What Good Is $160,000?
| By Justin Elliott - Oct 1st, 2007 at 2:39 pm EDT |
| Also listed in: Campus Progress Blog |
One hipster’s answer to what the price of four years of college gets you:
$160,000 “...so as to end up flaccid, immobile, alone on the carpet of a dorm room, shirtless, wheezing, intellectually menopausal, cutting lines on an iBook with a pre-paid Discover card, watching consecutive hours of user-generated porn, in the dark, in a hoodie, apolitical, remorseless, eating salt-and-vinegar potato chips from a bag without a napkin: like some hero, pretending to be otherwise, on a Wednesday, during discussion section.”
InsideHigherEd (Via the Brown Daily Herald) explains:
The statement comes courtesy of Adam Delehanty, a Brown senior taking a class called “radical media” that looks at the relationship between art, technology and politics. Mark Tribe, an assistant professor who teaches the course in the department of Modern Culture and Media, asked students for their first assignment to create a radical poster of any sort.
Some put their own twist on political and social issues through the posters. This particular project involved the student crafting a sign made to look like an official university plaque that you’d find nailed to an academic building. The sign captured significant attention on the campus, as crowds of students and others puzzled over it and the Brown Daily Herald reprinted it.
All of which prompts two questions: (1) Is it an accurate depiction of college life? (2) Does the sign’s status as an actual assignment for a class called “radical media” militate in favor of a stronger core curriculum?
!
Comments are closed for this post.
My thought: Let the market decide. If the parents want to put that much money into something their kids won't make use of, that's their choice.
As for the federal government? We, the taxpayers, should be getting a return on our investment. I'd tie the continued receipt of federal financial aid to the selection of majors (steer kids away from the fluffy stuff) and the maintenance of a higher GPA than we currently demand, probably 3.0 or above (I think it's 2.0+ currently?).
I'd love to see my tax dollars go into helping an underprivileged kid become a doctor, an entrepreneur, a Farsi or Mandarin language specialist, a physicist. If he wants to study Proust, he can take it as an elective or crack open a book in his leisure time.
Besides, we have a teacher shortage, which means we do need students to study in every field (including literature). According to what seem to be your own standards (improving US economy?), you are wrong
Family situation should not, to the extent possible, be a factor in educational opportunity. “Letting the market decide” sounds a hell of a lot better if your parents can afford to pay for your education. For the rest of us, who happen to make up the majority of the population, the market would leave us S.O.L.
Finally, at almost every level (including the way schools use their own funds), there has been a shift to merit aid from need-based aid, which means students from wealthy families are getting a lot of financial aid. Not to mention billions in what amounts to corporate welfare. Perhaps the real question is whether you want your tax dollars going to loan companies and students from wealthy backgrounds studying Proust, or to students from low or middle income families doing the same.
**end of rant**
So liberal arts should be a privilege of the rich? ""
Spending $160,000 of someone else's money to study liberal arts should be a privilege of the rich.
You can study this stuff on your own in your spare time, as an elective course, or take some summer courses at community college for chump change if you want.
""I think scholarship in the humanities would quickly begin to stink. ""
Scholarship in the humanities isn't very important to the health of our society.
""Besides, we have a teacher shortage, which means we do need students to study in every field (including literature). According to what seem to be your own standards (improving US economy?), you are wrong""
I went to a great public school - and none of my literature teachers there were literature majors. We still studied the greats just fine.
Though I wouldn't be opposed to handing out some government scholarships for just this purpose, *so long as* we slap an onerous service requirement on it. In exchange for the grants, you're required to teach 8-10 years in public school, let's say.
I doubt a shortage of literature teachers is our biggest worry in America at the moment, though.
""
Family situation should not, to the extent possible, be a factor in educational opportunity. “Letting the market decide” sounds a hell of a lot better if your parents can afford to pay for your education. For the rest of us, who happen to make up the majority of the population, the market would leave us S.O.L.""
Way to deliberately misread my point. I'm all in favor of giving you, and everyone else with limited means but intellectual ability, educational opportunity *funded by tax dollars*!
