When I started teaching at Queens, after having had this wonderful experience teaching at Princeton, I assigned pretty much the same books that I had assigned in my courses at Princeton.
I knew the students had very different backgrounds and different levels of preparation, but that is what I knew how to teach and I felt I could tell them what they needed to know and open up the texts for them.
It completely threw me, because I had never thought about it before. I could see that it was a legitimate question; the student was asking me to justify the return on investment in a college education. And I think that was the moment when I got interested in the philosophy and history of American higher education.
We say that an intelligent person is open-minded, self-critical, thinks outside the box, is consistent, prudent, and so on. But society needs a mechanism for sorting out its more intelligent members from its less intelligent members, because society wants to identify intelligent people, wherever they may be, in order to bring them into a system that can funnel them to careers that will maximize their talents.
Society wants to make the most out of its human resources. On this theory, college is essentially a four-year intelligence test. Students have to demonstrate intellectual ability over time and across a wide range of subject matter. As an added service, college also sorts people according to aptitude. It separates the math types from the poetry types.
And at the end of the process, the graduates get a score—the GPA—along with other kinds of evaluations like recommendation letters, board scores, and so on, that professional schools and employers can trust as a measure of intellectual capacity and productive potential. This reflects a different theory of college. The theory is: In a society like ours in which people are encouraged to pursue the career paths that promise the greatest personal or financial rewards, people will, given a choice, learn only what they need to know for success.
College is the place where future citizens get exposure to knowledge that enlightens and empowers them, no matter what career they may choose. In performing this function, college also socializes. It takes people from different backgrounds and with different beliefs and it brings them into line with mainstream norms of reason and taste.
We honor independence of mind in college, but we expect students to master the accepted ways of doing things before they can deviate from them. Ideally, we want everybody to go to college because college puts everyone on the same page. The only thing that really matters is the grades. If you prefer the second theory, then you might consider grades a useful instrument of positive or negative reinforcement, but what really matters is what students actually learn.
There are certain things you think that every adult ought to know. Some confusion is caused by the fact that since , American higher education has been committed to both theories. Professional schools and employers still depend on college to sort out each cohort as it passes into the workplace—the meritocratic theory. But elected officials and the rest of us talk about the importance of college for everyone—the democratic theory.
On the one hand, elite schools have become ridiculously selective. The acceptance rate at Harvard in was 85 percent. By , it was 20 percent. This year, it was 6 percent of over 35, applications. The acceptance rate at most of the top schools this year was less than 10 percent. At the same time, the system as a whole has become much more accessible. Currently, just under 70 percent of American high schools graduates go to college. In , that figure was under 50 percent.
So from that point of view, an increase in public investment in higher education with the goal of sending everybody to college—in effect, taxpayer-subsidized social promotion—is thwarting the operation of the sorting mechanism. You think education is about selection, not about inclusion. Students and their parents are overvaluing a commodity for which there are cheap and plentiful substitutes.
Public colleges are much less expensive; the average tuition in public colleges in the U. And, of course, there are many less selective private colleges where you can get a good education and a lot more faculty face time. You think education is about personal intellectual growth, not about winning some race to the top.
Lots of students are accessing it, proportionally more than ever before in American history. Students all over the world want to come here for an American education. And higher education is widely regarded as the route to a better life. The whole issue tends to make professors anxious. Think about when you take your car into the shop to be repaired. The difference between the car when you brought it in and the car when you take it out is entirely due to the work done in the shop.
The car did not get better on its own. We call that a treatment effect. But education is more complicated because people do change, people do educate themselves, people do develop. Between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two, many people undergo some developmental change.
So how much of the intellectual and moral character of the college graduate is a treatment effect, and how much is just a selection effect? Those of us who are professional educators think that we can intervene, or participate, in this process in a way that will be productive rather than just redundant or annoying. We believe that there are educational outcomes that are more or less desirable, and that there are methods of achieving these outcomes that are more or less effective.
But we have a hard time explaining in specific terms where and how the process of going to college makes a difference. The college does not select, at the beginning of that process, people who are bigoted, dogmatic and wicked. It selects people who already have, in high measure, the very qualities that the college promises to inculcate. And the people who apply to that college apply because they have those qualities, as well. To put the question the other around, are there things that colleges could actually do that would make people less tolerant, open-minded and principled, than they would otherwise be?
How does college make a difference? Every college wants to make a difference to its students, and every professor wants the academic experience to make a difference. But coming up with a way for that academic experience to make a difference, and even coming up with a definition of what the difference should be—what makes a college graduate different from a high school graduate—has been interestingly difficult throughout the history of American higher education.
You can see this the minute faculty start discussing requirements for a general education program. When you start this conversation, you find that people are coming from wildly different places. After graduating from Pomona in , he attended Harvard Law School for a year before taking a leave of absence. Menand recalls several reasons for his leave:.
While on leave, he began studying English in the Ph. He was encouraged to attend by Richard Fader, a teacher of his at Pomona and a Columbia alumnus. In retrospect, Menand could not have found a better place to cultivate his interest in literary and cultural history. Menand earned his doctorate in and began his career as a writer, contributing regularly to publications like The New Republic and The New York Times Literary Supplement shortly thereafter.
He got the job, curiously enough, while writing a story about the famous publication for another magazine. Menand garners consistently high scores on the CUE i. Both his colleagues, like Greenblatt, and his students find Menand to be an exceptionally capable teacher.
In a way, writing for magazines and teaching have been mutually reinforcing, Menand observes. Kang is a Columbia alumnus from the Class of , who has since started up a web design development company that has redesigned web pages for various Harvard organizations, including parts of the Cabot House website. For Menand, the fan-supported creation of a website bearing his name was rather unexpected. Menand himself has always favored writers who display a certain sense of emotional removal from their subject matter, citing Joan Didion and Janet Malcolm as two writers who excel at this approach.
I always get attracted to people who can really get very distant emotionally from their subjects. Although one might think that consciously removing emotions and personal experience from a piece might be troublesome, for Menand, a distanced, objective approach to writing magazine articles is actually more comfortable. Custom Programs. Policies and Accessibility. Campus Experience. Faculty Directory. Centers, Projects and Initiatives. Faculty Recruitment. Faculty Experts.
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