Does College Really Matter?

For a few hundred years we've assumed that a college education translates into a better, happier, and more productive life. 

Studies clearly show that a college education is related to economic success, despite the fact that most of us can name a few dozen millionaires, and possibly even a billionaire or two, that never made it through college.

Rush Limbaugh, who commands the ears of a few million people every day on 500 radio stations, never made it through college—but you can draw your own conclusions about that. 

As a point of comparison, the chart on the left illustrates the percentage of people in the United States with different levels of education

There are those who say individuals who are destined to be successful will be successful with or without a college education.

While that may be true, at the same time for most people there is a proven relationship between college and income. The figures below are for all U.S. occupations in 2002.
 

Note that individuals with an advanced degree can expect to earn between three and four times as much each year as those who fail to finish high school.  Over an average lifetime the difference this education would make in earnings would amount to more than two million dollars.

A personnel manager for a large company recently confided to me that in going through the stacks of resumes she gets every day, she first looks for people with a college education. She said she even puts those with a master's degree on the top of the pile for first consideration. 

Is it because she thinks these people are better qualified? "I'm not sure if what they learn makes them better qualified," she said, "I've just found that the people who can get through four or more years of college have at least proven they can meet deadlines and can handle some responsibility." 

So in her mind it appears to be "the process" rather than "the product" that's most important. 

Personally, I'm sure that I've forgotten most of what I learned in the years of course work I went through for my Ph.D. 

I remember in one course I had to memorize the crops, major exports, major imports, land areas, population, religions, and leaders of a few dozen countries. About the only thing I remember from it all is that It took more days to learn this stuff than it took me to forget it. 

Was I better off for having to spend my time memorizing all this information? Only, I think, if I had plans to go into the diplomatic corps or some branch of the foreign service, which I didn't. 

I'm sure you can also remember many nights you spent learning similar information in order to pass a test, information which had absolutely no relevance to your life, either then or in the years that followed. 

Could this be related to the problem of retaining students—both their minds and their bodies—at the grade school, high school and college levels? 

The obvious exception here is course work designed to prepare students to get, hold, and be successful in a job or profession. But, interestingly, this kind of course work is frowned upon by many professors as being "vocational?" 

If the prerequisite for teaching in college was five or more years of successful work in a nonacademic profession, I wonder if the typical college curricula wouldn't be quite different. 

But, what about the traditional liberal arts curriculum? In a day of intense competition for professional success and an increasing emphasis on practical course work, does it still have a place? 

Yes, but not the traditional liberal arts curriculum that most schools have been somewhat doggedly clinging to for decades. 

In a day when we can get almost any information we need from the Internet or a local library, memorizing information doesn't make much sense. Although many students may accept such assignments as "a fact of school," I'm sure we'll see increasing numbers of students questioning this approach (in one way or another). 

Maybe not entirely unrelated are the studies which show that the highly prized talent of creativity is inversely related to years in school. At the college level our most creative students are the ones that are most apt to drop out. 

In years gone by, colleges were sources of information that was not readily attainable elsewhere. Possibly then there was some justification in using classroom time to transmit data and using tests to check the assimilation of information.  No longer. 

Today, getting information is no problem; it's being able to separate the "wheat from the chaff," organizing and making sense out of it, putting it into the context of what's gone before, and applying the information to real-life situations that we need to focus on. 

Today, this and certain other skills I've listed elsewhere, should be the primary role of a so-called liberal education. It is only by making the link between such course work clear (to ourselves, to our students, and to the parents who pay the bills) that our colleges can survive the challenges they face. 

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