Assignment

SENECA

On

Liberal and Vocational Studies

[

CIRCA 55

CE

]

LUCIUS ANNAEUS SENECA

 

(4

 

BCE

–

65

 CE

)

,

sometimes called “Seneca the

Younger,” was a member of the early Roman Empire’s most celebrated literary

family. His father, Marcus Annaeus Seneca, or Seneca the Elder (

circa

54

 BCE–circa

39

 CE

), was a

note

d orator and writer. His nephew, Lucian (39

–65 CE), was a

celebrated poet who made important contributions to the development of satire.

Seneca the Younger distinguished himself as a scientist, scholar, playwright, and

philosopher

—

as well as a politician w

hose career rose and fell on the whims of three

powerful emperors.

Seneca received a first

–

rate education and as a young man became a successful

politician. But in 37

 CE

, he came into conflict with the emperor Caligula and barely

escaped a death sentence.

Four

year

s later, in 41

 CE

, Seneca was accused of having an

improper relationship with the niece of the emperor Claudius, who consequently

banished him to the island of Corsica. Seneca remained there until 49

 CE

, when he

was summoned back to Rome to tutor

the twelve

-year-

old Nero, who would become

emperor in 54

 CE 

after Claudius’s death. Seneca became one of the young Nero’s

most trusted and powerful advisors, but as the emperor became more corrupt, Seneca

became less powerful. He received permission to ret

ire in 62

 CE

, but three years later,

Nero accused Seneca of conspiring against him and ordered Seneca to commit suicide

by slitting his own wrists.

Seneca was a well

–

known member of the Stoic school of philosophy. Stoics held that

people achieved the great

est good by living a life founded on reason and in harmony

with nature. Stoics also believed that wealth and social position were ultimately

unimportant because reason and virtue were available to everybody. In fact, two of the

most famous Roman Stoics wer

e the slave Epictetus (55

–

153) and the emperor

Marcus Aurelius (121

–

180). As a Stoic, Seneca believed that excessive passions

diluted the influence of reason, that the point of living is to live virtuously, and that

one could be happy and virtuous in any p

hysical or economic condition.

“

On Liberal and Vocational Studies

” is the eighty-

eighth of 124 letters from Seneca

that are collectively known as the “Moral Epistles.” In this letter, Seneca attempts to

define

liber

al studies and separate them clearly from

vocational training. During

Seneca’s time, a “liberal” education was the kind of education appropriate for a

 liber,

or a free person. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Seneca was unwilling to defend

pursuits such as literature, music, geometry, and astronomy by arguing that they made people virtuous. This argument, Seneca believed, reduced the liberal arts to a sort of moral propaganda. They do not convert people to virtue, he insists; rather, they are the raw materials out of which a virtuous life can be built—and as such they are indispensible to the functioning of a free society.

Much of Seneca’s philosophical work comes to us in the form of letters to other people. As you read Seneca’s argument, consider how his use of the second-person address (“You want to know . . . ”, “You teach me”) creates a connection with the reader and constructs his own ethos as a writer.

Letter LXXXVIII

You want to know my attitude towards liberal studies. Well, I have no respect for any study whatsoever if its end is the making of money. Such studies are to me unworthy ones. They involve the putting out of skills to hire, and are only of value in so far as they may develop the mind without occupying it for long. Time should be spent on them only so long as one’s mental abilities are not up to dealing with higher things. They are our apprenticeship, not our real work. Why “liberal studies” are so called is obvious: it is because they are the ones considered worthy of a free man.

1

 But there is really only one liberal study that deserves the name—because it makes a person free—and that is the pursuit of wisdom. Its high ideals, its steadfastness and spirit make all other studies puerile and puny in comparison. Do you really think there is anything to be said for the others when you find among the people who profess to teach them quite the most reprehensible and worthless characters you could have as teachers? All right to have studied that sort of thing once, but not to be studying them now.

The question has sometimes been posed whether these liberal studies make a man a better person. But in fact they do not aspire to any knowledge of how to do this, let alone claim to do it. Literary scholarship concerns itself with research into language, or history if a rather broader field is preferred, or, extending its range to the very limit, poetry. Which of these paves the way to virtue? Attentiveness of words, analysis of syllables, accounts of myths, laying down the principles of prosody? What is there in all this that dispels fear, roots out desire, or reins in passion? Or let us take a look at music, at geometry; you will not find anything in them which tells us not to be afraid of this or desire that—and if anyone lacks this kind of knowledge all his other knowledge is valueless to him. The question is whether or not that sort of scholar is teaching virtue. For if he is not, he will not even be imparting it incidentally. If he is teaching it he is a philosopher. If you really want to know how far these persons are from the position of being moral teachers, observe the absence of connexion between all the things they study; if they were teaching one and the same thing a connexion would be evident. . . .

Turning to the musical scholar I say this. You teach me how bass and treble harmonize, or how strings producing different notes can give rise to concord. I would rather you brought about some harmony in my mind and got my thoughts into tune. You show me which are the plaintive keys. I would rather you showed me how to avoid uttering plaintive notes when things go against me in life.

The geometrician teaches me how to work out the size of my estates—rather than how to work out how much a man needs in order to have enough. He teaches me to calculate, putting my fingers into the service of avarice, instead of teaching me that there is no point whatsoever in that sort of computation and that a person is none the happier for having properties which tire accountants out, or to put it another way, how superfluous a man’s possessions are when he would be a picture of misery if you forced him to start counting up single-handed how much he possessed. What use is it to me to be able to divide a piece of land into equal areas if I’m unable to divide it with a brother? What use is the ability to measure out a portion of an acre with an accuracy extending even to the bits which elude the measuring rod if I’m upset when some high-handed neighbour encroaches slightly on my property? The geometrician teaches me how I may avoid losing any fraction of my estates, but what I really want to learn is how to lose the lot and still keep smiling. . . . Oh, the marvels of geometry! You geometers can calculate the areas of circles, can reduce any given shape to a square, can state the distances separating stars. Nothing’s outside your scope when it comes to measurement. Well, if you’re such an expert, measure a man’s soul; tell me how large or how small that is. You can define a straight line; what use is that to you if you’ve no idea what straightness means in life?

Paragraph 5

I come now to the person who prides himself on his familiarity with the heavenly bodies:

Towards which quarter chilly Saturn draws,

The orbits in which burning Mercury roams.

