college experiences nonrenounceable,” wrote Dayna Tortorici in an issue of n 1 magazine entitled “Bad Education.”
It’s not impossible to critique higher education if you’ve benefitted from it, but that awkwardness — that the very institution being critiqued is the one that shaped the way we look at it — is rarely acknowledged by those who most ardently object to education in its current form.
Critics range from those who believe higher education should be focused on giving economic value through credentials (such as Gov. Pat McCrory) to the disgruntled high school seniors who did not make it into the prestigious school of their dreams and choose major national papers as their venue for griping.
The now infamous Wall Street Journal column by Suzy Lee Weiss painted just as vivid of a picture of her frustration at not getting into Ivy League schools as it did of the pressures high school seniors are under to be successful, as affirmed by the prestige of the colleges they get into.
This is, after all, the age of a new species of “Super People,” as an op-ed in The New York Times termed it. The article questioned, “Has our hysterically competitive, education-obsessed society finally outdone itself in its tireless efforts to produce winners whose abilities are literally off the charts?”
It sounds good, at first, to have a society full of extremely educated people. But, as the supply of highly skilled workers has gone up just as the demand for them has been decreasing, those workers have been forced to move down the career ladder “to perform jobs traditionally performed by lower-skilled workers,” according to a paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research.
That translates to a weak job market so saturated with overqualified people that those searching for jobs feel like they have to be superhumans in order to qualify for them. It creates an enormous pressure to accrue credentials to boost resumes.
Perhaps that’s the situation McCrory sees when he imagines turning our universities into credential factories, producing better and better workers to compete for the few jobs available.
But I didn’t go to college just for the diploma, and the diploma is only a small part of what I gained. When our younger selves dreamt of going to college, I’d venture that most of us were not imagining it solely as a line on our resume.
