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.

The Social Animal in the Realm of Learning

I've been reading David Brook's Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement, with mixed feelings. For instance, Harold and Erica, the author's fictional characters devised to hang all sorts of far-flung data, simply do not work for me. Actually, they annoy me. That said, Brooks does trot out interesting stats. Of course, as Thomas Nagel points out in The New York Times, Brooks seems way too willing to take seriously any claim by a cognitive scientist, however idiotic. Nagel's case in point: that since people need only 4,000 words for 98 percent of conversations, the reason they have vocabularies of 60,000 words is to impress and sort out potential mates.

Still, Brooks, a columnist with The Times, offers or, as in the marshmallow case mentioned below, reminds us of some truly interesting findings, particularly in the realm of education. (Oh, and of course, there are simply some nice Brooksisms, typically inspired by the British Enlightenment. Here's one: "Emotion assigns value to things," Brooks writes, "and reason can only make choices on the basis of those valuations." Here's another: "The adult personality — including political views — is forever defined in opposition to one's natural enemies in high school," Brooks explains.)

But let's get back to Brooks' interesting findings in the realm of education. Consider financial aid programs, for instance, designed to reduce college drop-out rates are based on the assumption that the main problem for students is material. "When in fact," Brooks explains, "only about 8 percent of students are unable to complete college for purely financial reasons. The more important problems have to do with emotional disengagement from college and lack of academic preparedness, intangible factors that the prevailing mindset found it hard to factor and acknowledge." While Brooks goes too far when saying that "the government had tried to fortify material development but ended up weakening the social and emotional development that underpins it," I do think people — parents, in particular — blame the costs of college for many students' failure to graduate (or graduate in a timely fashion) when other factors are at play.

Brooks also highlights the classic — and hilarious — marshmallow test from the 1970s, which suggests the value of self control. His point: Kids from "disorganized, unstable communities have a much harder time acquiring the discipline to succeed in life." The experiment showed 4-year-olds asked to postpone gratification by leaving a marshmallow uneaten for a time as a condition of receiving a second marshmallow. According to Brooks and others, this test of will was a "very good predictor of success in life": "The kids who could wait a full 15 minutes had, 13 years later, SAT scores that were 210 points higher than the kids who could wait only 30 seconds. . . . Twenty years later, they had much higher college-completion rates, and 30 years later, they had much higher incomes. The kids who could not wait at all had much higher incarceration rates. They were much more likely to suffer from drug- and alcohol-addiction problems." (Note: Most kids actually ate the marshmallow right away, but I'm not sure if "right away" was less or more than 30 seconds.)

Below is a video clip from a modern-day marshmallow experiment, and here's an excerpt from Brooks' book on decision making via The New York Times.