2

What is to be gained from this sort of knowledge? Am I supposed to feel anxious when Saturn and Mars are in opposition or Mercury sets in the evening in full view of Saturn, instead of coming to learn that bodies like these are equally propitious wherever they are, and incapable of change in any case. They are swept on in a path from which they cannot escape, their motion governed by an uninterrupted sequence of destined events, making their reappearances in cycles that are fixed. They either actuate or signalize all that comes about in the universe. If every event is brought about by them, how is mere familiarity with a process which is unchangeable going to be of any help? If they are pointers to events, what difference does it make to be aware in advance of things you cannot escape? They are going to happen whether you know about them or not. . . .

“So we don’t,” you may ask, “in fact gain anything from the liberal studies?” As far as character is concerned, no, but we gain a good deal from them in other directions—just as even these admittedly inferior arts which we’ve been talking about, the ones that are based on use of the hands, make important contributions to the amenities of life although they have nothing to do with character. Why then do we give our sons a liberal education? Not because it can make them morally good but because it prepares the mind for the acquisition of moral values. Just as that grounding in grammar, as they called it in the old days, in which boys are given their elementary schooling, does not teach them the liberal arts but prepares the ground for knowledge of them in due course, so when it comes to character the liberal arts open the way to it rather than carry the personality all the way there. . . .

In this connexion I feel prompted to take a look at individual qualities of character. Bravery is the one which treats with contempt things ordinarily inspiring fear, despising and defying and demolishing all the things that terrify us and set chains on human freedom. Is she in any way fortified by liberal studies? Take loyalty, the most sacred quality that can be found in a human breast, never corrupted by a bribe, never driven to betray by any form of compulsion, crying: “Beat me, burn me, put me to death, I shall not talk—the more the torture probes my secrets the deeper I’ll hide them!” Can liberal studies create that kind of spirit? Take self-control, the quality which takes command of the pleasures; some she dismisses out of hand, unable to tolerate them; others she merely regulates, ensuring that they are brought within healthy limits; never approaching pleasures for their own sake, she realizes that the ideal limit with things you desire is not the amount you would like to but the amount you ought to take. Humanity is the quality which stops one being arrogant towards one’s fellows, or being acrimonious. In words, in actions, in emotions she reveals herself as kind and good-natured towards all. To her the troubles of anyone else are her own, and anything that benefits herself she welcomes primarily because it will be of benefit to someone else. Do the liberal studies inculcate these attitudes? No, no more than they do simplicity, or modesty and restraint, or frugality and thrift, or mercy, the mercy that is as sparing with another’s blood as though it were its own, knowing that it is not for man to make wasteful use of man.

Someone will ask me how I can say that liberal studies are of no help towards morality when I’ve just been saying that there’s no attaining morality without them. My answer would be this: there’s no attaining morality without food either, but there’s no connexion between morality and food. The fact that a ship can’t begin to exist without the timbers of which it’s built doesn’t mean that the timbers are of “help” to it. There’s no reason for you to assume that, X being something without which “ Y” could never have come about, Y came about as a result of the assistance of X. And indeed it can actually be argued that the attainment of wisdom is perfectly possible without the liberal studies; although moral values are things which have to be learnt, they are not learnt through these studies. Besides, what grounds could I possible have for supposing that a person who has no acquaintance with books will never be a wise man? For wisdom does not lie in books. Wisdom publishes not words but truths—and I’m not sure that the memory isn’t more reliable when it has no external aids to fall back on.

There is nothing small or cramped about wisdom. It is something calling for a lot of room to move. There are questions to be answered concerning physical as well as human matters, questions about the past and about the future, questions about things eternal and things ephemeral, questions about time itself. On this one subject of time just look how many questions there are. To start with, does it have an existence of its own? Next, does anything exist prior to time, independently of it? Did it begin with the universe, or did it exist even before then on the grounds that there was something in existence before the universe? There are countless questions about the soul alone—where it comes from, what its nature is, when it begins to exist, and how long it is in existence; whether it passes from one place to another, moving house, so to speak, on transfer to successive living creatures, taking on a different form with each, or is no more than once in service and is then released to roam the universe; whether it is a corporeal substance or not; what it will do when it ceases to act through us, how it will employ its freedom once it has escaped its cage here; whether it will forget its past and become conscious of its real nature from the actual moment of its parting from the body and departure for its new home on high. Whatever the field of physical or moral sciences you deal with, you will be given no rest by the mass of things to be learnt or investigated. And to enable matters of this range and scale to find unrestricted hospitality in our minds, everything superfluous must be turned out. Virtue will not bring herself to enter the limited space we offer her; something of great size requires plenty of room. Let everything else be evicted, and your heart completely opened to her.

Paragraph 10

“But it’s a nice thing, surely, to be familiar with a lot of subjects.” Well, in that case let us retain just as much of them as we need. Would you consider a person open to criticism for putting superfluous objects on the same level as really useful ones by arranging on display in his house a whole array of costly articles, but not for cluttering himself up with a lot of superfluous furniture in the way of learning? To want to know more than is sufficient is a form of intemperance. Apart from which this kind of obsession with the liberal arts turns people into pedantic, irritating, tactless, self-satisfied bores, not learning what they need simply because they spend their time learning things they will never need. The scholar Didymus wrote four thousand works: I should feel sorry for him if he had merely read so many useless works. In these works he discusses such questions as Homer’s origin, who was Aeneas’ real mother, whether Anacreon’s manner of life was more that of a lecher or that of a drunkard, whether Sappho

3

 slept with anyone who asked her, and other things that would be better unlearned if one actually knew them! Don’t you go and tell me now that life is long enough for this sort of thing! When you come to writers in our own school, for that matter, I’ll show you plenty of works which could do with some ruthless pruning. It costs a person an enormous amount of time (and other people’s ears an enormous amount of boredom) before he earns such compliments as “What a learned person!” Let’s be content with the much less fashionable label, “What a good man!” . . .

I have been speaking about liberal studies. Yet look at the amount of useless and superfluous matter to be found in the philosophers. Even they have descended to the level of drawing distinctions between the uses of different syllables and discussing the proper meanings of prepositions and conjunctions. They have come to envy the philologist and the mathematician, and they have taken over all the inessential elements in those studies—with the result that they know more about devoting care and attention to their speech than about devoting such attention to their lives. Listen and let me show you the sorry consequences to which subtlety carried too far can lead, and what an enemy it is to truth. Protagoras

4

 declares that it is possible to argue either side of any question with equal force, even the question whether or not one can equally argue either side of any question! Nausiphanes

5

 declares that of the things which appear to us to exist, none exists any more than it does not exist. Parmenides

6

 declares that of all these phenomena none exists except the whole. Zeno of Elea

7

 has dismissed all such difficulties by introducing another; he declares that nothing exists. The Pyrrhonean, Megarian, Eretrian, and Academic schools

8

 pursue more or less similar lines; the last named have introduced a new branch of knowledge, non-knowledge.

