Nicholas Tampio is a professor of political science at Fordham University. In this post, he demonstrates how a proposed federal program could crush the liberal arts and humanities.
He writes in the Boston Globe:
A bipartisan group of senators, including Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, are backing a bill called the College Transparency Act. It would require public and private colleges around the country to report how many students enroll, transfer, drop out, and complete various programs. Then that information would be combined with inputs from other federal agencies, including the Internal Revenue Service, so that the “labor market outcomes” of former students could be tracked.
In other words, the act would create a system that publicizes how much money students make, on average, after going through particular colleges, programs, and majors.
According to Senator Whitehouse, “Choosing a college is a big decision, and yet too often families can’t get the information to make apples-to-apples comparisons of the costs and benefits of attending different schools.” The purpose of the College Transparency Act is to allow people to make these comparisons. Its other sponsors are Republicans Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and Tim Scott of South Carolina.
Unfortunately, the College Transparency Act could reshape how students, families, policymakers, and the public view the purposes of higher education.
To be sure, privileged students will still be able to pursue their academic passions, but many students will be channeled into paths with a higher payoff upon graduation. Many students who might want to explore geography, philosophy, or the fine arts will be advised to stay away from such majors that do not appear lucrative.
Allison L. Dembeck, vice president of education and labor advocacy at the US Chamber of Commerce, applauds the act for ensuring that “American students have access to accurate information on college affordability, employment, and income data by major.” And the text of the bill says that this system will “focus on the needs of the users of the information.”
But which needs are we talking about? The system would publicize only some outputs of college — especially how much money students make — and not, for instance, surveys of graduates’ satisfaction. This would have the effect of nudging students and families into viewing college as being primarily about making money.
As a college professor, I have talked with students who wanted to major in political science but who pursued a business degree because of parental pressure. I fear that the College Transparency Act would steer many more students toward majors that lead to more money.
The increased pressure may not come from parents alone. The College Transparency Act could lay the foundation for the government to eventually refuse to pay for programs with modest student economic outcomes.
The Obama administration tried to create the Postsecondary Institution Ratings System, which would have rated colleges on graduates’ income earned and then steered federal financial aid to students in schools that fared well on this measure. The administration went so far as to create a College Scorecard that reports median alumni earnings in the year after graduation for students who received federal financial aid. The College Transparency Act would capture much more detailed data, which could give Congress the ability to create a high-stakes accountability system in the next reauthorization of the Higher Education Act.
States could go this route even if the federal government doesn’t. The act would require the commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics to provide a report to each state’s higher education body. In Florida, the legislature is considering a bill that would waive state university tuition and fees for students enrolled in academic programs that align with the state’s “economic and workforce needs.” The proposed data system would give states information that could be used to determine which majors to fund or not.
College can be a wonderful chance to explore academic options. Sometimes there is a direct link between a student’s major and their career. But not always. Often enough, English majors go to veterinary school, theology majors go to law school, political science majors become priests, and cultural anthropology majors go into venture capital. If students learn to read complex texts and write research papers, practice public speaking, find a mentor, and make friends, then they often do well after college regardless of major.
American higher education’s commitment to academic freedom means that professors get to choose what to teach and research, and students have options about majors and courses. There is a buzz on American campuses as professors and students do what they are passionate about.
Passion is not frivolous. Students who are fired up about learning go on to start businesses, become intelligence analysts or Peace Corps volunteers, raise families, and do other meaningful things. Do we really want central planners to set up a system that leads students to think more about their anticipated income? I agree with Stanford University Professor David F. Labaree that American higher education is “a perfect mess” and that this messiness contributes to it being “the most successful and sought-after source of learning in the world.” Who knows what is the next major that America will need in the future, regardless of how well it pays now?
Does anybody doubt that engineering graduates earn more than comparative literature graduates, at least shortly after graduation? Most students already have a decent idea about what they will be able to do with their degrees. The College Transparency Act is not just about collecting and providing data. It is about building a higher education system in the image of economists and businesspeople.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I got my Bachelor of Music Education from Washington State in Pullman, WA. Nobody would benefit from adding my salary to a statistic to determine how good a school Washington State is based on the amount of money that I made. [Why would anyone go into education based on the amount of money teachers make?]
Washington State isn’t responsible for the rotten salaries that Illinois was giving music teachers.
Diane I think that’s where the term “bean counter” came from.
But the great difference is also not a matter of telling someone (like legislators or parents) about the differences in kinds or qualities of education someone receives. It’s a matter of a person’s horizon and their closed judgments about it. . . if we cannot “see” what’s beyond our own horizon, it doesn’t exist (to us). And if a person has NOT had a dose of liberal education, and swum around in a few arts and humanities courses, or read the greats in political philosophy and history, they can have no idea . . . and along the way they have become adults and so their own view of things is “just fine.”
The correlate problem is that, if a person HAS had a good dose of liberal studies, the question remains about whether they know what they have and how different it might be . . . OR if they merely project their own view of things out onto others, feeding their own liberal naive optimism, while those others may actually have been well-prepared to “get a job” (jobs jobs jobs!) and count beans in all aspects of their lives, pooh-poohing liberal education all the while. CBK
“In Florida, the legislature is considering a bill that would waive state university tuition and fees for students enrolled in academic programs that align with the state’s “economic and workforce needs.” The proposed data system would give states information that could be used to determine which majors to fund or not.”
Every time they go down the “career training” road they end up with an elitist outcome that shifts lower income people to designated areas.
