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I’ve always found it amazing just how out of touch the intellectuals in university are about what their institution actually means for students. To be blunt, college hasn’t been about education for a very long time, and it strikes me as hilarious that anyone who attended one writes these sorts of handwringing articles bemoaning the decline of education in college. 99% of students who were ever in university (perhaps with the exception of tge leisure class) have ever gone to college seeking the education for the sake of education. For most of us, it’s about getting job skills, getting a diploma, padding a resume, etc. if learning happens on the side, fine, but most people are looking at college as a diploma that will hopefully unlock the gates to a good paying job.
In the 1990s kids were caught cheating, and many before computers outsourced those slop essays to grad students or upperclassman. Every kids knows how to find old exams and cajole the exam topics out of the TA. Which is to say, except for this being done with LLM bots, it’s not even unusual. And civilization has not fallen because students cheat on tests. Mostly because the things tge students are cheating on — slop writing assignments in non major classes and generally covering topics that most people would only use on Jeopardy— it doesn’t matter if they know it or master it. History, sociology, psychology, X studies, and philosophy can certainly be interesting classes. But I don’t think most of them are valuable to most people, so again, the cheating not only isn’t harming them, but it’s beneficial, both because they’re saving time so they can focus on the courses that matter, but because they’re getting hands on experience using a technology that will be more important to their future than whatever essay they’re not writing on their own.
Of course the professors of these courses tend to have exaggerated notions of their importance and the importance of the subject matter they are teaching, not just for the current crop of twenty year olds who are forced into their classrooms by the college itself, but to the world at large. I enjoy philosophy and history. I like reading about it, thinking about it, and so on. But I also understand that unless you’re going to work in a university teaching the subject to students and writing research papers about it, it’s not going to be valuable for the students. They love to bemoan the decline of students, that they don’t read the material, or they use chatbots or they scroll during class time. But they don’t ever ask why it’s happening to them and not in engineering classes or CS classes.
While I can only speak for myself, I studied a STEM subject because I was genuinely interested in it. Sure, the fact that STEM people usually find well-compensated work was a consideration, but not the major one. I certainly did not research which subject would have the highest expected salary. I also embarked on a lengthy PhD for rather meager pay, but I was fine with that.
Some of the stuff I learned as a student I get to use in my job, while some other stuff I sadly/luckily do not have reason to use. And as usual, a lot of the relevant skills I picked up outside class.
I am also somewhat privileged in that my parents paid for my education (i.e. the cost of living in a small room for 5+ years -- universities themselves are almost free in Germany). But I never felt I was attending just for the signaling value of the diploma.
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I would think these kind of essays, which a genre older than I am, are defensive in nature. Lets be honest, the more an institution is a skinsuit, the more defensive it is going to be of itself. If Harvard was a bunch of white boys from Boston's upper class playing squash for bragging rights against Yale and their rich New Yorkers they would feel no reason to pen such an essay. But since universities have been transformed into giant apparatuses whose purpose is hoovering up federal funding, they will be very defensive.
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These people don't believe that. They're simply using a very different definition of 'education' than you are, one centering around having appropriate credentials rather than knowing things/how to do things. This isn't totally new, either- much as grievance studies are particularly blatant, lots of psych and ed research is just polished turds too, and the people getting these degrees don't really seem to care. Like the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy says about itself- well then reality is the one that's got it wrong.
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Not vastly in a purely economic sense, but personally I think the way I interact with information, ideas and the world generally is incomparably better off for having studied history at university, in a way I doubt I could have achieved by pure dilettantism. Maybe it isn't the most rational use of national resources, but either way I think it's still one of the developed world's greatest achievements that so many people get the opportunity to have their internal world enriched forever, even if a lot of them don't take it up when they're there.
As someone who majored in engineering, I've come across a few largely-self-taught coworkers. Some of them are quite talented, but most seem to have more trouble than the degreed folks when we get into the deeper parts of the subject that aren't quite as fun to study (linear algebra, complex analysis, there is probably part of this in any field). I think there is real value to an engineering curriculum that makes us study the useful but un-fun parts that puts tools in the tool belt to solve real-world problems.
I've seen analogous outcomes from home-school students that were allowed to focus near-exclusively on their interests, and, even while otherwise bright, can't have a coherent conversation about some reasonably-part-of-the-curriculum topics -- for example, "the Spanish-American war and its consequences".
I mean sure, but I don’t think most people wou be materially hampered because they didn’t get exposed to philosophy or history or art history. There might be the odd tool (personally, I think formal logic is a very powerful tool for understanding the world, and the same is true of probability and statistics and so on) but unless such things are related to daily work in some way, it’s mostly a vestige of the leisure class view of college as finishing school and at that point, you can make a case for teaching manners and dance as part of making a person suitable to the upper class. But this, again is silly, and really doesn’t lead to gains for anyone. It’s a waste of time, and to be fair, most of this is something that could be done for nearly free using resources available cheaply online.
But it’s mostly about the grift. You have to pretend that you’re now a better person because you know some history of Asia, or read a bit of Kant, or wrote an essay on indigenous peoples.
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While homeschooling had wide variances, I genuinely wonder how many public school educated kids could hold a coherent conversation about the Spanish American war.
Good question. But it's at least part of the formal curriculum for AP US History, so the answer is hopefully nonzero even if some have forgotten since.
There is some advantage to knowing what (shared) curriculum can be pointed to. Even here, we have a somewhat understood corpus of "things I can refer to and expect readers to understand", but there is always some context dependence.
I definitely remember being taught about the Spanish American war, but I think most of my classmates, if asked today, would say something like ‘well, Cuba attacked Maine, so we had to go to war’ on the high end of historical knowledge. There’s only so much class time to go around, especially when a full 70% of it has to be dedicated to the civil war/slavery and WWII/the Holocaust.
This pattern of spending 70%+ class-time on the national lore and the rest of random tid-bits of history nobody quite remembered anyway was also present when I went through K12 education in Turkey. Every single detail of Ataturk's life and 1918-1923 history of Turkey drilled again and again in increasing detail for us instead of course. I wonder if there is any national curriculum anywhere with an alternative history that avoids this trap. But then what would you teach? History sounds very difficult to grapple with kids without some sort of narrative.
Not doubting the reason for the pattern. But ‘why American kids don’t know about the Spanish-American war’ is because they get a day long lecture about it, once. In contrast American kids know about D-day, Pearl Harbor, the battle of the bulge, guadalcanal and midway, Auschwitz. Because each one of those gets as much class time as the Spanish American war in its entirely- in some cases considerably more.
I can imagine a high-IQ Trump inflected curriculum in which the civil war is mostly brushed over, but the Spanish American war and WWI get a starring role in addition to WWII because it’s about America’s rise on the world stage.
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Sometimes I like to imagine what it would be like if universities were actually calibrated for that purpose.
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