The Value of Higher Education Made Literal

[n2doc]

By STANLEY FISH
A few weeks ago at a conference, I listened to a distinguished political philosopher tell those in attendance that he would not be speaking before them had he not been the beneficiary, as a working-class youth in England, of a government policy to provide a free university education to the children of British citizens. He walked into the university with little knowledge of the great texts that inform modern democracy and he walked out an expert in those very same texts.

It goes without saying that he did not know what he was doing at the outset; he did not, that is, think to himself, I would like to be come a scholar of Locke, Hobbes and Mill. But that’s what he became, not by choice (at least in the beginning) but by opportunity.

That opportunity — to stroll into a world from which he might otherwise have been barred by class and a lack of funds — is not likely to be extended to young men and women in England today, especially if the recommendations of the Browne report, “Securing a Sustainable Future for Higher Education” (Oct. 12, 2010), are implemented by a government that seemed to welcome them and, some suspect, mandated them.

The rhetoric of the report is superficially benign; its key phrase is “student choice”: “Our proposals put students at the heart of the system.” “Our recommendations . . . are based on giving students the ability to make an informed choice of where and what to study.” “Students are best placed to make the judgment about what they want to get from participating in higher education.”

The obvious objection to this last declaration is, “No, they aren’t; judgment is what education is supposed to produce; if students possessed it at the get-go, there would be nothing for courses and programs to do.” But that objection would be entirely beside the point in the context of the assumption informing the report, the assumption that what students want to get from participating in higher education is money. Under the system the report proposes, government support of higher education in the form of block grants to universities (which are free to allocate funds as they see fit) would be replaced by monies given directly to matriculating students, who would then vote with their pocketbooks by choosing which courses to “invest” in.

“Invest” is the right word because the cost of courses will be indexed to the likelihood of financial rewards down the line. A course’s “key selling point” will be “that it provides improved employability” and students will be asked to pay “higher charges” for a course only “if there is a proven path to higher earnings.” (There is a verbal echo here, surely unintended, of the value nowhere to be found in the report, the value of higher learning.)

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http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/13/the-value-of-higher-education-made-literal/

[Democracyinkind]

1. Bologna has brought the Americanization of European Universities.

While there's some good in it, there's a great amount of frustration among students in Europe about this "marketizing" of European Universities. We're almost at the point where having studied at a university is looked at as nothing more than additional "training for being on the job", something that faculty, staff and students despise equally. I have degrees in History, Philosophy and Economics and on the few occasions that I teach I have to fill out a form describing how what I teach will help students on the job. It's quite a farce. Although I absolutely enjoy composing sentences like "bringing back the categorical imperative to marketing", the waning of the Bildungsideal, as the Germans so untranslateably call it, is a pitty.