Stewards of the Visual Exposition
Beyond the Academy: As Some Departments Decline, Lifelong-Learning Rises
Publisher's note: The John William Pope Center for Education Policy provides a treasure trove of information suggesting the better path forward in regards to North Carolina's number one issue - public education. Public education, at all levels, requires a significant amount of funding from our state government, and all one hundred North Carolina counties, so it is essential that leaders effecting education policy get it right, and know that concerned entities, like the John William Pope Center, will be minding their progress to do so. We welcome the John William Pope Center for Education Policy to our growing readership, and expect our readers to learn all they can to do their part in this wise endeavor to better educate our People.
The authors of this post are Jay Schalin and Jenna Ashley Robinson.
Many in academia bemoan the increasing and overwhelming focus on graduates' job prospects. It is decried as a key element of a growing "corporatization" of the academy, with professors forced "to produce trained cogs for the corporate machine."
And for some, this intrusion of vocational pursuits is a threat to the beloved concept of "learning for learning's sake," of academia as a refuge from the tainted world of commerce and politics. Professional programs are in; studying for aesthetic or spiritual reasons are out.
The facts confirming this vocational trend are overwhelming. In 2012, the portion of incoming college freshmen that cited job success as a "very important" reason for attending college reached an all-time high of 87.9 percent, an increase from 85.9 percent in 2011. In 1976, that figure was just 67.8 percent, according to surveys conducted by the Higher Education Research Institute.
But just because there is a practical focus in academia does not mean that learning for intrinsic reasons need disappear. In fact, never before in history have there been more ways for people to pursue their intellectual interests on their own.
And academia must shoulder much of the blame for the concentration on vocational education, primarily by failing to control costs. The trend is also driven not by some grand corporate plot, but by a growing awareness among young people of very real and discouraging economic conditions, such as long-term economic malaise and excessive underemployment for graduates.
It should therefore not be surprising that most students go to college to get a better job and make more money. And a less-than-robust economy is only part of the picture. In an era of million dollar chancellor salaries and excessive levels of non-teaching staff employment, costs have risen dramatically. According to a Bloomberg report, the cost of a college education has risen four times faster than the Consumer Price Index since 1978.
This has led to the well-reported expansion of student debt. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the percentage of students owing money for student loans at graduation rose from roughly 45 percent to 70 percent from 1993 to 2014, while the average debt of each borrower climbed from approximately $15,000 to over $35,000 (in constant dollars).
Additionally, higher education has become more accessible to rapidly increasing numbers of first-generation and low-income students. It is only natural that their top priority is future employment, for they have more to lose than their upper middle class peers should they wind up unemployed on graduation day. Such students cannot afford to spend four (or six!) years at a university without learning something of value to employers.
As a result, interest in business, health care, and STEM majors has boomed. According to the federal Digest of Education Statistics, business degrees rose from 13.7 percent of all degrees conferred in 1971 to 21.3 percent in 2011, while bachelor's degrees in health care professions nearly tripled, from 3.0 percent in 1971 to 8.4 percent in 2011.
In the same time frame, interest in the arts, social sciences, and humanities has fallen. English degrees were 7.6 percent of all conferred in 1971, but only 3.1 percent in 2011. Social science degrees fell from 18.5 percent to 10.3 percent.
The sad reality is that many of the majors students might choose "for their own sake" return very little in economic terms. For example, five years after graduation, philosophy and religious studies majors from UNC schools earned just $28,062 annually. Women's studies graduates fared even worse, earning less than $15,000 five years after graduation.
Given this scenario, what can earnest scholars who lack family financial support do to pursue their heart-felt intellectual interests? Certainly, they can throw caution to the wind by choosing their majors for love instead of money. A select few will be able to rise to the top in their fields-to earn their Ph.D.s and find academic jobs, or to become self-supporting artists-although the income outlook for future academics and artists is generally bleak.
Quite a few others may be lucky enough to be hired by government or industry despite their majors, particularly if they can demonstrate outstanding writing or research skills.
But many who follow their hearts rather than their wallets will find themselves left out in the cold, working at jobs they could perform right out of high school. Such is the economic reality.
Still, all is not lost for hopeful scholars who must chase a career instead of their passion. Learning doesn't (and shouldn't) end at a university graduation ceremony. Nor need it be confined to the Ivory Tower. Opportunities abound for lifelong learning.
One could start, of course, with the traditional library. And night classes at community colleges and other schools have been around for many years.
More recently, the Internet, with the help of savvy education entrepreneurs and forward-thinking university departments, has made most knowledge available to anyone with a computer and a Wi-Fi signal.
