The Cost of College for All

In The New Yorker this week, Louis Menand ponders why we have college and who learns the most. He explains that "a lot of confusion is caused by the fact that since 1945 American higher education has been committed to [two] theories": a meritocracy and a democracy. Not surprisingly, these two theories are at odds. We, Menand writes, "want higher education to be available to all Americans, but we also want people to deserve the grades they receive." In other words, no inflation, no degree farms.

While Menand goes on to write about Professor X, his woes and his new book, he makes a fine argument for a liberal education. As he tells it, a particularly interesting finding is that "students majoring in liberal-arts fields—sciences, social sciences, and arts and humanities— [...] show greater improvement, than students majoring in non-liberal-arts fields such as business, education and social work, communications, engineering and computer science, and health." Menand also goes on to highlight the various reasons that liberal-arts students do well: They are "more likely to take courses with substantial amounts of reading and writing; they are more likely to attend selective colleges, and institutional selectivity correlates positively with learning; and they are better prepared academically for college, which makes them more likely to improve." And the unsurprising kicker, echoed in The New York Times last April? Business majors are the students who score the lowest and improve the least.

Sources: The New Yorker, Professor X's 2008 article in The Atlantic.