“I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.”
— John Adams
I think you have to have critical thinking skills to be a good mechanic, electrician, carpenter, or plumber. If you call a plumber because your water pressure is low, they have to diagnose the problem and then figure out the best way to fix it.
Agreed.
And IME heat pump technicians have to be really good at diagnosing probems. I had a new unit put in recently and I was amazed at how many things they have to take into account. It’s definitely gotten more complicated than the one I had installed about 15 years ago, due to energy efficiency requirements, pollution controls, etc. No wonder there’s a shortage of people who can do it.
I’m not dismissing effective use of resources; I’m saying that if we’re concerned about effective use of resources, limiting higher education is a piss-poor approach. A much better place for such concern is taxing the ultrawealthy.
Did you read that cite you posted later? More than half of undergrads showed significant improvement in a range of skills–including critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing–during their first two years of college. More than half! If we can do that for more people, that’s spectacular.
I’d love to see how it breaks down across departments.
“Critical thinking skills” isn’t a soup, it’s a buffet. There are a lot of different skills that get lumped together. Mechanics have to be excellent at spatial puzzles and chains of cause-and-effect and suchlike. Skills at evaluating social trends, identifying rhetoric that contains fallacies, reflecting on one’s own biases and the biases of others, communicating effectively in writing and so on? These are less important in a mechanic’s work life, but crucial in the life of an engaged citizen.
If they vote then they should be.
I don’t even think it’s so much a question of educational elitism or neighborliness as much as it’s a question of social class. Middle class, college-educated, white collar people are essentially a different social class than say… high school educated rednecks with blue collar jobs. Trades fall somewhere in the middle, and I’m deliberately leaving race out.
So in some sense, being college educated or having your kids go to college is an aspirational thing for many, and for others, it’s a baseline requirement. Few people choose to go down a social rung, after all.
Hell, the idea of sticking upper middle/middle class kids with some dirty, hot, and awful summer job in high school is almost a rite of passage. And done so with the intent of showing them the alternative to going to and graduating from college, both the unpleasantness of the work itself, and the difference in lifestyles of the people who do it for a living.
That gives us a great way to calculate where the minimum wage should be set!
That is some impressive spin!
If we measured your students and nearly half of them made no, or potentially negative, progress on the key goal skills over two years, I doubt you’d be praised as doing a spectacular job educating kids.
If I was looking at a medical intervention that cost many tens of thousands of dollars and the result was that nearly half showed no statistically significant positive change, on ANY measure, and half reached statistical significance, on something at least, not necessarily of clinical significance, I’d not be impressed. Especially in a case with no control group.
That’s a key point. You are quite … dismissive … of how young adults mature intellectually and cognitively as well as emotionally in a workplace environment, and with experiences other than the college life. Honestly for a group of college students college is an extension of adolescence, drinking beer having fun, not much intellectual rigor,. For another group it is a means of getting a credential. The last is not to be scoffed at, at least historically.
No question that there have been many positive characteristics correlated with college education. Many have of course been attributable to the careers they end up in compared to the average non college educated person. More likely on the selection bias: those getting into and completing college have been a different group than those not.
I would actually be shocked if my children turned out at all differently in terms of critical thinking skills or values if they had seen HVAC as the thing they wanted to do. They really already were who they were in terms of intelligence and intellectual curiosity, and political leanings. I was happy that we were able to enable each of them to get as much education as they wanted without crippling debt. But college did not make them better people, or better citizens.
Another selection factor though - part of college is that it groups you with selected group of others. That is important. At the extreme you have the most prestigious schools, where the name opens doors sure, but the friends you made do more. Your classmate is the child of the big company CEO and will get you the job when they are advanced there. In medical school I learned more from classmates than from professors. Hanging with people as smart or smarter than you matters.
If the smarter people were learning trades that would be just as true.
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The surveys on improving thinking skills at university have often shown that most students learn very little in their first two years. There is a big exception in two disciplines: English and History. The difference is attributed to the reading and writing students do in those disciplines.
What would happen if we asked not “what jobs do we want to train people for?” but “what do people want to study and learn and do?” and build from there? What if we thought about the economy as something we could help design rather than something we were stretched and chopped to fit into? What would change if we drastically reduced the working day and fitted the economy around our actual needs and wants rather than have these provided as an afterthought by people designing stuff to maximize profit?
