Now College is the Break - Eric Felten

2011年2月11日 - The Wall Street Journal

Industrialist and critic of
college Andrew Carnegie, circa 1910.

Andrew Carnegie didn't think much of college. More than a century ago, he looked around at the men commanding the industries of the day and found that few had wasted their time lollygagging on a campus quad. "The almost total absence of the graduate from high positions in the business world," he wrote in "The Empire of Business," "seems to justify the conclusion that college education, as it exists, is fatal to success in that domain."

How different things are now. Though a number of famous successes didn't collect a sheepskin before embarking on a career—Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg among them—most corporate executives these days have college degrees, if not MBAs.

The earning power of the average university graduate, relative to that of a high-school grad, has been going up for decades. We're convinced the skills needed to compete in the complex, ever-changing modern workforce are acquired through scholarship. Which is one reason colleges have been able to ratchet up tuition at twice the rate of inflation.

And yet, as the reward for the collegiate credential has been going up, what goes into getting that degree has been going down. So find sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa in their book "Academically Adrift" (University of Chicago Press). Institutions of higher learning are "focused more on social than academic experiences," they write. "Students spend very little time studying, and professors rarely demand much from them in terms of reading and writing." More than a third of students do less than five hours of studying a week—and these shirkers end up, on average, earning B's.

Ms. Roksa, who teaches at University of Virginia, and Mr. Arum, a professor at New York University, mined data from thousands of sophomores who retook a learning assessment test they had first been given when they arrived at college. Nearly half the students showed no sign of intellectual progress after two years of undergraduate endeavor.

The Journal's "Numbers Guy," Carl Bialik, has already captured the debate the study has provoked over what counts as learning and whether there is any quantifiable measure of modern erudition. But the book's most damning and unambiguous finding was reported by the students themselves—that in college they get away with a bare minimum of academic work. The average American junior-high or high-school student's days are packed with classes; the nights, with homework. And once in the workforce, Americans are notorious for jamming as much work as they can into a week. Which makes the college experience a strange interlude of lassitude filled with kegs and canoodling.

What would Mr. Carnegie have thought of it? "While the college student has been learning a little about the barbarous and petty squabbles of a far-distant past," he wrote, "or trying to master languages which are dead...the future captain of industry is hotly engaged in the school of experience, obtaining the very knowledge required for his future triumphs." Mr. Carnegie may have thought the knowledge gained at college was "adapted for life upon another planet," but he did expect that the students were gathering some sort of knowledge. Shouldn't parents footing the massive tab for tuition be able to expect the same?

Mr. Carnegie's contempt for college was not universal in his day. Best-selling 19th-century author William Makepeace Thayer specialized in hokey biographies of men who came from nothing to achieve greatness. But he didn't see an early devotion to commerce as the path to success. Instead, it was study he banked on—the more intensive the better.

"Some bright people think that the higher education," Mr. Thayer wrote, "makes young men and women lazy." But academics meant studying "more hours in twenty-four than the farmer or mechanic works." It wasn't students, he noted, who were agitating for an eight or 10-hour workday: "The question with them is not how few hours they can devote to the pursuit of knowledge, but how many." Has that equation been reversed?

There are plenty of serious students who strive to do the kind of hard work Mr. Thayer championed. But our universities seem designed to accommodate, if not encourage, laziness. Could it be that colleges are neglecting the most important thing one can learn in school—not the body of some arcane academic specialty, nor even a more general cognitive dexterity, but rather the ability to work hard at a sustained mental task?