You often hear defenders of liberal-arts education suggest that their goal is less to teach the specifics of a particular discipline or profession than to teach students how to think. For programs in the liberal arts, however, the answers are not straightforward.
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Universities that offer specialized training in specific professions have an answer: “We’re training the next generation of nurses, accountants, physical therapists, teachers, software engineers, etc., etc.” Whether they do it well or not is a legitimate issue, but that they should be doing it is not much in dispute. But what does it mean to “know how to think”? Society demands an answer.Ĭolleges and employers alike say they want students who know how to think. Besides, if earnings are not a good measure of educational value, then what is? Colleges can’t get away with smug silence on that question any longer. Many academics regard this reliance on financial outcomes as an indicator of educational quality as philistinism, but one cannot reasonably expect students or their parents to shell out a quarter of a million dollars (the price of many highly selective institutions) and be indifferent to what they will earn when they graduate. Recently the Brookings Institution moved us a further step in that direction when it introduced a rating system that ranks colleges by the midcareer earnings of their graduates, student-loan repayment, and the projected earning power of the occupations that graduates pursue. This accounting was to be done of both graduation rates and the earnings profiles of graduates, an attempt to measure educational value literally, by asking if the cost of a college education pays for itself. A part of that initiative was an insistence that colleges be held accountable - that federal aid be tied to measures of performance. Two years ago, the Obama White House launched an admirable initiative to make college more affordable and accessible.
What are students getting for all that money? What should they be getting? Demands for accountability are everywhere, spurred in part by the absurdly high cost of a college education and the trillion dollars in student debt. Commentators, politicians, and parents are expressing serious doubts, about whether colleges are teaching what they should be teaching and about whether they are teaching it well. It has always been taken as self-evident that higher education is good for students and society at large, and that American colleges and universities are doing an excellent job of providing it.
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