Education

ed•u•ca•tion

–noun

1. the act or process of imparting or acquiring general knowledge, developing the powers of reasoning and judgment, and generally of preparing oneself or others intellectually for mature life.

2. the act or process of imparting or acquiring particular knowledge or skills, as for a profession.

3. a degree, level, or kind of schooling: a university education.

4. the result produced by instruction, training, or study: to show one's education.

5. the science or art of teaching; pedagogics.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/16/degrees-of-influence/?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=thab1

Our head of school sent this link yesterday. I typed out my knee-jerk reaction in about 5 minutes, and in re-reading it, thought I'd post it for a keepsake.

Cohan’s opinion is simply inflammatory and leads the ignorant “skimmer” of these kinds of blogs (probably the majority of readers) to reach entirely the wrong conclusion – that college isn’t worth it. The same message can be gotten at a low-end public school full of future factory workers, so why blog about it in the NYT?

The argument that pursuing an education isn’t “worth it” is always frustrating to me. Cohan’s not just talking about elite colleges, he’s talking about all of higher education (2nd to last paragraph).

William D. Cohan graduated from Duke University, and his own skill at justifying an opinion like this, not to mention his very employment by Fortune, the NYT, and Wall Street, is doubtless the product of a decent education.

So many “opinions” today cite statistical outliers like Gates, Zuckerburg, Ellison, Jobs, etc (all of whom dropped out of elite colleges, and therefore had to be smart and educated enough to get in, in the first place) as why college isn’t worth it, not to mention “elite” colleges. “See? You can succeed without it” they say. Statistically, not so likely for the average American.

If you look at the salaries earned by graduates of “elite” colleges, college degrees at “elite” colleges pay themselves back – positive ROI. Not so easy at the for-profit schools and those which don’t make the cut as “elite” schools.

Cohan also refers to how Wall Street was changed by the influx of “calculating MBA’s” that started in the 70s, but is there perhaps also a correlation of Wall Street’s ethics problems with the number of smart, ethical people who pursued service-oriented social work (at the lowest possible pay-scales) rather than college starting in the 1970’s? Or even with those who went to college, but studied and then taught the humanities and sciences (again, at the lowest pay-scales), never even learning the fundamentals of business because of a “values conflict” with the people they knew who wanted to study business?

“Could it be possible that higher education these days is not only a poor investment but also is leading to major fissures in the social compact between those who run Wall Street and the rest of us?”

It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. What would happen if smart, ethical, socially-motivated people also invest pieces of their educations into contributing to economic stability? Might we in the past have experienced balanced, ethically monitored growth instead of bubble after bubble? Might we in the future see the “right” decisions being made instead of just the immediately “profitable” ones?

The “46 years between 1930 and 1976” Cohan refers to as some kind of “golden age” (“Goldmann’s age?”), there was so much social corruption that the entire field of sociology (which wasn’t even invented until the 1870’s at Yale University) exploded with studies of social stratification, socio-economic oppression, etc. And yet, even though these scholars were uncovering truths, they had no power to affect decisions because they didn’t have the business education to put their findings into the proper context for the people with power or for the ignorant masses who mindlessly drove the economic bubbles.

All of this is related to my personal justification for being at Vanderbilt right now, so I could be a bit biased.