What do U.S. colleges sell today? Knowledge or just access to jobs?

By David McElroy · April 30, 2013

When I was a student at the University of Alabama, I never seriously asked myself why I was in school. It was just understood that I was there to get a degree that would prepare me for a career. My parents both had degrees and it was just an assumption in our family that everyone gets a university degree.

If you had asked me why I was in school, I might have struggled to answer. I might have wanted to say that the purpose was to be an intellectually well-rounded and thoughtful person, but if I’d been honest with myself, I would have admitted I was there to get a piece of paper that marked me as acceptable as socially acceptable for employment. (The photo above from a UA graduation two years ago suggests to me that students still mostly see graduation as a ticket to employment.)

As much as I love learning, I’ve come to have serious doubts about the way the university system works in the United States today. (For readers in other countries, “college” and “university” are used interchangeably for practical purposes here in most usages.) I’ve come to see college as a long series of expensive hoops to jump through — which mostly just show that someone has the tenacity and willingness to stick to a plan and follow orders.

On Monday, a friend posted a link on Facebook to an article questioning the value of getting master’s degrees in library science and suggesting that some sort of apprentice program would be more useful. My friend is a librarian and a very bright woman. She’s decided to get a master’s in “library science” — which in itself as an odd name — but it’s not because it will help her do her job better. It’s because she’ll be paid more.

“I’ve struggled with the idea of going back for my [master’s] for many years,” she wrote when we discussed the article. “I’ve finally decided to go ahead and do it, because I’m at the point where I’m doing the work of a degreed librarian, without the pay (which isn’t that much, but is more than I’m making now). All things considered, it seems like the best course of action, but ultimately, I’m going through all of this just for a piece of paper. [Emphasis mine.] If I applied for certain types of library jobs right now, with my experience and references, and that piece of paper, I’d at least be seriously considered. As of right now, though, because I don’t have it, I won’t even get looked at.”

I have friends in other fields who feel the same way. I’ve had teacher friends get master’s degrees in education (or even doctorates) simply because the system is set up so they get paid more for those pieces of paper. It’s not that they’re better at their jobs. They say the coursework is useless and doesn’t apply to the real world. But they have an incentive to waste their time and money — and tax revenues for the classes subsidized at state schools — in order to make a better income. How does anyone benefit from that?

Over the weekend, I read a story about vocational schools, something that was looked down upon when I was in school. For my friends and I — who were bound for college and smugly considered ourselves above those who went to trade school — it was a step down. We were reflecting a common attitude that going to a four-year college is obviously the superior choice. After all these years, I wonder who the suckers were.

Millions of people graduate with fairly useless undergraduate degrees and struggle to find work, while those who go to vocational schools tend to be prepared for very good blue collar jobs, many of which pay more than many generic four-year degrees will ever bring.

When I posted the article on Facebook, a friend commented on his experience learning a trade instead of getting a college degree.

“I work for a Caterpillar dealer in their truck shop,” he said. “I make more money and have better benefits than many of my college-educated friends. I have no college debt. And most importantly, I actually like my job.”

The educational establishment is happy to push the idea that more and more students should go to college, resulting in dumbing down standards for students who shouldn’t be there in the first place (and who aren’t interested in being there). The establishment likes the “college for all” idea because it brings in more students, making their jobs more important and more secure. (And they naturally believe that what they do must be important.) In addition, those who make student loans and sell textbooks are also happy to lobby for “greater access” to college, because it pads their bottom lines.

I believe that a liberal arts education can have great value for a lot of people. I love learning for its own sake. But not everyone is interested in a traditional university education and many of those people don’t need that kind of education for the things they want to do with their lives. Those who aren’t interested in this kind of education are generally going to memorize what they need to know long enough to pass required classes — and not remember the material the next day. Who benefits from this system?

We need to look carefully at our dysfunctional education system. Those who want a traditional liberal arts education should have it available. Those who want a more technical education — such as engineering, medicine and such — should have that available to them, too. Those should probably be entirely different institutions, because the mindset is entirely different. And third, we need to elevate the status and training of those who want to work in blue collar trades so more people will feel that it’s acceptable to make that choice.

Society needs all three of those types of people. It seems to me that those are three entirely different types of educations with entirely different purposes.

I studied journalism at Alabama (along with political science, history and whatever sounded interesting at the moment of registration). I took journalism classes that I was required to take, but the dirty little secret is that I didn’t learn a thing in those classes. I learned all that I learned of journalism by doing the work at a real newspaper where I was working part-time.

Journalism isn’t a profession. It’s a trade. I think we’d be better going back to the days when young reporters learned by being hired to do grunt work and then gradually learning the skills they need. It worked well for me, and that’s why I was managing editor of a small daily newspaper when I was still 21.

I know better than to think these changes are going to happen. I’m just frustrated that we’re saddled with a system that’s dysfunctional — leaving students unprepared for real jobs and saddled with debt that’s going to follow them for years.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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