They seem to be incapable of doing this well, so they should probably stop doing it.
We literally had the exact same “debate” when I was in high school. They then ended up slotting all the lower income kids into vocational schools.
Would it be so bad if they just admitted “we don’t seem to be able to do this well- maybe we shouldn’t” 🙂
There’s a difference between collecting data to inform policy and collecting data to socially engineer outcomes. In my opinion the liberal arts graduates are nimble and creative thinkers that are generally well informed about the world. With resilience and critical thinking skills, they can do well in a variety of disciplines. Driving students away from the liberal arts would be a big mistake, particularly in the precarious economy that we have today.
retired teacher Hmmmmm . . . maybe that’s why they call them “core” courses.
CBK
My university required a two year long liberal arts program for all majors. It included a requirement of three years of a foreign language. I tutored lots of rather dense business majors in French. Yet, today these are the people that believe they should tell everyone else what they should do.
The fact that some progressive Dems and conservative Reps both agree about the need to spell out the economic dimension of this or that college major shows how deep the neo-liberal consensus among current left and right-wingers goes. Anyone who sees education principally as a means to a job buys into the notion–whether consciously or not–that young people (of a certain class) are just laborers in training, not human beings developing themselves for living a full life. Underlying this neo-liberal view is a notion of life that suits the existing class order by allocating broad, full education to the wealthy, and mere job training to everyone else. The College Transparency Act reveals just how reactionary our political class really is–both on the left and right. Elite education–broad liberal arts exposure–is only for the children of the wealthy, so these kids develop a solid sense of themselves as possessors of entitlement to rule. Most kids should only get job training. It is the old distinction between College and Job tracks in the high schools of the 1950s and 60s. (Remember, about 40% of new undergraduates in the Ivy League are graduates of elite private schools, schools that educate a tiny minority of America’s children. Schumer and Gulliani and Kennedy and Trump’s kids all attended or attend the same private schools, where liberal arts are taught. At $60,000 tuition per year, per kid.)
At bottom our Senate is filled with conservatives and liberals alike whose kids share the same life experience of privilege and access to broad liberal arts education that instills in them a belief that they are people who will define their futures (and ours). Cassidy and Scott, Whitehouse and Warren–they are more similar than they are different when it comes to a class understanding of the education system. We shouldn’t forget it. .
Few, if any, of these people care seriously about your kids’ futures the way they care about their own kids’ futures. They believe their kids are born to rule, and that everyone else’s kids are born to follow. They are not democrats at heart; they are technocrats in charge of people who–thank God–persist in not following the road their social betters dictate for them. Isn’t it possible that Trumpism somehow taps into anger that this not-so-hidden class rule engenders in millions of Americans who believe their lives are worth more than the pinched, narrow futures imagined for them by the political class, the class that thinks about things like College Transparency Acts? Trumpism, in its own sick way, feeds off a stratification system in which ordinary people are fooled by a political class that poses as the servant of the Public Good, while actually serving its own class interests.
When Warren and Whitehouse propose the same education for all kids, not some, give me a call. Otherwise, expect more of the same class bs from our wonderful “Two Party” system when it comes to education.
Passion is not frivolous for Harvard undergrads. But it is for your kids.
If politicians cared about young people, they would stop promoting education as market based product. They would let teachers do their jobs without meddlesome rules, tests and punishments. They would stop sinking public dollars into unaccountable charters, vouchers and ridiculous ESAs, and they would stop allowing billionaires to dictate the policies of the DOE.
Passion is not frivolous for Harvard undergrads? Really?
Do you think the way privileged students approach their education at Harvard is the same as the first generation students approach their education at Harvard?
And Harvard has a dearth of students whose parents would actually have to pay a significant amount of money for them to attend. The very, very privileged are disproportionately represented in the student body compared to the somewhat privileged whose parents earn enough so that they are eligible for very little, if any, financial aid, but for whom the burden of the cost is still felt.
And small liberal arts colleges — even the very top ones — have a hard time attracting first generation students and even just unprivileged middle class students — unless they are offering full scholarships or extremely generous financial aid packages. Why? Because except for those who live very privileged lives, most parents don’t pay $70,000/year for college so their kid can pursue their passion.
And don’t get me started on the middle class kids who got fooled into taking out $300,000 in loans for one of those very expensive private schools to pursue their passion and found themselves burdened with huge debt.
Should that debt be forgiven? I see discussions by middle class parents whose kids accepted merit scholarships or went to state schools who certainly aren’t happy that the kids who chose to “pursue their passion” and incur $300,000 in debt doing so would be bailed out.
And do we provide not just free college at state universities but free college at private ones too?
Elizabeth Warren attended a public university. The fact she teaches at Harvard was not because she “pursued her passion”. It was because she was able to work in her field without being burdened by hundreds of thousands in debt.
Privileged students have always been able to pursue their passions. Others have been able to pursue their passions either at public universities with lower tuition or with merit or financial aid at private ones.
And yet others fell for the hype that having hundreds of thousands in debt is no big deal because “pursing your passion” is so important. Senators Warren and Whitehouse understand this. Their motives are not “neoliberal” unless “neoliberal” now applies to almost every middle class family figuring out how to pay for college.
