Value of Education
Government in the UK is doing it again, evaluating the value of something solely in terms of money. This time it’s higher education. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak wants to limit the number of students allowed to take what he regards as degrees with low value.
He says the value of a degree is the amount of money it is likely to allow a graduate to make in a job. To him, the quality of a university degree is the “earning potential” it provides to graduates. He apparently believes money equals success.
The main value of higher education is not something so easily seen, handled or measured.
Media reports focus on that and say less about changes in the funding model that Sunak wants. British universities are struggling financially despite having gone from government funding to a relatively high tuition fee in the years since I moved to the UK. Sunak wants to cut the tuition universities are allowed to charge by about 38%. Later I will fold in how that combines with his intention to choke certain types of degree courses.
The High End
Some of the most brilliant graduates don’t belong in a job or only belong in a job for the earliest portion of their adult lives.
Did the personal computer emerge from regular workers just doing what their employer wanted? No, big companies like IBM had to stumble all over themselves to catch up with what sprang up from tinkering in a garage. How many great works of art have you seen in a museum that were produced by someone as part of just doing their job at the behest of their boss?
For the best and brightest, higher education can be a launchpad into some form of independent or semi-independent work. They can even change the world. That doesn’t happen as just part of marching in lockstep on a regular paycheck.
Most of Us
But higher education is also immensely valuable for the great majority of us who aren’t the best and brightest. It doesn’t just pour more information into our heads. It doesn’t just teach us what we need to know to do this job or that job. How useless would that be in a world where entire industries can arise and disappear in less than a generation? A job that is desirable today may not even exist a decade from now.
The main point of a higher education is that it helps us learn how to learn better and learn how to think better. Until we get to higher education, standard schooling is focused on cramming foundation material into us. How well we do there is often measured through standardized tests of our knowledge. If we are good at rote memorization, we can come through it with high grades. There is a little room for thinking, a little room for subjectivity in such places as analyzing literature, but not much.
Higher education gets serious about thinking, analyzing, stretching to learn more than what we can take in by rote. We could learn elsewhere about critical thinking, or how to find and piece together information to solve a previously unsolved puzzle, or how to distinguish well-founded hypotheses from nonsense, but at a university we can get a concentrated dose of it.
After we go through university, even if we become a poverty-stricken novelist from whom the next great novel is still years away, we have practice at separating the true and reasonable from propaganda and horse pucky.
Someone who wants to bamboozle us can’t do it straightaway. First they have to find a way to hit our emotional buttons and bypass the thinking skills we’ve acquired… and more of us are resistant to that technique than we would be if we hadn’t gotten so much training in how to use our brains better.
I’m not saying higher education is a perfect vaccine against being subverted by propaganda. It isn’t. But it’s a big improvement over what we have before going through higher education.
It’s for Society, Not the Economy
The main value of higher education isn’t what it does to the economy. It isn’t the tuition revenue brought into the university, jobs at the university, discoveries injected into the market from the university, or wages earned by graduates for their productivity on behalf of employers (an absurdly narrow way to measure the value of a degree). Those are valuable, but they are not the most important value of higher education.
It’s not about the economy.
It’s about society. The main value of higher education is its uplift of the population. On the whole, people who have acquired the habit of continuously learning and constantly thinking can make better decisions and adapt better to changing times.
This includes how they choose governmental representatives and elected leaders.
They don’t stop at “bringing up the average”. Their influence also rubs off on people around them. When I’m around people who are smarter than I am about something, I learn from them even if they aren’t aware they are teaching. That happens to other people too.
Why Government Wants to Throttle It
Oh dear, methinks we have stumbled upon what’s really happening.
From 2016 onward, both of my countries have been getting a crash course in how the art of distraction can be used. Most of the oxygen in mainstream media is taken by Sunak’s announcement about putting a cap on the number of students in degrees he has declared to be of low value. Hardly anything is being said about drastically cutting tuition revenue at a time when universities are already struggling.
Foreign students pay more than UK students. Their tuition was crucial for universities here. The flow of foreign students has fallen dramatically due to Brexit and what the government proudly proclaims as its hostile environment for immigrants. Cutting how much tuition the universities are allowed to charge (a 38% cut is huge) will hobble them further and force the universities to accept fewer students.
Headlines parrot the government’s line that they want to funnel a higher proportion of students in higher education toward degrees that will help them earn higher wages after graduation. Thanks to being able to look beyond the surface and think our way through information, we can see the actual effect of the total package will be reducing the number of people who can go to university at all.
We also understand why a government in collapse might want fewer people to go through higher education. To have any hope of staying in or returning to power, they need a society that is easy to mislead. They need a society thin on the skills people acquire at university.
The very campaign they are waging against higher education illustrates the case for getting more people into it.
Two points: I almost lost it with a temporary boyfriend of our older daughter when she was at Texas Tech. He snottily questioned why it was worth the cost of a degree to become a teacher. Dumba** (He was from Kansas, and apparently, the flying monkeys that raised him went with a discount education for him). Secondly, somewhere in my early to mid 50s, I found myself getting stupid. Fortunately, my employer offered a tuition reimbursement program, and I earned my Master of Journalism a few months shy of my 60th birthday. I did learn some fun facts to know and tell, but the out-of-comfort-zone interaction with young people and the confidence of remembering how to learn and grasp and apply new concepts are irreplaceable. BTW, 4.0 (my GPA for my bachelors had to overcome a 1.8 first semester).
This is right on, Bonnie. I have a MAGAT friend who is always denigrating people with college degrees because he thinks WE think we're superior. Well, if it means we learn how to evaluate the world based on facts and logic versus conspiracy theories, maybe we are. We should all learn how to do that by the time we graduate from high school (if not sooner.) I earned my degree piecemeal - a few courses in Germany when I was in the Army, two years of community college, a 12-year gap, then a year at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington where my political views did a 180 in the Power in Perspective program. I finished up my remaining semester at age 55 while working as a park ranger in Big Bend National Park, Texas, via the University of Maine online. None of my educational goals had to do with earning big bucks. Rather, I wanted work that used my artistic, writing and photography skills. A degree has been invaluable in obtaining decent paying federal jobs, but more importantly it expanded my mental and social horizons. I wish everyone had the opportunity to do at least two years in a good community college. It not only helps one become a good citizen, but it can also help one become a good human being.