Digital libraries are the tip of the iceberg. Project Gutenberg, founded in 1971 by Michael Hart, pioneered the field. Now offering over 49,000 digital versions of books that are in the public domain, it offers perennial literature class favorites as well as obscure fiction and non-fiction works.
Numerous sites provide extensive but specialized collections. The Liberty Fund's Online Library of Liberty boasts 1,692 works on social science topics including economics, history, law, political theory religion, and sociology. And Stanford's Encyclopedia of Philosophy maintains a library of philosophical works as well as curated articles on philosophers, movements, and theories written by scholars in the field.
There are also various websites that catalog open source textbooks. OpenStax College, a project of Rice University, offers free, open source, peer-reviewed textbooks for college courses. The books can be downloaded as PDFs or read live on the web.
More structured options also exist, mimicking-to some extent-a college course, but at far lower prices. Want to learn a language conversationally (albeit not at the scholarly level of academia)? Rosetta Stone and DuoLingo offer interactive, self-paced courses to get people speaking languages quickly. While Rosetta Stone can cost up to $500, Duo Lingo is free.
And that's to say nothing of online courses such as those offered by Coursera, Khan Academy, and Udacity. Many are simply a set of online lectures, perhaps with recommended reading materials. Others are quite advanced; at Libertas University, one can participate in a virtual classroom that is very close to the real thing through the use of a personal "avatar" and teleconferencing software.
For the most part, though, learning on your own is a more solitary endeavor that requires more drive and self-discipline than does the immersive classroom experience. Even in online college courses, the connection to professors is much more tenuous. It is more difficult for professors to offer guidance or to provide feedback on a student's mastery of the material. And there are no other students to share the experience, to study with, or to engage in discussion.
Still, the real challenge to learning for the sake of learning is one of motivation, not access.
Higher education is changing with the times out of necessity, and largely from the demands of students. Advancing technology and specialization have made it more difficult to go from a non-vocational curriculum to an entry-level professional position. The competition for jobs is fierce, and for most students, college is an investment in future income. If some departments must shrink or combine with others, what they lose in numbers they will gain in the passion of those who remain.
And this transition does not mean an end to learning for its own sake. If certain subjects are studied less in the academy, they will be studied more outside of it, and by those who are seriously interested. And that may turn out to be for the best. After all, many top poets, such as T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens, and many important thinkers, from John Locke to Edmund Burke to John Stewart Mill to Eric Hoffer, had non-academic day jobs when they produced their greatest works. A shift to the life-long learning model, using resources both inside and outside the academia, may very well initiate a flowering of culture instead of decay.
Go Back
The authors of this post are Jay Schalin and Jenna Ashley Robinson.
Many in academia bemoan the increasing and overwhelming focus on graduates' job prospects. It is decried as a key element of a growing "corporatization" of the academy, with professors forced "to produce trained cogs for the corporate machine."
And for some, this intrusion of vocational pursuits is a threat to the beloved concept of "learning for learning's sake," of academia as a refuge from the tainted world of commerce and politics. Professional programs are in; studying for aesthetic or spiritual reasons are out.
The facts confirming this vocational trend are overwhelming. In 2012, the portion of incoming college freshmen that cited job success as a "very important" reason for attending college reached an all-time high of 87.9 percent, an increase from 85.9 percent in 2011. In 1976, that figure was just 67.8 percent, according to surveys conducted by the Higher Education Research Institute.
But just because there is a practical focus in academia does not mean that learning for intrinsic reasons need disappear. In fact, never before in history have there been more ways for people to pursue their intellectual interests on their own.
And academia must shoulder much of the blame for the concentration on vocational education, primarily by failing to control costs. The trend is also driven not by some grand corporate plot, but by a growing awareness among young people of very real and discouraging economic conditions, such as long-term economic malaise and excessive underemployment for graduates.
It should therefore not be surprising that most students go to college to get a better job and make more money. And a less-than-robust economy is only part of the picture. In an era of million dollar chancellor salaries and excessive levels of non-teaching staff employment, costs have risen dramatically. According to a Bloomberg report, the cost of a college education has risen four times faster than the Consumer Price Index since 1978.
This has led to the well-reported expansion of student debt. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the percentage of students owing money for student loans at graduation rose from roughly 45 percent to 70 percent from 1993 to 2014, while the average debt of each borrower climbed from approximately $15,000 to over $35,000 (in constant dollars).
Additionally, higher education has become more accessible to rapidly increasing numbers of first-generation and low-income students. It is only natural that their top priority is future employment, for they have more to lose than their upper middle class peers should they wind up unemployed on graduation day. Such students cannot afford to spend four (or six!) years at a university without learning something of value to employers.