We all admire immigrant kids who work hard and succeed in America, and public universities do a good job of providing the means for this success. Sort of…whether successful students are native born or immigrants, success, meaning a job at Goldman Sachs (plum jobs for Ivy League grads), certainly has a downside. Turning immigrant success into support for the general tracking system just reproduces the problem. Many immigrants, then and now, wrongly conclude, just as many of their successful native born fellows do, that because they succeeded, anyone ought to be able to do so. Next step is joining the technocracy. [This topic reminds me of a cartoon from the early Obama admin: a line-up of some men and women, all dressed in suits, multi-racial, all of whom are lawyers (probably Harvard, Yale and Stanford Law).] Successful students who gravitate to making money and securing power for themselves and families, whether immigrant or not, deflect from the general reality, which is exactly what technocratic types interested in accountability for others want. The problem here is simple, just as it is in healthcare and housing: are we going to create systems that enable everyone to benefit? Market systems, the ones neo-liberals love, distribute goods, services, and power based on how much money things cost and how much money people have. Warren et al believe they can manipulate this market distribution system to serve everyone. Such manipulation exists to a certain extent in social democratic societies, not in ours. Warren and Whitehouse are no social democrats. I’d trust the policy views of AOC and her colleagues about these matters more than I would trust people who ignore basic political realities in our country in order to retain influence.
You can’t make a system work for everyone if there are precious few seats of “success” for which everyone, immigrant and native born, must compete (except of course for the kids of the current political and economic elite). That system, our system, just allows the people who are not held accountable (the Deformers) to keep what they have at the expense of the society as a whole. Hence my point about the common habit among leading Dems and Reps of talking about policies that are nonsense in the hope that people will believe nonsense instead of thinking critically about “the way things actually work.” The entire 25-year disaster of education reform in the US has accomplished just one thing: to entrench the power of an unaccountable and incompetent elite by distracting us from taking education and its link to a good society seriously.
Education reform has been a disaster, I agree.
But it wasn’t people like Elizabeth Warren and Sheldon Whitehouse who made it a disaster.
There were a lot of people who were educated at fancy private liberal arts colleges pursuing their “passion”, who found a nice highly compensated career first at Teach for America and then promoting ed reform. Wanna bet that they thought that they were better than their fellow students pursuing more “marketable” majors?
What I see is a lot of privileged adults educated in privilege to pursue their passion who got to privilege-splain how kids in K-12 needed their ed reform?
What I saw is a lot of 25 or 26 year olds who “pursued their passion” to start their own charter school (and receiving a generous salary as CEO) who looked down on the public school teachers who often came from public colleges and looked down upon education degrees and those who were trained in how to teach students. After all, they could learn that in 6 weeks, right?
I agree with many of your points, but I don’t think that it has anything to do with ed reform and the disaster it has caused.
This is about students being overly burdened with college debt.
I wrote a longer reply that may or may not eventually post. I agree with many of your points re: education reform, but I think this is a different issue.
Consider what the more democratic socialist countries of Europe do for higher education. I’m not that well-versed in how all countries handle it, but I do know people who had more technical educations or educations in which they chose what they were studying and studied only that. Going to university was not a time to explore — it was studying what you had applied to study. That may have included philosophy, but only for those students who had applied to study that.
I have to side with Steven on this one, nycpsp. His post is right on. Maybe the message that this is a neoliberal move sounds to you like ‘Dems are no better than Reps.’ Dems are multiple times better than Reps, but that doesn’t cancel out the fact that there’s a segment of each that find consensus on neolib policies often as not (and this most definitely is one). I adore Warren on anything connected with banking, but this is out of her bailiwick, & a misstep.
“And yet others fell for the hype that having hundreds of thousands in debt is no big deal because ‘pursing your passion’ is so important. Senators Warren and Whitehouse understand this. Their motives are not ‘neoliberal…”
I could be wrong but I suspect the non-privileged went into gross debt to go to places like Harvard not necessarily to ‘pursue passion’ (which they could do as well elsewhere), but to get a ticket to upward mobility provided by the name. That too is ‘hype’ if one goes into the kind of debt that takes decades of high salary to repay. The proposed bill does not address that. These loans resemble the ones handed out by deregulated banks during the period before the housing bust, and that’s where Warren should be targeting her know-how.
bethree,
There aren’t that many middle class and low-income students at Harvard, but those fortunate enough to get admitted receive generous financial aid. (In the NYT study, half the students at Harvard came from families with HHI over $168,000 and of those, nearly 1/3 had incomes over $600,000. And at other Ivies, the median income of families whose students attended was over $200,000!)
But at other private universities like NYU, the financial aid is much less generous but middle class students whose families don’t make $600,000+ a year are more likely to get a seat, and also incur a lot of debt believing that what is important is pursuing their passion.
I really don’t understand the use of the word “neoliberal” as an insult. It reminds me of how the right was able to turn “liberal” into a dirty word back when Dukakis was running against Bush 1. It became shorthand to get voters to hate the Democrats because a policy choice was supposedly made because of untrustworthy Democratic politicians whose only goal was to please their liberal masters at the ACLU. When the left joined in decades later using “neoliberal” I found it a sign that they were no better than the right and they were being played into helping empower the far right Republicans.
I like real discussion and debate. A conversation where terms like “neoliberal” are thrown out to describe something that Elizabeth Warren support is not about having a good discussion — it is about smearing and undermining those politicians and the entire Democratic party.