I just want to control what you do with those opportunities. I want to tell you, to some degree, what to study and where to work for a while after you graduate.
That's the return I want on my investment.
""Perhaps the real question is whether you want your tax dollars going to loan companies and students from wealthy backgrounds studying Proust, or to students from low or middle income families doing the same.""
I wouldn't give merit-based aid to anyone who wanted to study Proust, either.
I'm getting what is essentially 'merit-based' aid from the government. A good chunk of cash in exchange for having had the highest combined GPA and SATs in my high school.
It wasn't contingent on me studying anything important, which is a flaw in the system, I agree.
At the same time, it did pay dividends for the government -- the general level of academic competition at my school went up because there was cash money at stake for being at the top. So it did do some good for the government, even indirectly.
And as it is, I'm training to (hopefully!) work in the intelligence community, so I'm not putting it to waste.
The study of Proust isn't a good investment. We want to invest in disadvantaged kids so that they *become* the next generation of elites; the next doctors, the next lawyers, the next investment bankers and entrepreneurs and policy wonks.
Why should I invest my tax dollars into the study of something that isn't going to allow that disadvantaged kid to pass on much better financial opportunities to his/her children?
(I'd also be up for adding a requirement to study a language critical to America's national security, if it's taught at the institution they attend.)
Which speaks better of America as a nation - an America that takes its talented but disadvantaged kids and turns them into one more kid with a liberal arts degree, or one that helps them become Farsi/Arabic/Korean/Mandarin/S wahili/Russian-speaking professional powerhouses?
We're already part-way to this. The Boren scholarships are a great start - they'll pay a huge chunk of the cost of studying abroad, if you're studying in a country whose language is critical to U.S. national security. In exchange, there's a requirement that you briefly(1 year or so) work for the federal government.
Works great - we need to build upon it.
I never cease to be amazed at how ready some are to disparage liberal arts education wholesale. The guy reading Proust (or Dostoyevsky, or Tolstoy, or Shakespeare) is not learning a technical skill but is developing critical thought capacity beyond most technical educations. Liberal arts grads become lawyers, investment bankers and policy wonks all the time, because liberal arts education stresses reasoning and rationality in addition to promoting a varied knowledge base.
If you want to cut back on MA and PhD fellowships in literature in favor of increasing them for undergrad work and MD programs, fine. But let's not pretend that learning Proust can't contribute in meaningful ways to a student's education. Hell, that'd be like pretending that there's no real value in reading Hobbes or Locke or Plato. (After all, when was the last time you heard someone yell "is there a philosopher in the house?")
By that logic, put all your money in T-bills. After all, it's a higher return than nothing -- why bother with mutual funds and the like?
A liberal arts education is better than nothing, but it's risky and the concrete material benefits aren't there compared to other degrees.
""Hell, that'd be like pretending that there's no real value in reading Hobbes or Locke or Plato. (After all, when was the last time you heard someone yell "is there a philosopher in the house?")""
I'm actually rather open to that proposition. Well, I wouldn't put it as "no value", but rather "it's marginal and iffy at best".
And besides, we're not talking about leaving the kids in total darkness. General ed courses often touch on a lot of this stuff - have you read a bit of Joyce, a bit of Locke, a bit of Hobbes.
""The guy reading Proust (or Dostoyevsky, or Tolstoy, or Shakespeare) is not learning a technical skill but is developing critical thought capacity beyond most technical educations.""
Color me skeptical that your average lit major has a better capacity for critical thought than your average engineering/math/econ major.
""Liberal arts grads become lawyers, investment bankers and policy wonks all the time, because liberal arts education stresses reasoning and rationality in addition to promoting a varied knowledge base.""
Plenty of them do, but plenty of them don't. It's more of a crap-shoot than other majors, a greater degree of uncertainty. My main concern is reducing uncertainty in America's investments in an individual's higher education.
Liberal arts education works well for plenty of people, I agree. But I think we can get better results with less risk and less variance by focusing elsewhere with our tax dollars.