> Does anyone believe in college education anymore?
Presumably. It quite visibly takes place, so unless you are prone to "flat earth" conspiracies it is hard to deny.
It seems that you are really asking if anyone believes in the economic value of college education anymore? Did anyone ever? It was always apparent that the supposed value hinged on a misinterpretation of the data sold in a "a diamond is forever"-esq marketing scheme.
> ...if anyone believes in the economic value of ...
Yes and no. College education has very often been sold on the moral basis of academic learning being a virtue in itself, education providing or enhancing the social legitimacy & status of people & groups, etc.
And that basis for college education also seems to be crumbling.
> And that basis for college education also seems to be crumbling.
Wouldn't you say that already fully crumbled as soon as we thought it was a good idea to make college available to all? Those attributes can only hold under an exclusive club. Which, indeed, describes the early origins of college, but not what it has been for quite a long time.
No - even if a (bright enough) ill-born daughter of a poor, non-white mother can get in, college can still carry quite a bit of cachet - on the basis of learning being a moral virtue, graduates having greater knowledge & understanding, meritocracy, etc.
Learning remains a moral virtue of some sort, people are gaining greater knowledge and understanding, etc. but it now happens everywhere you look. You can't hardly step outside without being exposed to things that would have historically only been available to people within a college institution.
The cachet was being an exclusive club that kept exclusive information and connections away from non-exclusive people, but those days are long behind us. When college became common, what college offered became common, and thus no longer valuable. Basic supply and demand.
Where college has managed to retain some value into modern times is in the dating pool it offers. Providing a sizeable group of young people living in close proximity and ready to mingle is quite valuable. That is what has recently started to erode, thanks to service like Tinder encroaching on that space.
I think the author misses several important factors besides the many prominent wealthy tech founders:
- American culture broadly has rejected both the Christian and Classical ideas of virtue. Classical virtue, in particular, requires discipline and study. (You need to learn Latin and Greek to read all those Classical works of knowledge.) Instead, post-modernism deconstructed the very idea of virtue. In fact, it was the universities (and humanities departments) that were responsible for the deconstruction of virtue. So that eliminated one of the historical raisons d'etre of elite schools.
- As an academic outsider, it seems that humanities departments are promoting a post-modern narrative of "'truth' is just a set of 'knowledges' used by oppressors to maintain the oppressive system". So now universities have deconstructed truth itself and are promoting this idea. Well, if truth doesn't actually exist and knowledge is just oppressor-man propoganda, then the idea of a university as a repository of knowledge and wisdom has been deconstructed into non-existence. So why would I want to pay tons of money for this? Especially when post-modern theory isn't going to pay rent in a major city?
- I've always been very supportive of college education. However, if I had college-age kids I would be very selective about where they go. Pieces like this one in Harpers reinforce this. I think the author is right that universities' priorities is not education. But the meltdown at Evergreen and the pro-Palestine protests make a case that the universities are promoting a culture that is--at best--irrelevant to learning, the formation of character, and the cultivation of wisdom. The author, himself an academic at Harvard, just assumes the virtue of the pro-Palestinian protestors and calls resistance by universities to disruptive protests as "military". But there is no discussion of the brutal rape and murder of Israelis by the Palestian government, nor is there any discussion that, while Israel's events subsequent to the Harvard protests are pretty heavy-handed (at best), Israel is stuck with no good options. They can't live next door to a state dedicated to wiping them out and which takes concrete actions to that effect, but no Arab state will take the Palestinians, so it seems like their options are a variant of a) live with it, and b) eliminate the problems. So if the university professor(s) just assume the virtue of disruptive protestors because they support the oppressed-coded Palestinians with no discussion of the other side, this does not seem like an environment conducive to learning and free thinking. The reports by Jonathan Haidt make a case that the thinking behind safe-spaces, etc. is reverse therapy--again, not something appealing, and not cultivating the pursuit of knowledge and wisdom. Reports by Jordan Peterson would make anyone with traditional values think that universities oppose their value system, which reduces the appeal of universities for religious people, who make up about 30% of the US.
- Tuition is expensive enough that most people need to see some return on investment. It's pretty obvious how STEM would do that, and it's pretty obvious that STEM requires serious study, but tuition is expensive enough that you have to ask the question of "is this worth it" compared to learning some other way, hence the transactional nature the author notes. But it's not clear why one should pay a lot of money for humanities studies with a post-modern value system that denies the very idea of truth, knowledge, virtue, and which seems to be replacing the traditional idea of virtue being something a person develops with virtue being related to how oppressed a person's unchangeable history is (or perhaps the intensity of one's visible support for oppressed-coded classes, hence the protesters).
So I think the author is right that universities are not focused on facilitating learning, but misses the more important causes.
And calls resistance by universities to disruptive protests as "military".
The word used in the article was "quasi-military", which as applies to Columbia's final crackdown is of course 100 percent accurate. If the author had said the crackdown "military" as such, then his words would have had a very different connotation. But he didn't, you know perfectly well that he did not.
Presumably. It quite visibly takes place, so unless you are prone to "flat earth" conspiracies it is hard to deny.
It seems that you are really asking if anyone believes in the economic value of college education anymore? Did anyone ever? It was always apparent that the supposed value hinged on a misinterpretation of the data sold in a "a diamond is forever"-esq marketing scheme.