Getting Educated
Allow me to begin by declaring that I am as imperfectly formed as any other human being on the face of the earth. I like to think of myself as enlightened and evolved, but let’s face it, we are all riddled with flaws including the flaw of self-professing our “not worthy” outlooks exactly like this very sentence. How’s that for calling it in on my own position? But one of the things we would all agree helps our formation as true human beings is education. I once (thirty years ago) went out with a woman who was a very smart Harvard Ph.D. in linguistics. When I broke up with her she told me that some day she hoped I could evolve into being a human being. That may have been one of the great break-up insults of all time and it was brought to us by way of a very thorough education from one of the great American institutions of higher learning.
This morning I am feeling overwhelmed by thoughts about higher education. I was raised by a mother who went back to graduate school in her forties for a doctorate in adult education. I always thought of college and graduate school as a given for me. Because I was doing my high school in Rome, where my mother was a Director of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations (UN), I followed the American formula for college admission. I applied to Yale, Stanford and Cornell (my naively-chosen throw-away safe school where my mother had matriculated as a sixteen-year-old in 1933). My mother had never given a dime to Cornell to my knowledge, her monies going to raising three kids on her own.. But when both Yale and Stanford passed on me, Cornell accepted me. I had good grades. I had scored well (very good, but not quite great) on the SAT’s (1380 if you recall the old 1600 max) with math being much stronger than my verbal score. I was also a National Merit Scholarship Finalist or “Minister Without Portfolio” since I never actually got a National Merit Scholarship.
My thoughts today were governed by news of the Lori Laughlin plea-bargain on the college entrance cheating scam. Then University of California declared it would stop using SAT/ACT scores for admission. And finally, I saw two early-morning interviews, one with a renowned educationalist, Scott Galloway, on the future of college in America and with the President of Ithaca College on opening later this year for on-site classes. Lots to unpack there. I feel the need to comment about my thoughts on the future of higher education.
I will start by quoting a favorite movie line from Good Will Hunting where Matt Damon (the writer and leading actor) verbally battles with a Harvard ponce by saying “You dropped a hundred and fifty grand on a fuckin’ education you coulda got for a dollar fifty in late charges at the public library.” That was supposed to tell us all that education is only as good as what you make of it and going through college on autopilot and required reading lists was not true learning. The comment I heard this morning that jumped out at me was referring to four years of college as most often a four-year adolescent day-care for parents who want their kids to get fully socialized in the American upper-echelon way of networked life. Wow, that rings so very true. I sent all three of my kids off to Cornell (It was ostensibly their individual choices, but they all chose to go on the path I had paved for them with a lot of volunteerism and donations). I felt strongly that it was something I could do (perhaps the last and best thing I could do for them) to give them the best advantage I could give them. I know it was a perpetuation of the unfair socio-economic beast that piles up in favor of the few and, by definition, against the many, but I thought that to do otherwise would be irresponsible of me. Darwinian reaction governed my actions, but cerebral overlay was not absent for a moment. I see that now, but am hard-pressed to see that I would have done otherwise even if challenged about it.
I would say that two of my kids got exactly what they wanted from Cornell. One got “finished” with an art history degree and eventually met her Cornell mate (less a money mate and more a well-educated, genteel and thoughtful human being, who got more true education and yet some life networking as well). The other got some creative direction from Cornell and a fulsome network of like-minded people (including a likely future mate) of wonderfully diverse backgrounds. Neither of those outcomes minimizes the value of a Cornell education, but they also probably do not fully optimize the Cornell potential educational experience. That optimization may be the Xanadu that simply does not exist. By contrast, for purely random reasons, my trek through Cornell fifty years ago led me through both engineering and arts & sciences in a way that surely did give me a more fulsome than normal “liberal” education, but it was by virtue of my indecision more than my specific search for such an outcome.
My first-born, who matriculated at Cornell and dropped out, is an interesting cautionary tale. He likes to think that I screwed up by pushing him in that direction where he was not optimally positioned to succeed (less about intelligence, which he has, and more about social connectivity, which he eschews). I tend to think he was a classic case of the student not being ready to learn and might have been better served by a stint in some other vocation, the less organized and the more free-form and self-deterministic the better. In other words, he needed to discover himself before trying to get mainstream education injected into his head. All that teaches me for more general application is what we all tend to know, that a mainstream track may be less good for more and more of our youth than we wish.
Where that all leaves me is to posit this formula for the future of higher education (and by that I mean four-year college, since graduate work really does work well for those with specific passions or ambitions). I think COVID will kill 30-40% of the colleges and Universities in America. I think that will be a good and necessary purge. Colleges should get supplanted by more vocational programs, whether work-study or tradecraft education (almost like apprenticeships of old). College needs to be left for more true “Socratic” learning where education is more personalized and thinking is not optional. Those who go to college are not better people or more destined to better lives, they are just those who are more ready to live the life of the mind. That represents a very few, and some don’t get there automatically at eighteen….colleges need to admit candidates who get to that mindfulness state at any age.
Needless to say, this theory is wonderfully idealistic and very hard to implement so here is my brainstorm for the day. It comes thanks to the interview with the Ithaca College president. Higher education should happen in remote centers of excellence like Ithaca. There you have Cornell (a world-class research University), Ithaca College (a well-respected college focused on more vocational occupation training like communications and physical therapy) and Tompkins County Community College (TC3 – a feeder system for those eighteen-year-olds not ready to commit to or even choose their best path). This sort of educational complex cannot only best control things like pandemic infection risk, but it can actually optimize our children to learn what they are best equipped and able to learn. Maybe everyone shows up at TC3 boot camp at eighteen and gets triaged based on desire and ability (both are necessary components). This sounds rather regimented, but it may be more egalitarian than the SAT/ACT billion-dollar machinery that pushes privilege. In this Utopian world, teachers and the people doing the triage will, by definition, become the most powerful and respected positions, as they should be if our real goal as human beings is in getting educated.