As a result, interest in business, health care, and STEM majors has boomed. According to the federal Digest of Education Statistics, business degrees rose from 13.7 percent of all degrees conferred in 1971 to 21.3 percent in 2011, while bachelor's degrees in health care professions nearly tripled, from 3.0 percent in 1971 to 8.4 percent in 2011.
In the same time frame, interest in the arts, social sciences, and humanities has fallen. English degrees were 7.6 percent of all conferred in 1971, but only 3.1 percent in 2011. Social science degrees fell from 18.5 percent to 10.3 percent.
The sad reality is that many of the majors students might choose "for their own sake" return very little in economic terms. For example, five years after graduation, philosophy and religious studies majors from UNC schools earned just $28,062 annually. Women's studies graduates fared even worse, earning less than $15,000 five years after graduation.
Given this scenario, what can earnest scholars who lack family financial support do to pursue their heart-felt intellectual interests? Certainly, they can throw caution to the wind by choosing their majors for love instead of money. A select few will be able to rise to the top in their fields-to earn their Ph.D.s and find academic jobs, or to become self-supporting artists-although the income outlook for future academics and artists is generally bleak.
Quite a few others may be lucky enough to be hired by government or industry despite their majors, particularly if they can demonstrate outstanding writing or research skills.
But many who follow their hearts rather than their wallets will find themselves left out in the cold, working at jobs they could perform right out of high school. Such is the economic reality.
Still, all is not lost for hopeful scholars who must chase a career instead of their passion. Learning doesn't (and shouldn't) end at a university graduation ceremony. Nor need it be confined to the Ivory Tower. Opportunities abound for lifelong learning.
One could start, of course, with the traditional library. And night classes at community colleges and other schools have been around for many years.
More recently, the Internet, with the help of savvy education entrepreneurs and forward-thinking university departments, has made most knowledge available to anyone with a computer and a Wi-Fi signal.
Digital libraries are the tip of the iceberg. Project Gutenberg, founded in 1971 by Michael Hart, pioneered the field. Now offering over 49,000 digital versions of books that are in the public domain, it offers perennial literature class favorites as well as obscure fiction and non-fiction works.
Numerous sites provide extensive but specialized collections. The Liberty Fund's Online Library of Liberty boasts 1,692 works on social science topics including economics, history, law, political theory religion, and sociology. And Stanford's Encyclopedia of Philosophy maintains a library of philosophical works as well as curated articles on philosophers, movements, and theories written by scholars in the field.
There are also various websites that catalog open source textbooks. OpenStax College, a project of Rice University, offers free, open source, peer-reviewed textbooks for college courses. The books can be downloaded as PDFs or read live on the web.
More structured options also exist, mimicking-to some extent-a college course, but at far lower prices. Want to learn a language conversationally (albeit not at the scholarly level of academia)? Rosetta Stone and DuoLingo offer interactive, self-paced courses to get people speaking languages quickly. While Rosetta Stone can cost up to $500, Duo Lingo is free.
And that's to say nothing of online courses such as those offered by Coursera, Khan Academy, and Udacity. Many are simply a set of online lectures, perhaps with recommended reading materials. Others are quite advanced; at Libertas University, one can participate in a virtual classroom that is very close to the real thing through the use of a personal "avatar" and teleconferencing software.
For the most part, though, learning on your own is a more solitary endeavor that requires more drive and self-discipline than does the immersive classroom experience. Even in online college courses, the connection to professors is much more tenuous. It is more difficult for professors to offer guidance or to provide feedback on a student's mastery of the material. And there are no other students to share the experience, to study with, or to engage in discussion.
Still, the real challenge to learning for the sake of learning is one of motivation, not access.
Higher education is changing with the times out of necessity, and largely from the demands of students. Advancing technology and specialization have made it more difficult to go from a non-vocational curriculum to an entry-level professional position. The competition for jobs is fierce, and for most students, college is an investment in future income. If some departments must shrink or combine with others, what they lose in numbers they will gain in the passion of those who remain.
And this transition does not mean an end to learning for its own sake. If certain subjects are studied less in the academy, they will be studied more outside of it, and by those who are seriously interested. And that may turn out to be for the best. After all, many top poets, such as T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens, and many important thinkers, from John Locke to Edmund Burke to John Stewart Mill to Eric Hoffer, had non-academic day jobs when they produced their greatest works. A shift to the life-long learning model, using resources both inside and outside the academia, may very well initiate a flowering of culture instead of decay.
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