UBI, shorter working day, more democracy in communities–those might be our starting positions, not “how do I think people should be broken on the new wheel of techno-capitalism?”
No it’s not. An effect size of more than 50% is huge. If you need to engage in that kind of snark, though, I’m much less interested in this conversation.
I think you missed the “it” in my post, with it being a college education in this instance
I think DSeid could have made his case more gently, but he has a point. As he noted, there is no control group. It’s not exactly shocking that most college students show improvement in critical thinking and complex reasoning as they mature from age 19-21 (typical ages for first two years of college). Cue the crowd shouting “their brains are still developing at that age!”. Don’t you think you would also see development in those areas in students in trade schools or even those working full time jobs? Maybe not as much (I have no idea actually), but that is a relevant inquiry for this discussion.
If there’s no control group, it’s not useful information. Sure, maybe kids would naturally gain these skills, and maybe the effect is less than 50%. We don’t know; so unless we’re missing information (e.g., there is a control group that we’re not considering), this study has little to add to the discussion and should be discarded.
I agree and I think that DSeid’s point, the study doesn’t show the effect that college specifically has on those skills in students
Sure. He brought up the study, and if we want to dismiss it, I’m fine with that.
Exactly. Investing in education creates more jobs than investments in most other things (demand based tax cuts, military, clean energy or health care). Education improves human capital and education is very labor intensive, so it creates a lot of jobs. The idea that there is a fixed supply of tax revenue and spending, and we have to take out of liberal arts college to fund the trades makes no sense. Its an arbitrary limitation designed to frame the debate.
They’ve done studies and people who go to college see their scores on authoritarianism go down.
Considering that the US is moving towards authoritarianism, higher education to help reduce the appeal of authoritarianism is an excellent investment.
Theres also the fact that voter turnout goes up with education. However I don’t know how much is cause vs effect (do people prone to higher education also have a predisposition to get involved in politics by voting).
I apologize if my expression of incredulity came off too snarky, but that result being interpreted as “spectacular” took me way off guard. Reading up more it was earth shattering bad to the college community when it came out, and pushback against it is ongoing. No one was claiming these were good results.
I’ll leave it be with the study speaking for itself (other than that “effect size” doesn’t mean what you seem to think it means.)
Anyway.
Evidence that college education creates better citizens, adults who are better at critical thinking in general, is lacking at best, and probably just wishful thinking. It has long just been something accepted as true.It’s a big investment for individuals or society to make based on no evidence of benefit.
It had been true that college had been a necessary credential for many middle class jobs. And was used a proof of having an ability to learn and to follow through. Returning to the OP, it was punching your meal ticket.
And it remains true that it is a sorting mechanism. With some consequences.
College education is necessary to have for some future pathways. We need researchers. And believe historians, poets, and even philosophers. It should be affordable. And there have to be pathways to create people trained with the skills to do the jobs we most know will need to be done going forward. The smartest people should feel that those paths are as valuable and valid as getting a college degree is. That pipeline must be widened.We need career paths for young adults. Historically college was the best guarantee of getting one and increasing the number of those going through that path seemed to be the best tactic. It seems like we are now producing more college degrees than openings for careers that require that ticket punched, and too few for careers that require a different education.
Tax the trillionaires all you want; we still must be considering ROI. Individually and as a society.
Can you quote anywhere in that citation that claims that?
I’m seeing lots of correlations, not any before after longitudinal work. Nothing about scores going down with more education; just that those who go to college, especially those who choose to major in liberal arts over engineering or business, score lower on authoritarianism measures. Well yeah. Students at a prestigious universities have higher than average IQs, going there didn’t cause that.
Part of your skepticism about the value of education is merited, because education is something that simply doesn’t work as well without student buy-in. If students are enrolled in a program because they want the degree, but they don’t actually value the education in and of itself, they put less into it and get less out of it.
That’s not actually a reflection on the value of the education available, though.
The thing is, you can lead a horse to water, but you just can’t make it drink. We have a culture in which it’s uncool to be seen to work hard, but cool to make things seem effortless. Uncool to be a nerd or a policy wonk, but somehow cool to be a rich lawyer. Uncool to work hard studying, but cool to work hard in the gym. And most of all, a culture in which the degree is the goal, not the education it represents.
That is an issue that really affects the effectiveness of education. More funding might actually increase the prestige of education, which would increase student buy-in, but we’ve had a culture with strong anti-intellectual elements for centuries, and it’s not going to change.