Well, all these theories you should just toss on top of that heap of superfluous liberal studies. The people I first mentioned provide me with knowledge which is not going to be of any use to me, while the others snatch away from me any hopes of ever acquiring any knowledge at all. Superfluous knowledge would be preferable to no knowledge. One side offers me no guiding light to direct my vision towards the truth, while the other just gouges my eyes out. If I believe Protagoras there is nothing certain in the universe; if I believe Nausiphanes there is just the one certainty, that nothing is certain; if Parmenides, only one thing exists; if Zeno, not even one. Then what are we? The things that surround us, the things on which we live, what are they? Our whole universe is no more than a semblance of reality, perhaps a deceptive semblance, perhaps one without substance altogether. I should find it difficult to say which of these people annoy me most, those who would have us know nothing or the ones who refuse even to leave us the small satisfaction of knowing that we know nothing.

SENECA

On Liberal and Vocational Studies

[
CIRCA 55 CE]

LUCIUS ANNAEUS SENECA

(4

BCE
–
65

CE
), sometimes called “Seneca the
Younger,” was a member of the early Roman Empire’s most celebrated literary
family. His father, Marcus Annaeus Seneca, or Seneca the Elder (circa 54

BCE
–
circa
39

CE
), was a note
d orator and writer. His nephew, Lucian (39
–
65

CE
), was a
celebrated poet who made important contributions to the development of satire.
Seneca the Younger distinguished himself as a scientist, scholar, playwright, and
philosopher
—
as well as a politician w
hose career rose and fell on the whims of three
powerful emperors.

Seneca received a first
–
rate education and as a young man became a successful
politician. But in 37

CE
, he came into conflict with the emperor Caligula and barely
escaped a death sentence.
Four years later, in 41

CE
, Seneca was accused of having an
improper relationship with the niece of the emperor Claudius, who consequently
banished him to the island of Corsica. Seneca remained there until 49

CE
, when he
was summoned back to Rome to tutor
the twelve
–
year
–
old Nero, who would become
emperor in 54

CE

after Claudius’s death. Seneca became one of the young Nero’s
most trusted and powerful advisors, but as the emperor became more corrupt, Seneca
became less powerful. He received permission to ret
ire in 62

CE
, but three years later,
Nero accused Seneca of conspiring against him and ordered Seneca to commit suicide
by slitting his own wrists.

Seneca was a well
–
known member of the Stoic school of philosophy. Stoics held that
people achieved the great
est good by living a life founded on reason and in harmony
with nature. Stoics also believed that wealth and social position were ultimately
unimportant because reason and virtue were available to everybody. In fact, two of the
most famous Roman Stoics wer
e the slave Epictetus (55
–
153) and the emperor
Marcus Aurelius (121
–
180). As a Stoic, Seneca believed that excessive passions
diluted the influence of reason, that the point of living is to live virtuously, and that
one could be happy and virtuous in any p
hysical or economic condition.

“On Liberal and Vocational Studies” is the eighty

–
eighth of 124 letters from Seneca
that are collectively known as the “Moral Epistles.” In this letter, Seneca attempts to
define liberal studies and separate them clearly from

vocational training. During
Seneca’s time, a “liberal” education was the kind of education appropriate for a

liber
,
or a free person. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Seneca was unwilling to defend

SENECA

On Liberal and Vocational Studies

[CIRCA 55 CE]

LUCIUS ANNAEUS SENECA (4 BCE–65 CE), sometimes called “Seneca the

Younger,” was a member of the early Roman Empire’s most celebrated literary

family. His father, Marcus Annaeus Seneca, or Seneca the Elder (circa 54 BCE–circa

39 CE), was a noted orator and writer. His nephew, Lucian (39–65 CE), was a

celebrated poet who made important contributions to the development of satire.
Seneca the Younger distinguished himself as a scientist, scholar, playwright, and

philosopher—as well as a politician whose career rose and fell on the whims of three

powerful emperors.

Seneca received a first-rate education and as a young man became a successful

politician. But in 37 CE, he came into conflict with the emperor Caligula and barely

escaped a death sentence. Four years later, in 41 CE, Seneca was accused of having an

improper relationship with the niece of the emperor Claudius, who consequently

banished him to the island of Corsica. Seneca remained there until 49 CE, when he

was summoned back to Rome to tutor the twelve-year-old Nero, who would become

emperor in 54 CE after Claudius’s death. Seneca became one of the young Nero’s

most trusted and powerful advisors, but as the emperor became more corrupt, Seneca

became less powerful. He received permission to retire in 62 CE, but three years later,

Nero accused Seneca of conspiring against him and ordered Seneca to commit suicide

by slitting his own wrists.

Seneca was a well-known member of the Stoic school of philosophy. Stoics held that

people achieved the greatest good by living a life founded on reason and in harmony

with nature. Stoics also believed that wealth and social position were ultimately
unimportant because reason and virtue were available to everybody. In fact, two of the

most famous Roman Stoics were the slave Epictetus (55–153) and the emperor

Marcus Aurelius (121–180). As a Stoic, Seneca believed that excessive passions

diluted the influence of reason, that the point of living is to live virtuously, and that

one could be happy and virtuous in any physical or economic condition.

“On Liberal and Vocational Studies” is the eighty-eighth of 124 letters from Seneca

that are collectively known as the “Moral Epistles.” In this letter, Seneca attempts to

define liberal studies and separate them clearly from vocational training. During

Seneca’s time, a “liberal” education was the kind of education appropriate for a liber,

or a free person. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Seneca was unwilling to defend

Writing

Assignment #3

:

Synthesis Argument

1

.

You

must

write a brief

synthesis

argument

about the role of college education

in

America today as discussed

in

the prompt at

#4

below

.

The finished final draft must

be a minimum of f

our

full pages in length. This means

that

yo

ur essay

must

end on

page five

or later (the Works

C

ited page does not count).

2. At a minimum, your argument must demonstrate the following characteristics:

A. Be an argument and contain a t

hesis that

responds t

o the prompt in #4

below

B.