Warren may or may not be wrong to support this policy, but it would be much more useful not to slime her and suggest that there is something wrong with Elizabeth Warren’s character, her motives, and her intelligence. Elizabeth Warren and Sheldon Whitehouse think this policy is good because they may have wrong information and the right information isn’t getting to them. Make an argument for why colleges should keep secret all of this information so that students and their parents never learn how little their kids will students and their parents should earn. But I wish people would stop throwing out the term “neoliberal”, which is just as meaningless as the right throwing out “liberal” to get people to hate politicians. Sadly, in both cases, it is a very successful attack, and in both cases, the ones who are attacked are Democrats.
“A conversation where terms like “neoliberal” are thrown out to describe something that Elizabeth Warren support is not about having a good discussion — it is about smearing and undermining those politicians and the entire Democratic party.”
Neoliberals believe “free” markets are better than democratic governments at providing public services and at investing public funds for public purposes. Republican neoliberals go for private religious schools, while Democratic neoliberals favor unregulated charter schools. Both types of neoliberals are anti-union, and are indifferent to income and wealth inequality unless political opposition gets too intense. Both favor private over public education. Unlike original 19th century liberals, they accept fiat currencies and central banks and the reality of some government regulation (so-called mixed economies). Rep neoliberals are indifferent to discrimination and Dem neoliberals favor modest anti-discrimination efforts. All neoliberals favor Wall St as the principal means of allocating capital (stocks, bonds, private equity), and hate taxes on any of these areas of the economy. All neoliberals favor privatization in general, and many favor even the privatization of the military.
Basically neo-liberals favor the wealthy class in that they see it as the best governing class, certainly better than popularly elected officials. So Rep and Dem neo-liberals share many principles that favor private sources of wealth over popular control of public policy and public resources. Real Dems favor unions, popularly elected officials, large-scale public programs to provide health care, a dignified retirement for everyone, anti-corruption laws and practices, rational regulation of economic activity, social uplight programs, public education, and civilian control of the military. Neolibs are religious fanatics when it comes to accepting economic orthodoxy regarding profit-making, investment, growth, and the dangers of regulation.
Real Dems believe government investment, taxation, and regulation of the financial sector, all require public control and oversight that are not captured by wealthy folks. They believe in the public provision of health care, pensions, equal opportunity policies in housing, education, and employment.
Basically real Dems believe in democracy, while neo-libs tolerate democracy only when they are forced to tolerate it. Real Dems are not afraid of popular government. Neoliberals are terrified of it.
I count myself among those Dems who think you can’t really be a neoliberal and a Democrat, for obvious reasons. I count myself among Dems who believe the Dem party is nothing if not the party of social security (not private retirement accounts), Medicare for All (not private health insurance that cannot cover everyone), public education, rational regulation of the private sector, and the criminalization of the capture of democratic institutions by private actors (corruption of free political processes). I regret that even real Dems fall far short when it comes to foreign policy and the militarization of foreign policy (and domestic policing). I regret that real Dems have yet to address the social structures of inequality, racial and sexist discrimination, and irrational economic investment.
Neoliberalism is the Democracy of those unwilling to say in public that they believe only a small portion of humanity can benefit from real education because only a small portion of humanity has real talent, that wealthy people are better than not-so-wealthy people, that free markets always produce the best outcomes, and that democratic government in general should become a technocracy supervised by the wealthy.
Dems get beaten up when some people fling “neoliberal” as an epithet, because too many Dems aren’t really democrats. Warren and Whitehouse and many other Dems, as advanced as they may be when compared to McConnell and Manchin, have yet to show how they can be relied upon to go up against the wealthy class. (Obviously Bernie does a much better job along these lines.) Schumer, Obama, Cuomo, Clintons, Pelosi are nice enough people, I suppose. However they live in a different world from the one in which AOC and others like her reside. We Americans could benefit at this point from a three-party system composed of an authoritarian, irrational, patriarchal, theocracy called the Republican party, a Neoliberal party composed of the professional class and its supporters, and a Democratic party composed of the majority of Americans.
Public education is education that enables the majority to govern itself based on the principles of equality, liberty, and rational engagement with the world. Public education is education for democratic living. (Didn’t some philosopher say this a hundred years ago?)
I don’t understand this comment.
There is not much difference between Elizabeth Warren and Bernie (but there is some difference). That doesn’t make Elizabeth Warren a “neoliberal”.
By those standards, LBJ and FDR could be smeared and undermined as “neoliberals”!
I don’t recall AOC throwing out attacks like that on Democrats. She has policy differences but makes her case by pointing out what is better in her policy because she seems to understand that calling Democrats “neoliberals” and accusing them of only being it in for the rich is just helping the far right. AOC is so much smarter than some of her elders who should stop helping to give the far right’s dishonest attacks legitimacy.
AOC understands that when Americans hear “the Dems are corrupt neolibs and don’t care about you” coming from both the right and the left, it only empowers those on the right that would absolutely destroy both the progressive movement and democracy itself.
Elizabeth Warren does not kowtow to corporate interests. Neither does Sheldon Whitehouse. It is possible to have policy differences with them while recognizing that.
Arguing about names isn’t really the point. The point is that before Bernie, AOC and the movement that supports them, you couldn’t have policy discussions that we’re having now because the other guys laughed at the insurgents. Warren and Whitehouse, as far as I know, are not part of that movement. Neoliberals are being forced to discuss these important issues by real Dems, and should the neos get an opportunity to ignore the real Dems, they will. And that includes public education. (In NYC, the two leading candidates are both in the pocket of school privatizers.)
