College: Is It Worth It? — Pt 1

Not long ago, the daughter of some friends of ours was accepted to a prominent Ivy League university. She’s a delightful Christian girl who I’ve been privileged to watch mature (I was her youth pastor in High School). At her going away party, I semi-sarcastically cautioned, “Don’t let them turn you into a liberal.” Well, she has returned, diploma in hand and, you guessed it, ideologically liberal. I recently had the chance to discuss some of her newfound “progressive” positions with her, and I found myself grieving over the radical worldview shift that four years of higher education gets you today. Not only are her parents now strapped with thousands of dollars in college loans, now they have a daughter who is shorn from her religious, ideological upbringing.

Sadly, this is not an unusual story.

The concept that most kids should graduate high school and get a “college education” may well be one of the biggest hoaxes ever foisted upon the American public. Not only have our universities become un-moored from their religious / philosophical roots, they’ve become engines of secularism, grinding out their own system of nonsensical hoops, which they charge grossly inflated amounts to jump through. No doubt, there are wonderful professors out there, great schools, and many people that benefit from them. But for the most part, the idea that everyone should graduate high school and then go to college has bankrupted — financially, morally and spiritually — many people.

It’s a point being made by more and more people. Like Marty Nemko, a career counselor out of Oakland, CA, who writes in an article entitled America’s Most Overrated Product: A Bachelor’s Degree:

Today, amazingly, a majority of the students whom colleges admit are grossly underprepared. Only 23 percent of the 1.3 million high-school graduates of 2007 who took the ACT examination were ready for college-level work in the core subjects of English, math, reading, and science.

Perhaps more surprising, even those high-school students who are fully qualified to attend college are increasingly unlikely to derive enough benefit to justify the often six-figure cost and four to six years (or more) it takes to graduate. Research suggests that more than 40 percent of freshmen at four-year institutions do not graduate in six years. Colleges trumpet the statistic that, over their lifetimes, college graduates earn more than nongraduates, but that’s terribly misleading. You could lock the collegebound in a closet for four years, and they’d still go on to earn more than the pool of non-collegebound — they’re brighter, more motivated, and have better family connections.

In For Most People, College is a Waste of Time, Wall Street Journal contributor and scholar Charles Murray sounds a similar note:

The BA acquired its current inflated status by accident. Advanced skills for people with brains really did get more valuable over the course of the 20th century, but the acquisition of those skills got conflated with the existing system of colleges, which had evolved the BA for completely different purposes.

Outside a handful of majors — engineering and some of the sciences — a bachelor’s degree tells an employer nothing except that the applicant has a certain amount of intellectual ability and perseverance. Even a degree in a vocational major like business administration can mean anything from a solid base of knowledge to four years of barely remembered gut courses.

Professor X agrees. Writing anonymously for the Atlantic (I assume, out of fear of peer pressure), in an article entitled In the Basement of the Ivory Tower, he contends “the idea that a university education is for everyone is a destructive myth.” And Dennis Prager suggests, Don’t Waste Your Money on an Expensive College:

A recent article in the New York Times about the mountain of education debt owed by graduates – an average of $27,600 – reports that “fewer students than ever say taking out loans to attend college was worth it.”

Americans have so long believed that it is necessary to spend a great amount of money on a college education that few ever questioned these skyrocketing costs. But with high-paying jobs increasingly hard to find, many students now find themselves stuck with college loans that will take them many years to repay. There is nothing like financial pain to focus the mind on the question of whether one has received fair value for money spent. And regarding tuition, the answer is usually a resounding no.

Adding insult to injury is the hijacking of our academic institutions by liberalism. American universities, once touted as bastions of intellectual diversity, now tilt way left. A recent article in The Examiner states:

A study published in Forum (2005) by Lichter, Rothman, and Nevitte reported that 72 percent of university faculty are liberal (87 percent in elite universities). That this is reflected in the teaching is easily seen in the prolific displays of left-wing propaganda displayed on campuses. The University of Colorado at Boulder has such a preponderance of liberal faculty (96 percent) that, according to a Wall Street Journal article (5/13/08), Chancellor G.P. Peterson intends to support intellectual diversity by establishing an endowed chair for a professor of conservative thought and policy. (emphasis mine)

This is why Prager, in Seven Questions to Ask Before Sending Your Kids to College, concludes:

Outside of the natural sciences, colleges are either more interested in liberal indoctrination than in a liberal arts education, or they enable students to take courses that are so narrowly focused that your child graduate will likely graduate as a cultural and historical illiterate. Why so many Americans go into debt paying so much money to such failed institutions is one of the riddles of the universe.

It is time to demand that universities teach… Because granting a Bachelor of Arts degree on someone who never heard of Cain and Abel and never heard a Haydn symphony is a fraud.

Being that I barely graduated high school and am a raging Conservative, you probably think I have an axe to grind. Fact is, I currently have two kids in college. So what’s the difference?

Tags: college education, Liberalism in the American university

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