Your thesis must assert an arguable relationship between different ideas

C.

C

ontain sufficient evidence to

support your claim

D.

Must not be an imitation of another argument nor an uncritical response

to another argument

E.

Your argument must demonstrate the interaction

, a synthesis,

of the

ideas

presented in disparate sources

3. Other requirements:

A. Your e

ssay must contain a minimum of four

secondary sources

, three of

which must be from

academic sources (this may i

nclude academic journals, books,

and sources identified through the library’s website)

.

B. It must be properly formatted and documented in MLA form, including

correct in

–

text

citations and a Works Cited page

D.

This is a formal argument and may not be written from first person

perspective

E.

You must use

proper, S

tandard American English

grammar throughout

your essay

4.

Prompt:

In Seneca’s letter “On Liberal and Vocational Studies” he fully rejects the notion that

the purpose of education is to prepare a student for a vocation, a job, a means of

making a living. He argues that the

only study worth pursuing is the attainment of

wisdom.

In the essay “Who are You and What are You Doing Here?” the author

suggests

that

college represents the only opportunity for young people to “find themselves” and,

therefore, argues that students should pursue subjects that interest them regardless of the possibility of ever making a living in those fields.

However, the summary of government job data detailed in “Why Did Seventeen Million People Go to College” that students–and all of us through taxes–have wasted trillions of dollars obtaining “pointless” degrees to eventually work in occupations where degrees are not needed.

As noted in the Week 10 Discussion Board, nearly all students offered a “free” grade in a general education course without having to attend classes or do the work opt to take the grade and skip the course.

So, what exactly is a college education now, what exactly should it be, and where do we go from here? More specifically, in America today what exactly should the role of a college education be?

Writing Assignment #3
:
Synthesis Argument

1. You

must write a brief
synthesis
argument

about the role of college education in
America today as discussed

in
the prompt at
#4 below.
The finished final draft must
be a minimum of f
our

full pages in length. This means that yo
ur essay
must

end on
page five

or later (the Works Cited page does not count).

2. At a minimum, your argument must demonstrate the following characteristics:

A. Be an argument and contain a t
hesis that
responds t
o the prompt in #4
below

B.
Your thesis must assert an arguable relationship between different ideas

C.
C
ontain sufficient evidence to
support your claim

D. Must not be an imitation of another argument nor an uncritical response
to another argument

E. Your argument must demonstrate the interaction
, a synthesis,

of the

ideas
presented in disparate sources

3. Other requirements:

A. Your e
ssay must contain a minimum of four

secondary sources
, three of
which must be from
academic sources (this may i
nclude academic journals, books,
and sources identified through the library’s website)
.

B. It must be properly formatted and documented in MLA form, including
correct in
–
text

citations and a Works Cited page

D.
This is a formal argument and may not be written from first person
perspective

E.
You must use

proper, S
tandard American English

grammar throughout
your essay

4.
Prompt:

In Seneca’s letter “On Liberal and Vocational Studies” he fully rejects the notion that
the purpose of education is to prepare a student for a vocation, a job, a means of
making a living. He argues that the
only study worth pursuing is the attainment of
wisdom.

In the essay “Who are You and What are You Doing Here?” the author
suggests

that
college represents the only opportunity for young people to “find themselves” and,

Writing Assignment #3: Synthesis Argument

1. You must write a brief synthesis argument about the role of college education in

America today as discussed in the prompt at #4 below. The finished final draft must

be a minimum of four full pages in length. This means that

your essay

must end on

page five or later (the Works Cited page does not count).

2. At a minimum, your argument must demonstrate the following characteristics:

A. Be an argument and contain a thesis that responds to the prompt in #4

below

B. Your thesis must assert an arguable relationship between different ideas

C. Contain sufficient evidence to support your claim

D. Must not be an imitation of another argument nor an uncritical response

to another argument

E. Your argument must demonstrate the interaction, a synthesis, of the ideas

presented in disparate sources

3. Other requirements:

A. Your essay must contain a minimum of four secondary sources, three of

which must be from academic sources (this may include academic journals, books,

and sources identified through the library’s website).

B. It must be properly formatted and documented in MLA form, including

correct in-text citations and a Works Cited page

D. This is a formal argument and may not be written from first person

perspective

E. You must use proper, Standard American English grammar throughout

your essay

4. Prompt:

In Seneca’s letter “On Liberal and Vocational Studies” he fully rejects the notion that
the purpose of education is to prepare a student for a vocation, a job, a means of

making a living. He argues that the only study worth pursuing is the attainment of

wisdom.

In the essay “Who are You and What are You Doing Here?” the author suggests that

college represents the only opportunity for young people to “find themselves” and,

ISSUE

74: Who Are You and What Are

You Doing Here?

Published on

  

August 22 2011

By

Mark Edmundson

 

A message in a bottle to the incoming class.

Welcome and congratulations: Getting to the first day of college is a major achievement. You’re to be commended, and not just you, but the parents, grandparents, uncles, and aunts who helped get you here.

It’s been said that raising a child effectively takes a village: Well, as you may have noticed, our American village is not in very good shape. We’ve got guns, drugs, two wars, fanatical religions, a slime-based popular culture, and some politicians who—a little restraint here—aren’t what they might be. To merely survive in this American village and to win a place in the entering class has taken a lot of grit on your part. So, yes, congratulations to all.

You now may think that you’ve about got it made. Amidst the impressive college buildings, in company with a high-powered faculty, surrounded by the best of your generation, all you need is to keep doing what you’ve done before: Work hard, get good grades, listen to your teachers, get along with the people around you, and you’ll emerge in four years as an educated young man or woman. Ready for life.

Do not believe it. It is not true. If you want to get a real education in America you’re going to have to fight—and I don’t mean just fight against the drugs and the violence and against the slime-based culture that is still going to surround you. I mean something a little more disturbing. To get an education, you’re probably going to have to fight against the institution that you find yourself in—no matter how prestigious it may be. (In fact, the more prestigious the school, the more you’ll probably have to push.) You can get a terrific education in America now—there are astonishing opportunities at almost every college—but the education will not be presented to you wrapped and bowed. To get it, you’ll need to struggle and strive, to be strong, and occasionally even to piss off some admirable people.

