College, By Degrees

Monday, July 16, 2007

A professor of mine, desiring to encourage regular attendance, asked the class to consider how much each class period costs. I’ve forgotten his exact figure, though, given yearly tuition is $35,178 for the 10s—divided by (I estimate) 315 hours of lectures per year (three or four hours per class per week; thirty weeks of class per year), it comes to $111.67 per hour. (There are complications: for example, office hours or access to library resources, which is difficult to temporally quantify. Also, many students receive financial aid.) Still, that’s no small wad of bills. If students had to pony up the cash after each class, one imagines this cost would be more deeply felt; however, it is difficult to imagine a student becoming more upset with himself for sleeping through class than if he were to accidentally break a $111.67 appliance.

This is not attributable to short-sightedness, not at all. Rather it indicates that students are not really paying for classes, so much as what classes will get them. Remember the line in Good Will Hunting: “You dropped a hundred and fifty grand on a [expletive] education you coulda got for a dollar fifty in late charges at the public library!” Remember, also, the response: “At least I’ll have a degree. And you’ll be serving my kids French fries on our way to a ski trip.” Oh, right: the degree. You might slice up the diploma into centimeter-long squares and calculate how much each of those costs; that would be a more significant figure.

What evidence is there against the idea that the degree—the certificate, the resume line, the stiff sheet of paper—is not merely a ticket to the middle class, something that certifies not intellectual achievement per se but status? One asks just because this is a disconcerting thought. Well, there is the fact that Dartmouth screens for ability and achievement: you’ve got to run a soup kitchen, win that contest, and ace your College Boards—one or two is not sufficient. This tells us something about admissions, but not necessarily about the diploma. If the document had to do strictly with admissions criteria, it would be issued during matriculation.

The practice of recruitment snaps a few features into focus. Most students I know who have been recruited into the corporate world tell me that virtually nothing required by their job was taught to them at Dartmouth. Yet, because of this school’s elite status, and the recruitment that followed from this, a prospective Dartmouth diploma recommended them to their current employers. During interviews, they are made to perform inane tasks that, again, have no bearing on their jobs, though the interviewers might say they test one’s mettle. Multiply these two large numbers in your head, then, could you please open that window over there, it’s a little stuffy in here. (It’s glued shut.)

One imagines there are eighteen year olds who have no idea who Plato was, what a chromosome is, or how to solve different equations who could, through sheer determination, completely trounce some Ivy League recruits in the corporate world. The rub, though, is how to locate these uncultured work-horses. This is difficult, if not impossible, which suggests that the awarding of elite degrees is just the culmination of a twenty-one-year education process through which employers sort their potential employees. Again, is this so?

No, I don’t think so. We can distinguish between education and career path. In an essay in The New Atlantis, Matthew Crawford reflects on the relationship between higher education and career, and recommends that a young person should go to college, but “approach college in the spirit of craftsmanship, going deep into liberal arts in sciences.” In the summers, however, he recommends that this student learn a manual trade. Contrary to popular belief, “blue-collar” tradesmen often make the same as or more than a white-collar tech worker. If your nighttime interests are intellectual, you’ll enjoy not having your mind exausted by number-crunching and computer screening all day.

In this same essay, Crawford makes another worthwhile point: “In college, by contrast [to vocational school], many students don’t learn anything of particular application; college is the ticket to an open future.” Compared to the ideal of liberal learning, this kind of college seems like a parody of vocational school, a place you attend to prepare for an unknown career. However, for all the talk about “pre-professionalism,” it’s an old practice: Dartmouth began a school for the clergy; after some decades, the lawyers started crowding out the prelates. Burton Bledstein, in his book The Culture of Professionalism, conjectures that on the antebellum American campus,

“The young man could not take his training, skill, and stratagems for granted; and he required customs and established roles that make it possible for him to act out his young manhood: mixing in the coeducational social gathering, competing in the boat race and on the ball field, debating a public issue, committing himself to a ‘radical’ reform, participating in student government and in religiously sponsored social-service projects.”

This social aspect of college was something entirely new; it would have been unrecognizable to the divinity students of a generation before. Bledstein is being a little ironic here; he doesn’t exactly approve, being a radical. Yet he recognizes that there is something profound in this. At this time, debating societies, fraternities, and student publications began to appear. Emerson, who was not welcomed by the official powers on certain campuses, was constantly sought after by the student-run literary societies, who also provided the best libraries. Much of what makes Dartmouth worthwhile is its autonomous student culture, which was born during this time. Bledstein suggests that it was all part of initiation into the middle class, and it is still that to some extent, but it is also more. But college will definitely be nothing but a bourgeois hazing ceremony if we fixate on the diploma, which, I believe, really is a socioeconomic token. The life-changing coursework, the autonomous student life, however, provide useful antidotes to this.

Why bring this up near commencement? It is because the commencement as such, like admission as such, is not extremely important, except as a bookend. The real significance was in the middle matter, as most sevens already know. For what it’s worth, I congratulate the class of 2007 on its years at Dartmouth. You’ve earned it—the experience of having been at Dartmouth, that is—slowly, dilligently, by degrees.

College, By Degrees

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