Young people falling into debt because of the cost of college is just one of the issues that real Dems have forced to the table. The one gratifying thing that is going on here is that Biden is rising to the occasion more than many lefties thought he would. But big fights loom. When the going gets tough–Supreme Court seats, filibuster, foreign policy, public sector resources–which side with Warren and Whitehouse be on? I hope it’s the Dem side.
FDR was not a neoliberal and using that term to describe politicians like Warren and Whitehouse who are probably to the left of FDR (and Truman and LBJ) on most issues is not productive. Which is why AOC makes excellent progressive arguments without resorting to words like “neoliberal” that do nothing for the progressive movement except make American voters believe that the Republicans are the only party that isn’t corrupt and dishonest.
I came of voting age along with a whole generation of young people who heard the term “neoliberal” thrown at Jimmy Carter and we believed it and hated and despised Jimmy Carter and the corrupt, corporate agenda that Jimmy Carter stood for. (In 1980, it wasn’t Bernie Sanders but Ted Kennedy who stood for the good progressive side against the evil neoliberal Jimmy Carter.) We helped empower Reagan and while some of us realized our error, I watched too many young people who thought it was Reagan who was the honest guy out to help the working people and Jimmy Carter who supported the neoliberal pro-corporate agenda. And they empowered the Republican party for decades.
I always wonder what would have happened if my generation had not been so certain that Jimmy Carter was the great betrayer and Reagan was the honest one. I was absolutely certain that Jimmy Carter was awful because I considered myself on the left and I was brainwashed into believing that Carter was a neoliberal who had betrayed the entire progressive Democratic movement.
Was I right?
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis majored in history at Yale. Can these people not hear themselves?
My brother and I were liberal arts graduates. My brother was a history major who could have been a great teacher, but he worked in human resources. I majored in French and started out teaching French. When I finished a master’s in TESOL, my background in French helped me get a job in a school district with a mostly Haitian foreign population. My French was not a waste of time.
at the end of life, we are nothing ore than our accumulated experiences: experiences in learning are never a waste of time
Waste of time” is a nonsensical term.
Nothing one does can be a “waste” of time because time would not exist without “doing”.
In fact, time itself is defined by the doing.
If there was nothing happening in the universe, there would be no passage of time.
Jeff Dearing They saw the money and the power, and that’s the last they saw of their hearts. CBK
I’m grateful for having been so enriched by my humanities education. I’ve lived an eventful and meaningful life thus far having always steered clear of money-making as a primary motivation.
back when computer programing started in the 1980s, almost all the people I knew who were doing well in the field had liberal arts degrees
Roy, my degree was in physics and I got it in the late 70’s. I got into computer programming because people were willing to pay me for it, even though I only had one computer course in school.
The technocrats in the Democratic party are trying to regulate the for-profit universities. They’re trying to inhibit places like outsized claims, deliver no meaningful education or degree & burden students with lifetime debt.
If they really wanted to end for-profit universities they would make them illegal, require rigorous accreditation standards and regulate the predatory student loan system.
WHY can’t they do that? Because they have a complete lack of imagination or are unwilling to really end profiteering in education.
And to continue along those lines… Some of the early word processors and spreadsheets seemed to me to reflect the thinking of people in general. Modern applications are often deemed “intuitive” by their promoters, but fail to live up to the billing on occasion. Meanwhile, we continue to elect polarizing candidates to public office and to support narrow agendas that leave out large portions of the population. The more we reject the liberal arts, the harder society tugs on itself.
Today our seniors are walking around school in their graduation regalia while we rightly celebrate their accomplishment of their high school experience. I usually take the time to ask them of their plans. One student plans to major in technical lab. Apparently there is a major for those who want to work testing blood. “O Brave new world, that has such people in it”
Though the two are intimately related, they are not the same: That is, gaining object knowledge is intimately related to, but vastly different from, undergoing expansive experiences, . . . the latter is more apt to occur more often, to have more depth, and to be more qualitative than if such undergoings occur in the former. And . . . though I have been warned enough by the romantic dangers of being captured by good “litrachur.” Guess which kind is commonly found on tests, and which is not and cannot be? CBK
If not careful, this proposal could result in a self fulfilling prophecy that would result in schools identified as elite remaining so. This could become another excuse to ratchet up the price to attend the schools that now leave students wallowing in crushing debt. The so called elite schools have a huge advantage in post graduate jobs because most of their students come from privileged environments that provide the networks for jobs of high net worth. We are now entering the fourth decade of labeling P-12 schools as successes or failures based on narrow measures on limited curricula. That has not worked out too well. If we are not careful, colleges will get similar ratings making it even more selective and segregated by socio-economic status while making economic mobility even less attainable…
Well said, Paul. An inevitable consequence of this.
Completely agree. This is the same boneheaded bean-counting mentality behind NCLB/RTTT/ESSA & its ‘grading’ of schools/ teachers based on ‘outcomes’ [annual standardized test scores] that have zero relationship to quality of ed instruction, what was taught/ learned in classroom.
As an academic I have always thought that more information is better than less, so I don’t think this is a bad idea that students make informed choices. It would be far worse to deliberately deceive students into thinking that, say, a degree in Greek is the pathway to riches.
One very good outcome might be for students to see that the choice of major matters a good deal more than the choice of university to attend. The average economics or math major from a public university will no doubt earn more than a psychology major from a much more expensive private school. If that is important to the student, it might well result in a much lower cost of education for families.
I think a degree in Greek will lead to riches. The person who does that is independent, nonconformist, dogged in the pursuit of knowledge, and unusually determined. The world is his or her oyster.
