p.1 Is College Worth It?

Transcription

1 p.1 Is College Worth It? David Cutler: Thank you so much for joining me today. To start off, I wondering to what extent you think it's worth it for students to pursue a liberal arts degree today? David Wilezol: It's interesting. I actually read an article on, I think, CNBC a couple days ago that said that employers still like to hire people with liberal arts educations. The reason being that they think that people who are versed in the liberal arts have better critical thinking skills, better writing skills, more capacity for abstract thought. Along the same lines, I was talking with an exchange, not an exchange student, but a student who was from China. He was studying at George Washington University, studying economics. I was talking to him and I was saying, look, over here we don't put the emphasis on STEM, Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math, education like you all do over there. You all are so much better prepared for the workforce in so many ways because of this. He said, "OK, that might be true, but if you look at institutions in China, you look at the education system in China, the politics." He said, "There's very little room for abstract thought there," where he says, "Over here you have a culture of the liberal arts and things like that in your university system that encourages" -- a cheesy, clichè phrase -- "outside the box thinking." To me, I think there is a good bit of value in studying the liberal arts, not only for the sake of gaining knowledge and to understand our own culture, our own values, our own time, but also, I think there can be a practical dimension to liberal arts education, as far as it goes in terms of certain attributes that you can develop to bring to the table in terms of the job market. David Cutler: It's interesting because at the same time, I know that in the book, you and Mr. Bennett talk about some majors that have more marketability to them than others. I'm wondering, should students go into college, do you think, with that in mind? It might be more difficult, let's say, if I majored in English to find a job in a field that I might not be able to get in if I studied something else in college. Are students being prepared enough, are they knowledgeable enough going in knowing that it might be difficult once they get out of college to get a job in the field they want? David Wilezol: George Orwell said that sometimes it's the first duty of responsible people to remind others of the obvious. I think, to a lot of people, it would seem obvious that finance or engineering or accounting would be more remunerative than English or history or classics. I'm a classicist. Bill got his PhD in philosophy. We know what we're talking about a little bit with this stuff. I would say that it is important to educate students to that reality, because I don't know that they're going to always know the distinctions otherwise. Some of the Top 10 highest paying jobs out of college right now are all in engineering fields. Especially where borrowing money is concerned, you might be 18, 19, 20 years old and be in college or getting ready to college and say, I really want to study British history or I

2 p.2 really want to study political science, that's my passion. I'm even willing to borrow money to do that. That's fine. You can do that. That's one of the great things about this country. You can do that, but you have to be aware that your prospects for employment might be more sharply limited, and how much you can earn over the course of your career might be more limited. Think about this. You might get 10 years from now. 10 years from being a freshman in college you might say, "Wow, I screwed that up a little bit. I'm not seeing progress in my career. I'm not paying down my loans as much as I would like. I want to get married. I want to buy a house. I want to buy a car. I want to have kids, but I just can't do that because I'm just not making enough money." A large part of that is the function of a bad downturn in the economy, but all other things being equal, I think we can look at the data and see that the humanities and the arts and social sciences generally payout less. But again, we're just trying to say, "Look, it's important that kids know these things and understand where their option is as a far as that goes." David Cutler: In the book, you and Mr. Bennett mention something interesting that perhaps at least some of the gusto behind the Occupy Wall Street movement not only had to do with the underemployment or the unemployment rate of today's youth coming out of college, but also the fact that there aren't people hiring, let's say, those in the humanities to fill technology jobs. That there was maybe some anxiety on the part of recent graduates saying, "Look, I spent four years studying x subject, why can't I find a job?" David Wilezol: I think a lot of the occupiers, and even ordinary people who are feeling dislocated in the modern economy, a lot of these people have a grievance because they didn't know what they were getting into and felt like I can go borrow $80,000 for my PhD in cultural anthropology and here I am, and I don't have any job prospects. On the one hand, I feel sympathy for you, but on the other hand, I don't agree with your method of redressing the problem by protesting banks and things like that. When push comes to shove, I think colleges and universities should have been doing a better job of educating their own students about the real world and about what their degree can get them and things like that. David Cutler: Speaking more in particular about college, one of the things that I really liked in your book was that you were saying, "Look, you can study Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. You can study fun things, but if you major in this don't be surprised if you don't find a lucrative job after four years." David Wilezol: That's what we're absolutely saying. There are people out there who have liberal arts' degrees who make perfectly fine careers for themselves. I'm not talking about managing a hedge fund or anything like that, but who do perfectly well. If you're a liberal arts' major, I don't want people to think that their life is hopeless, and they've

