{"id":1806,"date":"2020-04-29T00:35:47","date_gmt":"2020-04-29T00:35:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/endlesshybrids.com\/?p=1806"},"modified":"2020-04-29T00:35:47","modified_gmt":"2020-04-29T00:35:47","slug":"the-collapse-of-higher-education","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/endlesshybrids.com\/education\/the-collapse-of-higher-education\/","title":{"rendered":"The Collapse of Higher Education"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
Changes have been coming for higher education for some decades. It’s naive to think that higher ed in the mid-21st century will be the same as the late 20th century. The coronavirus pandemic marks the end of the 20th century and that way of thinking about the world. We now have students<\/strong> entering college who were born<\/strong> after<\/strong> 9\/11, yet university administrators proudly tout their recent strategic plans at creating a 21st century education. For our students, it always<\/strong> has been the 21st century.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What does an education at an elite liberal arts college get you? It buys you membership in an exclusive alumni club. <\/p>\n\n\n\n As the graduate of such a college<\/a> and as faculty in such a college<\/a>, we like to espouse the benefits of a small, residential liberal arts college and how it prepares you for lifelong learning and handling the complexities of a changing world. <\/p>\n\n\n\n But we don’t know the counterfactual.<\/p>\n\n\n\n How different would my life have been if I had gone to a second-rank state university? Might I not have ended up in the very same job as I have now? The only real difference I can discern is that I would have had a different set of friends. But my very dear friends from college are mainly just Facebook friends now as we live all across the country. Over the years, we all have developed many other friends. Wherever anyone goes to college, or even if one doesn’t attend college, friendships will be created, some will fade, some will endure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A perspective I’ve heard from fellow faculty is that college prepares you for life, for work and community. Is college the only way? Does not actual work prepare you better for the workplace?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n I’ve been fairly successful in my career, but I truly know that success has come from the early work experiences in my career and not from college or graduate school. All I got from the latter were the credentials that legitimated access to the profession. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Do 18 year olds really know what they want to do with their lives? Or are they doing what they think their parents want them to do? Why do I meet so many teenagers who want to go into investment banking, wealth management, or law? Really, kids? Your life goal is to help people with more money than you make even more money?<\/p>\n\n\n\n In a way, I understand that. It’s not just parental pressure. A long-held American ideal was that each generation would do better than their parents. But if your parents are pulling down $600k\/year, then you have limited choices of careers for doing better than that. <\/p>\n\n\n\n A value of the liberal arts is found in expanding the proverbial horizon of opportunity: highlighting that there’s more to life than just making money. And, if you do well financially, you’ll have the broad awareness of cultural and societal issues towards which you can contribute your excess wealth. <\/p>\n\n\n\n But I do understand those kids interested in finance. In high school, I remember reading an article in Forbes, which in the 1980s was a much better magazine than the website of the same name is now. The article profiled a research analyst in an investment banking firm. That was my first awareness that such a job existed. It sounded appealing. I had barely escaped poverty in small town Tennessee and wanted so much more. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The liberal arts provided a glorious distraction. Astonishing myself, I chose English as my major even though it wasn’t my best subject. I liked the idea of reading all those great works of literature, which I knew even then at age 20 that I would be unlikely to ever get around to reading on my own. Besides, I always thought that I would go straight to grad school and obtain my professional skills then. I got derailed for various reasons. Grad school got put on hold for a few years, and I got rejected from job after job because I “had no skills”. Finally, I got it all together and became a librarian while I figured out what I really wanted to do. 28 years later, still a librarian though librarianship has changed a lot. <\/p>\n\n\n\n