Me thinks teachingeconomist is stuck in the view that, no matter what, money is not only A guage, it’s the ONLY guage. CBK
I think students bring there characteristics to the major, not that the major shapes the students. Is you experience teaching undergraduates different?
CBK,
You are very mistaken. I advocate for fully informed decisions. Do you think it would be best if students are deceived when making a choice of majors?
Teachingeconomist “Deceived”? Wow. How your comment doesn’t surprise me.
Here’s my response: Do you think raising questions about (teaching to) commonly accepted cultural norms, e.g., to suggest a potential higher horizon, or even just different, is a form of deception?
In this case: the mandate is to challenge a corrupt and low-level set of assumptions and a powerful paradigm concerning what’s really worthwhile to do with one’s life, e.g., “success” equates to a big bank account, or having and wielding un-tempered power as distinct from what some of the writers here on this blog are well-aware of.
I think offering such challenges is what gives “education” its lifeforce. . . . I would say much better than just being a cultural lemming. Cha ching. Funny . . . I always thought students came to class to understand and to learn, and to undergo qualified change. CBK
TE My response went to moderation. Stay tuned. CBK
CBK,
The Boston Globe article is not about teaching to commonly accepted cultural norms. The thesis is that if students are made aware of salary differences between majors at any given university it may result in some students changing majors. I think that the author could be correct about that, but a better informed student will make better decisions.
TE And to leave in place the assumptions about the value of mere monetary income is where we leave education and enter the present propaganda of the capitalist paradigm. From my view, education at least enables us and our students to question such paradigms instead of merely following along with them.
Unfortunately, we ARE and HAVE BEEN saturated with the capitalist paradigm for generations. We know it’s in our bones when we cannot think around it without running into our love-of-money feelings.
In my view, this makes raising questions about it MORE, not LESS essential to the mandates of education especially, but not only, in democracies.
That’s why Pol Pot murdered teachers and artists first. He knew what teaching as questioning meant. CBK
The irony is getting pretty thick here.
Our economic system hides information as a matter of course and deceives people on a regular basis.
And most economists quite obviously prefer to remain UNinformed, willfully ignoring financial fraud like that which led to the 07/08 economic crisis.
https://neweconomicperspectives.org/2013/10/economics-science-economists-scientists.html
Of course, like so many mainstream economists, TEs hero, VAManujan just can’t admit to himself that the Emperor has no clothes.
We get mesmerized by numbers and forget to ask what the numbers are telling us vs. what the data crunchers say they are telling us.
CBK,
Perhaps my many years of postsecondary teaching gives me more faith in undergraduates ability to make nuanced decisions. For most students the choice of major will likely be influenced by the potential earnings from a major as well as a huge variety of other characteristics of individual majors at different institutions.
Many STEM fields, for example, design their majors so that anyone who satisfies the major requirements is well prepared for graduate study. Economics departments, on the whole, do not design their majors to include enough mathematics to make a student well prepared for graduate study. My general recommendation is that a student should double major in economics and mathematics if they wish to do graduate study in economics.
TE I’m glad to hear it. You seem to think I am saying that students shouldn’t be informed about the financial after-effects of their curriculum choices. I’m not.
To put it as succinctly as I can, I’m saying that an over-focus of financial rewards is a distorted view of a life well-lived. That view pervades our culture insofar as, at its root, we envy people with money and power, regardless of their other human qualities, or the qualities we expose in ourselves by embracing that view. And we’re dumb enough to think everyone else REALLY also envies.
And it pervades the academy insofar as that capitalist paradigm is understood as normative and insofar as it’s a deal-breaker that already stands at the beginning of curriculum choices, and where it’s even false in many actual situations where, for instance, Greek studies pans out financially.
The capitalist-only predatory viewpoint, to put it bluntly, is stunted, and it appeals to stunted people. (Anyone who reads Ayn Rand can see it all over her writing.) That very state of interior affairs blocks any potential for self-understanding that might break through to a different more humanized horizon. It commonly is accompanied by pervasive absences and ideas about engaging in very sources of human development that might put that over-focus back in its proper context. Pooh-pooh, doesn’t make money, it’s a waste of time. This whole idea plays out in a disregard for the profession of teaching, right down to their paychecks and the powers they do not have.
Education at its highest degree at least affords students the ability to do the very thing you seem to be calling for . . . to be able to make informed choices; but that doesn’t actually happen when that “information” mean just carrying forward a distorted understanding of humanity. CBK
CBK,
I am glad we are in agreement that students should have full information about which major to choose even if that results in them choosing a major that we would prefer they not choose. It is, after all, their lives.
TE Hmmm. . . Twisting the night away . . . . I don’t think we are in agreement at all. What I remember is that your main interest (only interest?) was informing students of the end-run economics of their curriculum choices. (Watch out for those humanities and social sciences courses, they are a real financial downer.)
Do correct me if I am wrong, but I don’t remember your putting financial considerations in the broader context of education as at least raising the questions that would relate other human values and sources of well-being, as others have done so well here. But then you’d have to take a few humanities and arts courses.
What goes around comes around, right off the cliff where cultural lemmings are concerned. CBK
CBK,
I think we are in agreement. Students should understand all the implications of choosing a major. I have not argued for anything other than this, and have not done anything other than this in advising students over the 3+ decades I have taught in post secondary education.