3 p.3 wasted it, and they're never going to be anything in life, but they can understand Dostoyevsky. That's not what we're saying, but we are saying, "Look, if 88 percent of students in one survey said one of my main motivations for going to college is to get a job that's going to be better paying than what I might otherwise get." At a certain point, it doesn't really become a value proposition for them, because if they've studied something that on average doesn't have a great return on investment and if they've piled up student debts to do that, it's not serving their financial interest in the long run. David Cutler: I wanted to take the conversation just into a bit of a different direction. David Wilezol: Sure. David Cutler: I'm wondering...it seems that, not just you and Mr. Bennett, but it seems that a lot of the education reformers come from either the moderate or the right side of the political spectrum. I'm wondering why you think that is? David Wilezol: That's a great question. David Cutler: Because usually it's the left that wants more rapid change, but... David Wilezol: No, I think a lot of the disrupt in innovation that is happening in higher ed and that has happened at the K-12 level over the last 30 years, you're right, has come from more of the right. I think it says something pretty big though. Even President Obama is more willing to start to hold colleges accountable. At the K-12 level, they're doing things with school choice that I think are important. I think it's somewhat of a reaction to the left model of approaching education in general and public education in particular, where it's just increase the dollars on it, which really hasn't produced anything. I think we've coupled spending since We haven't gone anywhere. It says give control to the teachers unions where there's not as much accountability for teachers. And let's, in terms of the curriculum itself, let's dumb down. This is not what the left is intentionally huddling together and saying. But let's dumb down. Let's teach kids how to learn instead teaching content. Let's remove character education out of the schools. I think that traditionally conservative notions of free enterprise and things like that have worked their way back into the education conversation largely on the strength of seeing how programs such as Teach for America have performed, how a lot of public charter schools have performed. They're not perfect, but...seeing how homeschoolers have performed. I'll quote what Bill has said to me before. He said, "At this point at my career, I'm more encouraged than I was when I was secretary of education about real reforms in the education system. David Cutler: Why is that? David Wilezol: I don't know. I think there are a lot of passionate people working in reform right now. I think people, even on the left, are starting to see a lot of the merits of

4 p.4 ideas that have come from the right. I don't know if I would even characterize it so much as a left-right divide, but the fact that a lot of the reform that has to take place in education is contrary to the interests of traditional stakeholders in the process, which a lot of whom have been of a leftward political orientation. David Cutler: Just talking about high school for a minute, you have some great pages on high school in the book. What do you think is wrong with high school right now, and what would be the ideal high school, in your mind, for preparing kids for college and then in turn for going off into the workforce? David Wilezol: I want to quote something. I don't know if you're familiar with the work of Charles Murray? David Cutler: Yeah, I am. David Wilezol: He's a scholar. I think he's kind of a pariah to a lot of people, but I think he's on to something. He has a book called "Real Education," and he says, "In American education, we expect too much from those at the bottom, the wrong things from those in the middle, and too little from those at the top." It's kind of hard words, but I think there's a lot of truth in them. Ideally, I think that we would recognize that not every student is created equal and that we should be doing more as would be possible to create specialized courses of study at the secondary level for students. I think that partly depends on realizing that not every student is terribly interested in doing calculus or reading Shakespeare, or whatever you're going to define that criteria as. Saying, "Look, we want to help you compete in the economy so we're going to put a renewed emphasis on vocational or technical education." The German system does this really well. They're able...in the ways that they do it is a little bit contrary to how I think we do it in America because we're into freedom. We're into choice here. They produce graduates from their secondary system where you can graduate high school and have the skills that will be attractive to a law firm or an accounting firm or an oil and gas firm in terms of technical knowledge and things like that. I feel like here, when you graduate high school, it's just preparation for college. It's assumed. It's just the de facto thing for a lot of students. In terms of reform in high school, also, we just have to teach content. American history is our worst subject. Our math scores and reading scores have barely moved since 1983 that famous report, "A Nation At Risk," came out. I think it's because we've abandoned teaching the great works, teaching the core curriculum. There's a lot of talk now about the common core state standards that are coming into play, but I think we need to get back to teaching some of the fundamental texts of western civilization, teaching rigorous math and teaching civics and things like that.