I came to college with few resources, but one of them was an understanding, however crude, of how I might use my opportunities there. This I began to develop because of my father, who had never been to college—in fact, he’d barely gotten out of high school. One night after dinner, he and I were sitting in our kitchen at 58 Clewley Road in Medford, Massachusetts, hatching plans about the rest of my life. I was about to go off to college, a feat no one in my family had accomplished in living memory. “I think I might want to be pre-law,” I told my father. I had no idea what being pre-law was. My father compressed his brow and blew twin streams of smoke, dragon-like, from his magnificent nose. “Do you want to be a lawyer?” he asked. My father had some experience with lawyers, and with policemen, too; he was not well-disposed toward either. “I’m not really sure,” I told him, “but lawyers make pretty good money, right?”

My father detonated. (That was not uncommon. My father detonated a lot.) He told me that I was going to go to college only once, and that while I was there I had better study what I wanted. He said that when rich kids went to school, they majored in the subjects that interested them, and that my younger brother Philip and I were as good as any rich kids. (We were rich kids minus the money.) Wasn’t I interested in literature? I confessed that I was. Then I had better study literature, unless I had inside information to the effect that reincarnation wasn’t just hype, and I’d be able to attend college thirty or forty times. If I had such info, pre-law would be fine, and maybe even a tour through invertebrate biology could also be tossed in. But until I had the reincarnation stuff from a solid source, I better get to work and pick out some English classes from the course catalog. “How about the science requirements?”

“Take ’em later,” he said, “you never know.”

My father, Wright Aukenhead Edmundson, Malden High School Class of 1948 (by a hair), knew the score. What he told me that evening at the Clewley Road kitchen table was true in itself, and it also contains the germ of an idea about what a university education should be. But apparently almost everyone else—students, teachers, and trustees and parents—sees the matter much differently. They have it wrong.

Education has one salient enemy in present-day America, and that enemy is education—university education in particular. To almost everyone, university education is a means to an end. For students, that end is a good job. Students want the credentials that will help them get ahead. They want the certificate that will give them access to Wall Street, or entrance into law or medical or business school. And how can we blame them? America values power and money, big players with big bucks. When we raise our children, we tell them in multiple ways that what we want most for them is success—material success. To be poor in America is to be a failure—it’s to be without decent health care, without basic necessities, often without dignity. Then there are those back-breaking student loans—people leave school as servants, indentured to pay massive bills, so that first job better be a good one. Students come to college with the goal of a diploma in mind—what happens in between, especially in classrooms, is often of no deep and determining interest to them.

In college, life is elsewhere. Life is at parties, at clubs, in music, with friends, in sports. Life is what celebrities have. The idea that the courses you take should be the primary objective of going to college is tacitly considered absurd. In terms of their work, students live in the future and not the present; they live with their prospects for success. If universities stopped issuing credentials, half of the clients would be gone by tomorrow morning, with the remainder following fast behind.

The faculty, too, is often absent: Their real lives are also elsewhere. Like most of their students, they aim to get on. The work they are compelled to do to advance—get tenure, promotion, raises, outside offers—is, broadly speaking, scholarly work. No matter what anyone says this work has precious little to do with the fundamentals of teaching. The proof is that virtually no undergraduate students can read and understand their professors’ scholarly publications. The public senses this disparity and so thinks of the professors’ work as being silly or beside the point. Some of it is. But the public also senses that because professors don’t pay full-bore attention to teaching they don’t have to work very hard—they’ve created a massive feather bed for themselves and called it a university.

This is radically false. Ambitious professors, the ones who, like their students, want to get ahead in America, work furiously. Scholarship, even if pretentious and almost unreadable, is nonetheless labor-intense. One can slave for a year or two on a single article for publication in this or that refereed journal. These essays are honest: Their footnotes reflect real reading, real assimilation, and real dedication. Shoddy work—in which the author cheats, cuts corners, copies from others—is quickly detected. The people who do this work have highly developed intellectual powers, and they push themselves hard to reach a certain standard: That the results have almost no practical relevance to the students, the public, or even, frequently, to other scholars is a central element in the tragicomedy that is often academia.

The students and the professors have made a deal: Neither of them has to throw himself heart and soul into what happens in the classroom. The students write their abstract, over-intellectualized essays; the professors grade the students for their capacity to be abstract and over-intellectual—and often genuinely smart. For their essays can be brilliant, in a chilly way; they can also be clipped off the Internet, and often are. Whatever the case, no one wants to invest too much in them—for life is elsewhere. The professor saves his energies for the profession, while the student saves his for friends, social life, volunteer work, making connections, and getting in position to clasp hands on the true grail, the first job.

No one in this picture is evil; no one is criminally irresponsible. It’s just that smart people are prone to look into matters to see how they might go about buttering their toast. Then they butter their toast.

As for the administrators, their relation to the students often seems based not on love but fear. Administrators fear bad publicity, scandal, and dissatisfaction on the part of their customers. More than anything else, though, they fear lawsuits. Throwing a student out of college, for this or that piece of bad behavior, is very difficult, almost impossible. The student will sue your eyes out. One kid I knew (and rather liked) threatened on his blog to mince his dear and esteemed professor (me) with a samurai sword for the crime of having taught a boring class. (The class was a little boring—I had a damned cold—but the punishment seemed a bit severe.) The dean of students laughed lightly when I suggested that this behavior might be grounds for sending the student on a brief vacation. I was, you might say, discomfited, and showed up to class for a while with my cellphone jiggered to dial 911 with one touch.

Still, this was small potatoes. Colleges are even leery of disciplining guys who have committed sexual assault, or assault plain and simple. Instead of being punished, these guys frequently stay around, strolling the quad and swilling the libations, an affront (and sometimes a terror) to their victims.

You’ll find that cheating is common as well. As far as I can discern, the student ethos goes like this: If the professor is so lazy that he gives the same test every year, it’s okay to go ahead and take advantage—you’ve both got better things to do. The Internet is amok with services selling term papers and those services exist, capitalism being what it is, because people purchase the papers—lots of them. Fraternity files bulge with old tests from a variety of courses.

Periodically the public gets exercised about this situation, and there are articles in the national news. But then interest dwindles and matters go back to normal.

One of the reasons professors sometimes look the other way when they sense cheating is that it sends them into a world of sorrow. A friend of mine had the temerity to detect cheating on the part of a kid who was the nephew of a well-placed official in an Arab government complexly aligned with the U.S. Black limousines pulled up in front of his office and disgorged decorously suited negotiators. Did my pal fold? Nope, he’s not the type. But he did not enjoy the process.