TE Glad to hear it. . . . what doesn’t come clear in your earlier notes. CBK
As a taxpayer I have always thought that less govt bureaucracy was better than more. Info on salaries in various professions and career pathways leading from various majors is widely available on the internet. The only possible motivation for govt getting into the act & duplicating the research is to leverage it for some political agenda I probably don’t agree with.
Bethree5,
The data on majors and earnings so far collected primarily comes from the federal government, specifically the American Community Survey run by the US Census. Here is a link to Georgetown’s research based on the ACS data: https://cew.georgetown.edu/cew-reports/valueofcollegemajors/
That’s a very silly way to choose a college major. I bet plumbers and electricians make more than professors of economics at state universities. Why didn’t you become an electrician? I bet that Greek major is now driving a major tech company or a hedge fund.
Fully informed decisions means students would also have data about other ways to measure post-college success–not just money. Perhaps measures of job satisfaction, mental health, social relationships, spiritual health, family interactions, divorce, parent-child relationships, friendship, inner peace, purpose, civic contributions, support of non-profits, community leadership, creative endeavors, inventions, art and musical contributions, other productive outputs,diplomacy, publishing, running an amazing education blog, and other areas.
These areas are difficult to quantify. But we shouldn’t pretend that income is the only measuring stick by which to compare colleges.
I am paying for two kids in college right now, and the child who is in the liberal arts school is having the far better experience. The liberal arts/humanities are about self-transformation in a supportive yet challenging community. Income after graduation is just one thing to consider. And, as Diane said, who is to say that the Greek major isn’t the one who will be making the most money?
Montana teacher,
I totally agree that the choice of attending college or not and if you do attend which major to choose depends on a great many criteria. But I think it is the people here should not pretend that future income is one of the important criteria that students use in making decisions. While hiding postgraduate earnings from students may result in more classics professors at more universities, I don’t think that is in the best interests of the students.
TE “But I think it is the people here should not pretend that future income is one of the important criteria that students use in making decisions.”
Do you mean that: “people here should not pretend that future income is NOT one one of the important criteria . . . “?
Did “people here” really say that? And did “people here” say that future income should be “hidden” from students? Please show me where someone here said that. Is that idea the only strawman you need to blast away at, or perhaps you’d be better to blast away at your own ideological falsities about “people here.” CBK
No one is “hiding” potential post graduate earnings. Rather I think the hope is to point out that success is measured in far more nuanced ways than potential earnings that is needlessly obscured by an over emphasis on $$. You know it as well as any of us but delight in pretending to be clueless.
Speduktr,
I had thought the folks here were against Senator Warren’s efforts to increase transparency in earning outcomes for majors. It is good to know that they are in favor of presenting all the information to students so that they can make a well considered choice. I stand corrected.
What a sad life that was rated by dollar signs would be. I call on one of our more skilled satirist to craft an obituary that lauds a life from lemonade stand on by economic benchmarks.
I suggest that those unis that have not already done so promptly rename every major to make it sound like a money-maker. I think this has already been done for ELA majors [“Communications”] – any other suggestions?
How about renaming the History Department as The Career Path to Corporate Finance?
Psych and Soc majors should be Human Relations.
Excellent. Or Human Resources
Human Resources is better and is what I couldn’t think of when I posted. Naturally, it popped into my head ten minutes later.
Ah “what price is too much to pay for the ticket to economic success. Unfortunately that ticket many times is merely a lottery ticket” (Homeless Adjunct) As AI is developed and remote work goes international many will soon learn that lesson. Except a precious few at our most elite institutions, regardless of their major. And of course legacy is the primary means of entrance into the club.
“Within the next generation I believe that the world’s rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience.” Huxley’s letter to Orwell
Good morning Diane and everyone,
Diane, I’m glad you are feeling better and continuing your recovery. Nice to have you back. There’s an interesting paradox going on in our culture. On one hand we encourage and admire specialization in a field or subject. On the other hand, our society continues to change so fast in many ways that it seems a broader knowledge and experience of many fields and subjects is often what’s called for. That’s one of the gifts of a liberal arts education. As I get older, I find myself desiring less and less specialization and a broader field of education and experience. I went to Skidmore College and got a wonderful, broad liberal arts foundation. When I think about that education, I see that I have used and continue to use ideas and skills I’ve learned in every class I took there. I actually looked at my transcript recently and realized that each one of those classes opened me to the broad range of interests I have now. I’m still doing art, using all the foreign languages I took, continuing my interests in literature, philosophy, psychology, American history, and so many others. I wouldn’t trade my liberal arts education for anything.
Mamie, well said. I too had a broad liberal arts education, and if I had to do it over again, I would take more courses in history, literature, and the arts. Career specialization is a dead end since we don’t know what the careers of the future will be. I especially am grateful that I took a course in Greek literature, which may be the most “useful” course I had.
Diane Another problem with career specialization ONLY or even MOSTLY, is that educating to the whole person is needed to enhance one’s understanding of our place in the world (as a person and as a country); and in a democracy, of our call for active political engagement. Without a broader education, especially today, specialization means a “I am a specialist in ignorance.”
The other elephant in the room is the need to temper racism . . . provincialism, group bias, tribalism, etc., .. . all that are prevalent today. Aspects of liberal studies are not a guarantee against such backwardness, but reading and discussing history, philosophy, the arts, cultural studies, etc., and delving into the social sciences, makes for a good start.