5 p.5 David Cutler: I'm curious. When kids go into high school, let's say, I don't know, a sophomore or junior, do you think that instead of taking, I don't know, like an English course, if they know they want to be a technician or they know they want to be, I don't know, go into some kind of vocational trade, that we should at least not teach certain subjects so that they can emphasize and they can study what they need to so they can be successful once they graduate high school? David Wilezol: I think that's a great question. I think on the one hand, obviously, we want people to have a core set of knowledge, cultural knowledge so that we can be conversant with one another in terms of the great ideas and the great thoughts and who we are as a people. But, on the other hand, we've got to realize we're operating in education which is terribly difficult to get big reforms in. Everybody has budget constraints. I think if we present choices to kids and let them...present them with transparency. Present them with options. Give them guidance. I think students and parents at 17, 16, 17, 18, are wise enough to be able to make those choices about what's an appropriate future for them. In my ideal school, we would teach plumbing on Monday and Wednesday and Greek and Latin on Tuesday and Thursday, to be honest with you. But it's not for everybody. David Cutler: Just to ask you the elephant in the room, is it worth it? Is college worth it? David Wilezol: It depends. I think it's definitely worth it for some people. In the book, we're not saying don't go. We're saying, if you're going to go, carefully consider who you are as a student, what are your motivations for going, what are you going to study, where are you going to go? About 50 percent of people who enroll in a four-year college don't graduate within six years. To me, that says a we have a bunch of people who have spent a bunch of money, or borrowed a bunch of money, to get a credential that they will never receive. That's going to make them less competitive in the job market. What we're saying is, wait a minute, there's other educational alternatives out here that can serve you maybe just as well, if not better, than a traditional B.A. that are only neglected because of a lot of societal pressures, such as if you do manual labor, people think it's dumb, dirty or dangerous. Or if you get a community college education, you're an idiot. That's actually not the case. We're saying go with your eyes open. Keep your head on a swivel. David Cutler: What's wrong with vocational school? I feel that we've done a tremendous disservice between the '50s and I don't know what happened till now, where if you go to vocational school, you're somehow less than. I think it's done a tremendous disservice, and college isn't for everyone. David Wilezol: Yeah, I think a lot of the...the genesis, I think, of the abandonment of technical education, vocational education came back in '70s and 80's is when that started just because to a lot of observers and economists and things, it was evident the future

6 p.6 belonged to white-collar service economy, the high-tech economy. Look, actually, US GDP growth has been pretty similar to the growth of the semi-conductor industry if you put the two together, compare them on a chart. Now, we're realizing that by foregoing training a generation of electricians and plumbers and welders and skilled laborers, we're having a harder and harder time finding people to fill those jobs, which are going vacant in the large part. These are not jobs where you're not going to make any money. If you're a good electrician, you can be making into the six figures. It doesn't mean that you're dumb either. I'm sure there are electricians out there who have to use their head in electronic gear houses that are as big as some houses and compare that to somebody who is maybe a legal secretary, for instance, who has a BA. I think the one great thing about vocational, technical education too is that it dovetails more with the certain abilities and skills and inclinations that God's given each one of us. Not everybody was made to go read "Plato's Republic" and then go work in an office. That's just not how we are. I think especially for boys and men, there can be a tremendous amount of fulfillment in doing something and making something very tangible. David Cutler: I completely agree. At the end of the book, you mention some great alternative schools. I'm wondering, what do you think of online alternatives? David Wilezol: In higher ed, I do think there's a tremendous amount of potential for higher ed to be reshaped by these massive open online courses. I don't know if you read a lot about that? David Cutler: Of course. David Wilezol: The fact is they're going to be able to deliver similar, if not better content, for a much, much lower price. At San Diego State University, they're partnering with this company Udacity to do all of their remedial education with Udacity and it's going to be one-tenth the price. If you're somebody who is from a disadvantaged background, but wants more education and feels like they can't afford it, this seems to me like a perfect thing. Again, there are questions about the Socratic process, sitting in the classroom and talking about the text. That's really one of the beauties of education is diving into the material together. But for a lot of people who are just trying to [inaudible 20:14] a credential to get into the job market to get that job, I think that this digital thing is going to be really, really big. I think it's going to be for the better. I think it's going to put pressure on college and universities to have to adapt, especially their price model. David Cutler: Colleges are getting incredibly expensive. David Wilezol: The thing is that over time a lot of these especially private schools, they said, "We're just going to jack up our price, because to the general public, price is an

7 p.7 indicator of quality," but that's not totally the case. They've raised their prices and with the endless government spigot of money to keep up in the form of student loans, we're just on a crash course with that. Now, we have a trillion dollars in student loan debt and average student loan amount is $25,000, so you can see the product of that. They're trying to prestige themselves to death really. David Cutler: Is there anything that I forgot to ask you or something that you really would like to explain or discuss that I didn't get a chance to pose to you? David Wilezol: The only thing I would say is that college can still really be a valued proposition for a lot people. I think our book is getting wrongly cast sometimes as saying it behooves people more to just go right into the workforce out of high school than go to college. It's not always true. As things are now, I think some form of post-secondary education is really the best course for everybody unless you have really developed a skill that is marketable and will pay you a good job at the age of 18 or so. I just wish people would pick up the book, read it, consider it with an open mind, and just approach the whole question of what they're going to do after high school with a lot more nuance then what they've been doing before.