What colleges generally want are well-rounded students, civic leaders, people who know what the system demands, how to keep matters light, not push too hard for an education or anything else; people who get their credentials and leave the professors alone to do their brilliant work, so they may rise and enhance the rankings of the university. Such students leave and become donors and so, in their own turn, contribute immeasurably to the university’s standing. They’ve done a fine job skating on surfaces in high school—the best way to get an across-the-board outstanding record—and now they’re on campus to cut a few more figure eights.

In a culture where the major and determining values are monetary, what else could you do? How else would you live if not by getting all you can, succeeding all you can, making all you can?

The idea that a university education really should have no substantial content, should not be about what John Keats was disposed to call Soul-making, is one that you might think professors and university presidents would be discreet about. Not so. This view informed an address that Richard Brodhead gave to the senior class at Yale before he departed to become president of Duke. Brodhead, an impressive, articulate man, seems to take as his educational touchstone the Duke of Wellington’s precept that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton. Brodhead suggests that the content of the courses isn’t really what matters. In five years (or five months, or minutes), the student is likely to have forgotten how to do the problem sets and will only hazily recollect what happens in the ninth book of Paradise Lost. The legacy of their college years will be a legacy of difficulties overcome. When they face equally arduous tasks later in life, students will tap their old resources of determination, and they’ll win.

All right, there’s nothing wrong with this as far as it goes—after all, the student who writes a brilliant forty-page thesis in a hard week has learned more than a little about her inner resources. Maybe it will give her needed confidence in the future. But doesn’t the content of the courses matter at all?

On the evidence of this talk, no. Trying to figure out whether the stuff you’re reading is true or false and being open to having your life changed is a fraught, controversial activity. Doing so requires energy from the professor—which is better spent on other matters. This kind of perspective-altering teaching and learning can cause the things which administrators fear above all else: trouble, arguments, bad press, etc. After the kid-samurai episode, the chair of my department not unsympathetically suggested that this was the sort of incident that could happen when you brought a certain intensity to teaching. At the time I found his remark a tad detached, but maybe he was right.

So, if you want an education, the odds aren’t with you: The professors are off doing what they call their own work; the other students, who’ve doped out the way the place runs, are busy leaving the professors alone and getting themselves in position for bright and shining futures; the student-services people are trying to keep everyone content, offering plenty of entertainment and building another state-of-the-art workout facility every few months. The development office is already scanning you for future donations. The primary function of Yale University, it’s recently been said, is to create prosperous alumni so as to enrich Yale University.

So why make trouble? Why not just go along? Let the profs roam free in the realms of pure thought, let yourselves party in the realms of impure pleasure, and let the student-services gang assert fewer prohibitions and newer delights for you. You’ll get a good job, you’ll have plenty of friends, you’ll have a driveway of your own.

You’ll also, if my father and I are right, be truly and righteously screwed. The reason for this is simple. The quest at the center of a liberal-arts education is not a luxury quest; it’s a necessity quest. If you do not undertake it, you risk leading a life of desperation—maybe quiet, maybe, in time, very loud—and I am not exaggerating. For you risk trying to be someone other than who you are, which, in the long run, is killing.

By the time you come to college, you will have been told who you are numberless times. Your parents and friends, your teachers, your counselors, your priests and rabbis and ministers and imams have all had their say. They’ve let you know how they size you up, and they’ve let you know what they think you should value. They’ve given you a sharp and protracted taste of what they feel is good and bad, right and wrong. Much is on their side. They have confronted you with scriptures—holy books that, whatever their actual provenance, have given people what they feel to be wisdom for thousands of years. They’ve given you family traditions—you’ve learned the ways of your tribe and your community. And, too, you’ve been tested, probed, looked at up and down and through. The coach knows what your athletic prospects are, the guidance office has a sheaf of test scores that relegate you to this or that ability quadrant, and your teachers have got you pegged. You are, as Foucault might say, the intersection of many evaluative and potentially determining discourses: you boy, you girl, have been made.

And—contra Foucault—that’s not so bad. Embedded in all of the major religions are profound truths. Schopenhauer, who despised belief in transcendent things, nonetheless thought Christianity to be of inexpressible worth. He couldn’t believe in the divinity of Jesus, or in the afterlife, but to Schopenhauer, a deep pessimist, a religion that had as its central emblem the figure of a man being tortured on a cross couldn’t be entirely misleading. To the Christian, Schopenhauer said, pain was at the center of the understanding of life, and that was just as it should be.

One does not need to be as harsh as Schopenhauer to understand the use of religion, even if one does not believe in an otherworldly god. And all of those teachers and counselors and friends—and the prognosticating uncles, the dithering aunts, the fathers and mothers with their hopes for your fulfillment—or their fulfillment in you—should not necessarily be cast aside or ignored. Families have their wisdom. The question “Who do they think you are at home?” is never an idle one.

The major conservative thinkers have always been very serious about what goes by the name of common sense. Edmund Burke saw common sense as a loosely made, but often profound, collective work, in which humanity has deposited its hard-earned wisdom—the precipitate of joy and tears—over time. You have been raised in proximity to common sense, if you’ve been raised at all, and common sense is something to respect, though not quite—peace unto the formidable Burke—to revere.

You may be all that the good people who raised you say you are; you may want all they have shown you is worth wanting; you may be someone who is truly your father’s son or your mother’s daughter. But then again, you may not be.

For the power that is in you, as Emerson suggested, may be new in nature. You may not be the person that your parents take you to be. And—this thought is both more exciting and more dangerous—you may not be the person that you take yourself to be, either. You may not have read yourself aright, and college is the place where you can find out whether you have or not. The reason to read Blake and Dickinson and Freud and Dickens is not to become more cultivated, or more articulate, or to be someone who, at a cocktail party, is never embarrassed (or who can embarrass others). The best reason to read them is to see if they may know you better than you know yourself. You may find your own suppressed and rejected thoughts flowing back to you with an “alienated majesty.” Reading the great writers, you may have the experience that Longinus associated with the sublime: You feel that you have actually created the text yourself. For somehow your predecessors are more yourself than you are.

This was my own experience reading the two writers who have influenced me the most, Sigmund Freud and Ralph Waldo Emerson. They gave words to thoughts and feelings that I had never been able to render myself. They shone a light onto the world and what they saw, suddenly I saw, too. From Emerson I learned to trust my own thoughts, to trust them even when every voice seems to be on the other side. I need the wherewithal, as Emerson did, to say what’s on my mind and to take the inevitable hits. Much more I learned from the sage—about character, about loss, about joy, about writing and its secret sources, but Emerson most centrally preaches the gospel of self-reliance and that is what I have tried most to take from him. I continue to hold in mind one of Emerson’s most memorable passages: “Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.”