We live in a time when the whole idea of “lifelong education” is not a luxury but a necessity. CBK
Just have to insert my ‘70’s era work experience. I’d majored in French Lit, minored in Span Lit, but found teaching 5 levels of high school French too much agita & missed the family engrg/ constr experience. All it took was a teeny summer course at the erstwhile “Katharine Gibbs” in shorthand & typing: it was called ‘Entrée,’ with the suggestion this was how to worm your way into a corporate job. That led by serendipity to an enjoyable & remunerative decade as a procurement specialist for custom-engrd eqpt in the power-generation industry. Kudos to affirmative action, which meant my intl corp employer looked for secretaries to promote. Meanwhile I’d already been drafting commercial comments on engrg specs for my boss gratis just cuz. The co put me thro a biz law course & I was on my way.
This article falsely claims that geography is not a “lucrative” career.
Au contraire. Geography is a super-hot field right now. Tons of companies and government entities are hiring geographers. Did you know there’s even a GOTUS: Geographer of the United States?
With all the STEM push, I loudly proclaim to anyone that is listening (and even if they don’t listen) that geography is STEM–it uses science and math and always has.
I agree with the rest of his premise. But let’s stop bashing geography as some sort of “dead end” field.
Sorry about the type-o’s. My kingdom for an editing feature.
It may be “hot,” but how many geographers do we need as opposed to lawyers, doctors, financial wizards many of whom can command big bucks? Remember $$$ rule! My husband got his degree in civil engineering back in the early 70s when engineers were “hot.” Not long afterwards we had a glut of engineers, who then ended up migrating to other fields where they could make a living.
speduktr As an aside, I remember back then, perusing the employment ads in the Washington Post: PAGES AND PAGES and PAGES of “engineer” jobs. CBK
“Engineer jobs” is a really broad category, which is why I specified my husband was a civil engineer–dams, roads, bridges–that sort of stuff that we haven’t paid attention to for decades. Engineers include structural, chemical, electrical, mechanical,… One result of the glut was low wages, kind of like the restaurants who now want their low wage workers back who found better paying jobs in Amazon warehouses. If the infrastructure legislation passes in any substantial form we should see calls for more engineers again. The more you educate the less you have to pay them, which is a good reason to be very careful of falling for the latest hot job as a focus in college.
speduktr, RE: volatile job market: as a p.s. to the ‘70’s job change I outlined above: I took the secretarial course because, tho’ was planning to teach to support [first] husband as we moved to where he was accepted to law school, read an article beforehand “60k-80k teachers unemployed” in state we were moving to. (I remember it as the sort of glut on the market that often happened for those born in height of baby boom.) In those days, secretaries made in same ballpark as teachers, & it led to a much higher-paying job in a tech field. This boneheaded proposed law would have projected my humanities degree as resulting in low-ish teacher salary.
My husband still works in the engrg group where I was promoted into support services. Today, besides many more women engineers, there are women in tech jobs who’ve worked their way up from admin asst (today’s ‘secretary’), who mostly started in humanities degrees supplemented with a bit of computer training.
bethree5,
Back in the 1970s and 1980s, students didn’t come out with the kind of debt they do today. There is no comparison. I took out the maximum loans each year for college and my total debt could be repaid working at an extremely low paid job at a non-profit. That is impossible today.
The cost of college has increased manifold and salaries haven’t kept up with the huge debt.
Correct, nyspsp. In the ‘70’s-‘80’s, would we have suggested young graduates landing a decent-salaried first job immediately take on a home mortgage? Or for those who are so highly-paid they can do that, recommend they add on another for a vacation condo? That’s the equivalent.
My point was that the proposed law will most likely be based on a simple mindset, x bachelors gets you y salary, not on the actual UG majors of people who end up in various fields/ salary ranges. Without even considering graduate field, job changes, skills upgraded on one’s own or on the job, etc etc.
Threatened I think arguing for geography being a lucrative profession is playing ball in their park by their rules. Though we all need to be financially sound, the point is that such soundness is necessary but not sufficient . . . it cannot be the only guage for human well-being; and if it is FOR US, then we have stopped our potential development somewhere around its lowest common denominator. I’m glad for your breaking a myth about geography that was hanging around in my own mind. But the point is that whether or not it’s lucrative, geography it’s still a worthwhile profession. CBK
Oh gagme, another fed ed overreach. Shame on Warren. It’s not like this info isn’t out there already (google it!), but fed is determined to get it on record into archives direct from horses’ mouths as though that made it God’s Own Truth. Is it that they sit around in front of the computer thinking, let’s see, what other grist can I get free for my mill to leverage for xyz agenda? Data is invisible, out there in the ether, costs nothing to collect/ transmit, right? Or is that the line used by the tech-ed-industry to $$talk them into it? Meanwhile, kids have been getting this trip laid on them since time immemorial & parents don’t need fed stats to do it.
Of far more concern is the Neanderthal mentality behind this move. 50% of the GDP is generated by small businesses, and I’m betting the ed backgrounds of owners are all over the map. The days of xyz bachelor’s direct to corporate career path, if it ever existed, is long gone. As is well known by millennials & younger, just maintaining a living wage (let alone attaining financial security) requires constant networking, skills-building, flexibility and creativity, and frequently job-hopping and multiple gigs [track that, bean-counters].
And does this proposal mean we no longer need social workers, teachers, et al govt workers, therefore ‘no soup for you’? Does it mean there will be a sudden inflow of fed $$ to vo-tech training programs, since plumbing & HVAC repair pays better than teaching & social work?