Over Boston University’s spring break, I had a chance to read and reflect on a report recently published by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (AAA&S), “The Future of Undergraduate Education, The Future of America.” The report argues for the enduring and increasing importance of undergraduate education for the nation’s future, and offers recommendations to policymakers and institutions of higher education for achieving a better future for our nation. This report takes for granted the notion that higher education is a valuable good for individuals and society, but argues that although our future depends on doing so, we are not yet enabling all to enjoy the good of education. The report offers three recommendations, each divided into multiple steps: 1. ensure all students have high-quality (higher) educational experiences; 2. increase overall completion rates and reduce group-based disparities and inequities; and 3. manage college costs and improve affordability.
In a contrary vein, a new book, The Case Against Education: Why the Education System is a Waste of Time and Money, by Bryan Caplan, argues against supporting or promoting undergraduate education for most students. Caplan argues that the main benefit of education for individuals is in signaling through the attainment of credentials, and not the inherent or instrumental values of education itself. Caplan thinks that the argument that society is better off if more people get degrees commits the fallacy of composition: because an educational credential is a positional good, it is zero sum in the aggregate. Ominously, the Feb. 3, 2018, issue of The Economist proclaims that it is “Time to end the academic arms race,” agreeing with Caplan’s conclusion that there are too many students enrolling in undergraduate degree programs.
Should we encourage undergraduate degrees for all? Perhaps not. The Economist article and Caplan argue that there are many people for whom a college education is wasted effort and a wasted investment, by the individual and by society. Their arguments implicitly or explicitly rely on a distinction between liberal education and the attainment of a credential, the bachelor’s degree. There are wasteful, unproductive reasons for individuals to seek out educational credentials: to signal to employers that one has attributes that they want in employees, when direct tests of those attributes would be more socially efficient and fair. Worse, educational credentials enable invidious discrimination, such as on the basis of social class or race.
They also present financial arguments against pursuing a higher education. For individuals, it means foregone income and job experience, and one runs the risk of starting but not finishing a degree, thereby incurring more financial cost than benefit. The Economist points out that “Most students know that a degree in mathematics or finance is likely to be more lucrative than one in music or social work. What fewer realise is that the undergraduate premium overstates the financial benefit of embarking on a degree if their school grades barely qualify them for entry, no matter what they study.” (“All must have degrees,” The Economist, Feb. 3, 2018.) This article cites the statistic that in America 40% of college students fail to graduate within six years of enrolling. For society, there are the concomitant costs of the foregone productivity of students who could have been working and the risk of supporting unproductive educational outcomes.
These arguments against higher education focus on the social costs of unproductive competition for credentials and the financial benefits or costs of achieving a bachelor’s degree. But that understates the value of liberal education, as opposed to mere credential seeking. When we focus on the education itself, we see a great value in spreading liberal education broadly across society. I have previously written about what I see as the main reasons for pursuing a liberal undergraduate education, for both individuals and society. These include reasons that refer to real values at both levels: it promotes individual flourishing, creates a better informed and more civically engaged citizenry, and produces a skilled, more productive and innovative workforce. But in the current system of higher education, these values do not accrue to all students, and there are systematic disparities in how the benefits are distributed across the population.
This uneven and inequitable availability of opportunities for higher education constitute a serious problem, which the AAA&S report addresses. In order to fulfill the productive aims of liberal education and achieve more than the destructively competitive and discriminatory benefits for some individuals, higher education as a whole must do a better job of teaching students. It has to offer opportunities to a wide range of students and meet them where they are. And it has to be affordable to anyone who can qualify and benefit from an education.
What is Boston University’s role as an elite, highly selective private, non-profit institution when it comes to the access, completion, and affordability agendas? Higher education is a large and complex ecosystem of two-year and four-year, public, private non-profit, for-profit, open access, and highly selective colleges and universities. Many aspects of the access agenda – the goal of providing educational opportunity for any student who can gain from it– are not part of BU’s mission. Furthermore, BU already has a high rate of completion. Our six-year graduation rate is already over 85%, so we are already doing well by comparison to the 47% average rate of completion across the nation. But some of the recommendations do speak to us in elite institutions and propose actions we can take to secure the value and the future of higher education.
Most importantly, we should strive to bring in a diversity of students from all income levels by providing outreach to attract them, scholarships to make enrollment at BU affordable, and support while they are here to ensure that students overcome whatever challenges they face. These challenges will include financial ones, developing high level learning skills, and coping with the social and emotional stresses of a new social environment. We can also help to improve the accessibility of higher education more generally by providing educational outreach opportunities to students in K-12 in our city and surrounding communities, such as those offered through our Learning Resource Network (LERNet). Through such programs we inspire students to believe that they can achieve a higher education and help them develop the skills and the motivation to do so. There are other ways that BU faculty can improve educational access to a wide and diverse population beyond BU, such as by developing free Open Educational Resources and sharing our research and educational materials on OpenBU. Interestingly, The Economist, Caplan, and the AAA&S report all argue that higher education should do more for lifelong learning and provide access to micro-credentials or nano-degrees. We can further affect affordability by improving the transfer process. We can, as I have argued, target financial aid to low-income students and minimize merit- based aid, as we are doing through the Boston Community Service Award Program, which now is available to transfer students as well as freshman admits.
There are many social reasons for encouraging broad participation in higher education, arising from significant challenges we face as a society. As a result of greater diversity of demographics (by 2040 there will be no racial or ethnic majority in the U.S.), we may become a more divided union. The AAA&S report emphasizes that universities play an important role in providing a public space in which diverse persons with divergent viewpoints can come together to hear each other. This gives universities an ever more important mission to provide forums for the exchange of ideas, while requiring faculty and administrators to “mediate as well as educate.” (AAA&S, 78) Further, a more automated and robotic workforce will disrupt the economy, and dislocate many workers, perhaps many times over. We need to educate for a rapidly changing economy with new kinds of work, requiring flexible minds to respond successfully to the opportunities and challenges presented.
Higher education is vital to the future of individuals not for invidious competitive and discriminatory reasons, but because it prepares citizens to flourish amidst social diversity and global and technological change. Universities are uniquely positioned to offer opportunities to continue to learn and adjust to the demands of an ever-changing world, and an educated workforce will be able to repeatedly take advantage of those opportunities. For society to benefit, we must ensure that individuals from all diverse social groups can affordably access a high-quality education.