Emerson’s greatness lies not only in showing you how powerful names and customs can be, but also in demonstrating how exhilarating it is to buck them. When he came to Harvard to talk about religion, he shocked the professors and students by challenging the divinity of Jesus and the truth of his miracles. He wasn’t invited back for decades.

From Freud I found a great deal to ponder as well. I don’t mean Freud the aspiring scientist, but the Freud who was a speculative essayist and interpreter of the human condition like Emerson. Freud challenges nearly every significant human ideal. He goes after religion. He says that it comes down to the longing for the father. He goes after love. He calls it “the overestimation of the erotic object.” He attacks our desire for charismatic popular leaders. We’re drawn to them because we hunger for absolute authority. He declares that dreams don’t predict the future and that there’s nothing benevolent about them. They’re disguised fulfillments of repressed wishes.

Freud has something challenging and provoking to say about virtually every human aspiration. I learned that if I wanted to affirm any consequential ideal, I had to talk my way past Freud. He was—and is—a perpetual challenge and goad.

Never has there been a more shrewd and imaginative cartographer of the psyche. His separation of the self into three parts, and his sense of the fraught, anxious, but often negotiable relations among them (negotiable when you come to the game with a Freudian knowledge), does a great deal to help one navigate experience. (Though sometimes—and this I owe to Emerson—it seems right to let the psyche fall into civil war, accepting barrages of anxiety and grief for this or that good reason.)

The battle is to make such writers one’s own, to winnow them out and to find their essential truths. We need to see where they fall short and where they exceed the mark, and then to develop them a little, as the ideas themselves, one comes to see, actually developed others. (Both Emerson and Freud live out of Shakespeare—but only a giant can be truly influenced by Shakespeare.) In reading, I continue to look for one thing—to be influenced, to learn something new, to be thrown off my course and onto another, better way.

My father knew that he was dissatisfied with life. He knew that none of the descriptions people had for him quite fit. He understood that he was always out-of-joint with life as it was. He had talent: My brother and I each got about half the raw ability he possessed and that’s taken us through life well enough. But what to do with that talent—there was the rub for my father. He used to stroll through the house intoning his favorite line from Groucho Marx’s ditty “Whatever it is, I’m against it.” (I recently asked my son, now twenty-one, if he thought I was mistaken in teaching him this particular song when he was six years old. “No!” he said, filling the air with an invisible forest of exclamation points.) But what my father never managed to get was a sense of who he might become. He never had a world of possibilities spread before him, never made sustained contact with the best that had been thought and said. He didn’t get to revise his understanding of himself, figure out what he’d do best that might give the world some profit.

My father was a gruff man, but also a generous one, so that night at the kitchen table at 58 Clewley Road he made an effort to let me have the chance that had been denied to him by both fate and character. He gave me the chance to see what I was all about, and if it proved to be different from him, proved even to be something he didn’t like or entirely comprehend, then he’d deal with it.

Right now, if you’re going to get a real education, you may have to be aggressive and assertive.

Your professors will give you some fine books to read, and they’ll probably help you understand them. What they won’t do, for reasons that perplex me, is to ask you if the books contain truths you could live your lives by. When you read Plato, you’ll probably learn about his metaphysics and his politics and his way of conceiving the soul. But no one will ask you if his ideas are good enough to believe in. No one will ask you, in the words of Emerson’s disciple William James, what their “cash value” might be. No one will suggest that you might use Plato as your bible for a week or a year or longer. No one, in short, will ask you to use Plato to help you change your life.

That will be up to you. You must put the question of Plato to yourself. You must ask whether reason should always rule the passions, philosophers should always rule the state, and poets should inevitably be banished from a just commonwealth. You have to ask yourself if wildly expressive music (rock and rap and the rest) deranges the soul in ways that are destructive to its health. You must inquire of yourself if balanced calm is the most desirable human state.

Occasionally—for you will need some help in fleshing-out the answers—you may have to prod your professors to see if they take the text at hand—in this case the divine and disturbing Plato—to be true. And you will have to be tough if the professor mocks you for uttering a sincere question instead of keeping matters easy for all concerned by staying detached and analytical. (Detached analysis has a place—but, in the end, you’ve got to speak from the heart and pose the question of truth.) You’ll be the one who pesters his teachers. You’ll ask your history teacher about whether there is a design to our history, whether we’re progressing or declining, or whether, in the words of a fine recent play, The History Boys, history’s “just one fuckin’ thing after another.” You’ll be the one who challenges your biology teacher about the intellectual conflict between evolution and creationist thinking. You’ll not only question the statistics teacher about what numbers can explain but what they can’t.

Because every subject you study is a language and since you may adopt one of these languages as your own, you’ll want to know how to speak it expertly and also how it fails to deal with those concerns for which it has no adequate words. You’ll be looking into the reach of every metaphor that every discipline offers, and you’ll be trying to see around their corners.

The whole business is scary, of course. What if you arrive at college devoted to pre-med, sure that nothing will make you and your family happier than a life as a physician, only to discover that elementary-school teaching is where your heart is?

You might learn that you’re not meant to be a doctor at all. Of course, given your intellect and discipline, you can still probably be one. You can pound your round peg through the very square hole of medical school, then go off into the profession. And society will help you. Society has a cornucopia of resources to encourage you in doing what society needs done but that you don’t much like doing and are not cut out to do. To ease your grief, society offers alcohol, television, drugs, divorce, and buying, buying, buying what you don’t need. But all those too have their costs.

Education is about finding out what form of work for you is close to being play—work you do so easily that it restores you as you go. Randall Jarrell once said that if he were a rich man, he would pay money to teach poetry to students. (I would, too, for what it’s worth.) In saying that, he (like my father) hinted in the direction of a profound and true theory of learning.

Having found what’s best for you to do, you may be surprised how far you rise, how prosperous, even against your own projections, you become. The student who eschews medical school to follow his gift for teaching small children spends his twenties in low-paying but pleasurable and soul-rewarding toil. He’s always behind on his student-loan payments; he still lives in a house with four other guys (not all of whom got proper instructions on how to clean a bathroom). He buys shirts from the Salvation Army, has intermittent Internet, and vacations where he can. But lo—he has a gift for teaching. He writes an essay about how to teach, then a book—which no one buys. But he writes another—in part out of a feeling of injured merit, maybe—and that one they do buy.

