The highest ideals of higher ed are under mortal threat
Arnold Korotkin
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| Ben Wiseman |
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The highest ideals of higher ed are under mortal threat
By Frank Bruni | |
At dinner recently with fellow professors, the conversation turned to two topics that have been unavoidable these past few years. The first was grade inflation — and the reality that getting A’s seldom requires any herculean effort and doesn’t distinguish one bright consultant-to-be from the next. Many students, accordingly, redirect their energies away from the classroom and the library. Less deep reading. More shrewd networking.
The second topic was A.I. Given its advancing sophistication, should we surrender to it? Accept that students will use it without detection to cull a semester’s worth of material and sculpt their paragraphs? Perhaps we just teach them how to fashion the most effective prompts for bots. Perhaps the future of college instruction lies in whatever slivers of mental endeavor can’t be outsourced to these digital know-it-alls.
And perhaps a certain idea of college — a certain ideal of college — is dying. I keep coming back to that possibility, which seems more like a probability since President Trump returned to the White House and began his assault on higher education.
It’s not just that Trump sees colleges and universities as ideologically homogeneous, elitist enclaves (with some grounds for that view). It’s that he doesn’t seem all that keen on learning, period. That’s clear in his attitude about experts and expertise. It’s clear as well in his megabill. The legislation’s increased taxes on endowments, coming fast on the heels of the Trump administration’s clampdown on federal research grants, deliver another powerful blow to colleges’ coffers. And some of the new conditions on federal loans to students — specifically, that they be used for programs that place students in careers above a given income level — cast higher education in a fundamentally pecuniary, largely occupational light. Ye shall be judged by the salaries of your alums.
What happened to college as a theater of intellectual betterment, character development, self-discovery? Easy A’s work against that, replacing rigor with ready affirmation. A.I. also works against that: Why spend hour upon hour synthesizing knowledge when a few keystrokes will do the trick? And measuring schools by their financial return on students’ investments — an approach that predates Trump’s political rise and was, in fact, at the center of the Obama administration’s vaunted College Scorecard — occludes higher education’s other important functions. Colleges are supposed to nurture nimble thinkers. They’re meant to produce informed and enlightened citizens who are better equipped to leaven passion with reason. There’s a deficit of those now, as ominous as any budgetary shortfall.
I’m not under the illusion that college used to be regarded principally in such high-minded terms. From the G.I. Bill onward, it has been held up rightfully as an engine of social mobility, a ladder of professional opportunity, yielding greater wealth for its graduates and society both. But there was a concurrent sense that it contributed mightily to the civic good — that it made society culturally and morally richer. That feeling is now fighting for survival. So much over the past quarter century has transformed Americans’ relationship to higher education in ways that degrade its loftier goals. The corpus of college lumbers on, but some of its soul is missing.
“In the minds of our students, it has become highly instrumental and transactional,” Jonathan Zimmerman, a renowned historian of education at the University of Pennsylvania, told me. He mentioned a recent article in New York magazine by James D. Walsh, “Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College,” that began with a student at Columbia University who crowed, on the record, about his dependence on A.I. When Walsh asked the student why he bothered with the Ivy League “only to offload all of the learning to a robot,” the student answered that Columbia was an optimal place to meet the co-founder of his eventual start-up and to find his future wife.
“Points for honesty!” Zimmerman said. “We continue to tell a story about the mind-expanding purpose and qualities of a university, and no doubt some people who come here experience that mind expansion. The problem is that all of the other cultural and social signals around them are pointing them in the other direction.”
They and their parents watched the cost of college rise faster than inflation, in a manner that precipitated all that student debt and all the political debate over it; a small, wholly defensible part of Trump’s megabill reflects a desire to prevent young people from leaving school with a stack of i.o.u.s that will weigh them down for decades to come. And loans or no loans, when students make such an enormous financial commitment, they look for a near-certain financial payoff. That’s why computer science and business became such popular majors. That’s why so many top students point themselves toward investment banks, consulting firms and tech companies. They’re making what they believe to be the surest bet.
Income inequality has intensified that drive by raising the stakes of landing among the haves versus the have-nots. It has also created a large market of affluent families for whom colleges compete by adding amenities that have nothing to do with academics. “If income inequality hadn’t increased, the selective Ivies couldn’t be charging $100,000 because people couldn’t pay it,” Catharine Bond Hill, the former president of Vassar College, told me, referring to the annual sticker price that some schools are nearing. “Not only can they pay, but they’re willing to, and they want the stuff that that buys.” Such stuff includes “nice dormitories, your own bathroom, a great gym facility, good food.” The result, she said, is “an environment in which the notion of going to college to learn things got somewhat lost.”
As I and many others who write about college have noted, students are frequently treated as customers, a dynamic at odds with being pushed toward the most demanding books, forced to solve the knottiest problems, consigned to some of learning’s most tedious tasks and confronted with the sorts of uncomfortable situations in which the most growth often occurs. You don’t stress out customers; you make them happy. You don’t give them obstacle courses; you give them glide paths. And glide paths don’t lead people to their best, brightest selves. They’re inconsistent with college as chrysalis.
So are the brutal competition to get into selective schools and the fetishizing of exclusivity that’s a consequence of that. They turn college into a luxury acquisition, a bragging right. Meantime, the elaborate merchandising, marketing and pageantry of college sports have erased the line between amateur and professional, sending the message that college isn’t a formative pause before the mess of the adult world. It’s an acceleration into it.
But colleges’ pre-professional bent — reflected, too, in some schools’ elimination of such unpopular humanities majors as classics and art history — can be as imprudent as it is unimaginative. The modern job market has a flux and furious metabolism that routinely make a mockery of the best laid plans. “The Computer Science Bubble Is Bursting,” read the headline on an article in The Atlantic by Rose Horowitch last month. It noted that while the number of computer science majors in the United States had quadrupled between 2005 and 2023, it was now on the decline because of “a grim job outlook for entry-level coders.” “Artificial intelligence has proved to be even more valuable as a writer of computer code than as a writer of words,” Horowitch wrote. “This means it is ideally suited to replacing the very type of person who built it.”
So, consulting is the ticket? Not so fast. “If consulting was a stock, I’d be shorting it right now,” the entrepreneur and venture capitalist Peter Thiel told Joe Nocera for an article in The Free Press last week. Its headline: “The Consulting Crash Is Coming.” Its subhead explained that consultants, like coders, are being “outpaced by A.I.”
The moral of those two stories is that the smartest approach to college may be precisely the one that its trajectory of late has conspired against: range widely across subject offerings and focus not on a skill that could become obsolete but on intellectual dexterity and powers of judgment with better odds of enduring relevance. “A liberal arts degree is a pre-professional degree — you just don’t know what the profession is,” said Zimmerman, who teaches a seminar for first-year students at U-Penn called “Why College?”
The answer to the question in that course title goes well beyond return on investment — or, rather, doesn’t define that return as narrowly as many politicians do. “It’s important to remember that a liberal education was originally meant to develop the capacity to think and act well as a free person,” Jenna Silber Storey, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who has taught at Yale and the University of Chicago, told me. “The country could use more young people with these capacities now.”
They’d be a bulwark against the whirl of conspiracy theories, the welter of rage. But higher education as a blessing independent of any instantly redeemable credential bucks the zeitgeist. Under Trump, blunt materialism reigns, and such concepts as human rights, diplomacy and even democracy are suspect, the precious preoccupation of idealistic chumps. Do anthropology, philosophy and history stand a chance?