September 23, 2003

The Purpose of College

James Joyner comments on my thoughts on the future of higher education:

I've long thought that if college is to exist primarily as a job training center for the business world, it not only will but should fail. That's never been the role of the academy and, frankly, it is amazingly unsuited for it. Professors are subject matter experts in their field but, at least in the "pure" academy, they are primarily theorists. Their job is to educate, not to train. Those are vastly different missions.

This distinction has become rather difficult to maintain in an era when, in order to be more "relevant" and compete for dollars, most colleges and universities have entered into the realm of vocational-technical training that was once reserved for trade schools and community colleges. Technical skills that were of a professional nature, notably engineering and architecture, have long been housed under the rubric of the academy. But, gradually, such things as nursing, criminal justice, marketing, hotel and restaurant management, and similar purely job training programs began to infiltrate.

They are simply not academic subjects. The problem with these fields, from the perspective of the academy, is that they are highly practical and best learned by hands-on experience. The sort of people who traditionally obtained a Ph.D. are almost certainly unqualified to teach most of these subjects, not only because of a different mindset but also a different career progression. The way to learn to manage a hotel is to work one's way up the food chain, not devote a decade to post-graduate education in theory. So, either the professoriate for these fields have to be non-academics--in which case their standing within the academy is that of a lower caste--or they will be people with a foot in both camps, usually with a rather dubious Ph.D. earned late in life and without the intellectual commitment usual in those committed to the life of the mind.

He's right. The purpose of the university is to expand our knowledge. The only training that should take place should be future researchers and scholars. Trades like accounting, business, marketing, nursing, and teaching should be left to trade schools. We used to have government colleges specifically for teachers, but a time passed, they grew (as all government programs do) beyond their initial purposes.

Right now, I see a college degree as useful to employers as a sorting mechanism. But if undergraduate scholarship continues to be watered down, employers will look for proof of training in specific skills. That's where innovative for-profit and non-profit schools could make a serious impact and change higher education.

"College of the Future"