Money is still a problem, but in a new sense. The world wants him to write more, lecture, travel more, and will pay him for his efforts, and he likes this a good deal. But he also likes staying around and showing up at school and figuring out how to get this or that little runny-nosed specimen to begin learning how to read. These are the kinds of problems that are worth having and if you advance, as Thoreau said, in the general direction of your dreams, you may have them. If you advance in the direction of someone else’s dreams—if you want to live someone else’s life rather than yours—then get a TV for every room, buy yourself a lifetime supply of your favorite quaff, crank up the porn channel, and groove away. But when we expend our energies in rightful ways, Robert Frost observed, we stay whole and vigorous and we don’t weary. “Strongly spent,” the poet says, “is synonymous with kept.”

ISSUE 74: Who Are You and What Are

You Doing Here?

Published on

August 22 2011

By

Mark Edmundson

ISSUE 74: Who Are You and What Are

You Doing Here?

Published on

August 22 2011

By Mark Edmundson

Why

Did 17 Million Students Go to College?

October 20, 2010,

9:53 am

By

Richard Vedder

Two sets of information were presented to me in the last 24 hours that have dramatically reinforced my

feeling that diminishing return

s have set in to investments in higher education, with increasing evidence

suggesting that we are in one respect “overinvesting” in the field. First, following up on information

provided by former student Douglas Himes at the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BL

S), my sidekick Chris

Matgouranis showed me the table reproduced below (And for more see

this

).

Over 317,000 waiters and waitresses have college degrees (o

ver 8,000 of them have doctoral or

professional degrees), along with over 80,000 bartenders, and over 18,000

parking lot attendants

. All

told, some 17,000,000 Americans with college degrees are doing jobs that the BLS says require less than

the skill level

s associated with a bachelor’s degree.

I

 

have long been a

 

proponent of Charles Murray’s thesis that an increasing number of people attending

college do not have the cognitive abilities or other attributes usually necessary for success at higher

levels of

learning. As more and more try to attend colleges, either college degrees will be watered

 

down (something

already happening I suspect) or drop

–

out rates will rise.

The relentless claims of the Obama administration and others that having more college graduates is necessary for continued economic leadership is incompatible with this view. Putting issues of student abilities aside, the growing disconnect between labor market realities and the propaganda of higher-education apologists is causing more and more people to graduate and take menial jobs or no job at all. This is even true at the doctoral and professional level—there are 5,057 janitors in the U.S. with Ph.D.’s, other doctorates, or professional degrees.

This week an extraordinarily interesting new study was posted on the Web site of America’s most prestigious economic-research organization, the National Bureau of Economic Research. Three highly regarded economists (one of whom has won the Nobel Prize in Economic Science) have produced “Estimating Marginal Returns to Education,” Working Paper 16474 of the NBER. After very sophisticated and elaborate analysis, the authors conclude “In general, marginal and average returns to college are not the same.” (p. 28)

In other words, even if on average, an investment in higher education yields a good, say 10 percent, rate of return, it does not follow that adding to existing investments will yield that return, partly for reasons outlined above. The authors (Pedro Carneiro, James Heckman, and Edward Vytlacil) make that point explicitly, stating “Some marginal expansions of schooling produce gains that are well below average returns, in general agreement with the analysis of Charles Murray.”  (p.29)

Now it is true that college has a consumption as well as investment function. People often enjoy going to classes, just as they enjoy watching movies or taking trips. They love the socialization dimensions of schooling—particularly in this age of the country-clubization of American universities. They may improve their self-esteem by earning a college degree. Yet, at a time when resources are scarce, when American governments are running $1.3-trillion deficits, when we face huge unfunded liabilities associated with commitments made to our growing elderly population, should we be subsidizing increasingly problematic educational programs for students whose prior academic record would suggest little likelihood of academic, much less vocational, success?

I think the American people understand, albeit dimly, the logic above. Increasingly, state governments are cutting back  higher-education funding, thinking it is an activity that largely confers private benefits. The pleas of university leaders and governmental officials for more and more college attendance appear to be increasingly costly and unproductive forms of special pleading by a sector that abhors transparency and performance measures.

Higher education is on the brink of big change, like it or not.

http://chronicle.com/blogs/innovations/why-did-17-million-students-go-to-college/27634

Why Did 17 Million Students Go to College?

October 20, 2010,
9:53 am

By
Richard Vedder

Two sets of information were presented to me in the last 24 hours that have dramatically reinforced my
feeling that diminishing return
s have set in to investments in higher education, with increasing evidence
suggesting that we are in one respect “overinvesting” in the field. First, following up on information
provided by former student Douglas Himes at the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BL
S), my sidekick Chris
Matgouranis showed me the table reproduced below (And for more see
this
).

Over 317,000 waiters and waitresses have college degrees (o
ver 8,000 of them have doctoral or
professional degrees), along with over 80,000 bartenders, and over 18,000

parking lot attendants
. All
told, some 17,000,000 Americans with college degrees are doing jobs that the BLS says require less than
the skill level
s associated with a bachelor’s degree.

I

have long been a

proponent of Charles Murray’s thesis that an increasing number of people attending
college do not have the cognitive abilities or other attributes usually necessary for success at higher
levels of
learning. As more and more try to attend colleges, either college degrees will be watered

down (something
already happening I suspect) or drop
–
out rates will rise.

Why Did 17 Million Students Go to College?

October 20, 2010, 9:53 am

By Richard Vedder

Two sets of information were presented to me in the last 24 hours that have dramatically reinforced my

feeling that diminishing returns have set in to investments in higher education, with increasing evidence

suggesting that we are in one respect “overinvesting” in the field. First, following up on information

provided by former student Douglas Himes at the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), my sidekick Chris

Matgouranis showed me the table reproduced below (And for more see this).

Over 317,000 waiters and waitresses have college degrees (over 8,000 of them have doctoral or

professional degrees), along with over 80,000 bartenders, and over 18,000 parking lot attendants. All

told, some 17,000,000 Americans with college degrees are doing jobs that the BLS says require less than

the skill levels associated with a bachelor’s degree.

I have long been a proponent of Charles Murray’s thesis that an increasing number of people attending

college do not have the cognitive abilities or other attributes usually necessary for success at higher levels of

learning. As more and more try to attend colleges, either college degrees will be watered down (something

already happening I suspect) or drop-out rates will rise.