Matt Yglesias on the (Non) Purpose of Higher Education

Matt Yglesias nails the problem with the public debate over American universities: we don't know what they're for. When we fight about, say, police forces, we at least agree on what a police force is for: to promote a safe and orderly community. We still fight about them, but at least those fights are anchored in a common view of what we're trying to achieve.

Many of our debates about academia go nowhere because we have no such agreement on what universities are supposed to accomplish. In particular, we do not know what a university education should be. Here Yglesias responds to the Atlantic article I linked last week on the soaring number of students with "disabilities":

Maya Sen from the Kennedy School, who I generally think has good takes, reacted to this story by saying that abuse of accommodations is “far from a pressing national policy problem.” And I can see where she’s coming from there. But I think it’s just one manifestation of something that really is a pressing national policy problem, which is that the stakeholders in the American higher-education system can’t really articulate what it is they’re trying to do. So as various controversies pop up — about disability accommodations or viewpoint discrimination or admissions — there’s not a coherent response because there are no guiding principles to refer back to.

This lack of any sense of mission explains why so many education debates are empty. Yglesias:

As another example, I’ve seen a lot of conservatives crowing about the success of Southern universities in attracting more students away from the Northeast because the “frats and football” package has obviously more right-wing vibes than the Ivy League.

That’s fine as far as it goes. But the underlying dynamic here of schools competing for students on the basis of catering to teenagers’ whims actually just replicates a lot of stuff that conservatives claim not to like about higher education. Are these schools going to crack down on grade inflation? Make kids study worthwhile stuff instead of puppetry? The University of Alabama lazy river and water slide seem fun, but are they a good use of our student loan dollars?

Another good example concerns "grade inflation." If universities just exist to help people get jobs, and good grades help them get jobs, why not give everyone doing the basic work an A? If you think an A should be a signal of some kind of excellence, why do you think that? And what purpose does it serve? I have never personally given an A to a student I didn't think deserved it, but I would be hard-pressed to articulate a coherent defense of my policy. I just think that's how things should be.

There is no reason why universities can't pursue several goals at once: preparing students for careers, helping the most ambitious expand their minds, supporting research, providing a safe place for young people to mature. But the lack of any vision of what "education" means leaves universities adrift on the currents of culture and politics, vulnerable to every sort of political attack from either the right or the left.