On his first day in office in January, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro declared that most state jobs would not require a college degree. And in his State of the Union address this month, President Joe Biden put forth a “blue-collar blueprint to repair America” that emphasized well-paid jobs for working-class people. “Let’s offer every American the path to a good career whether they go to college or not,” Biden urged.
They’re right: You shouldn’t have to attend college to acquire decent-paying employment. So why have college at all?
To prepare citizens, of course. Our colleges and universities were founded to ready people for the tasks of collective self-government: reason, deliberation and tolerance. If you haven’t noticed, those skills are in short supply right now. We’re more likely to shout and cancel than to talk and listen.
Since the 1960s, however, we have too often imagined higher education as a job placement service rather than a place to make citizens. And that’s very bad news, for both our colleges and the society that they ostensibly serve.
On the right, politicians such as Florida U.S. Sen. Rick Scott and former North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory have suggested that states shouldn’t assist students who major in the humanities and social sciences because these disciplines don’t generate as many jobs as fields related to science, technology, engineering and math do. “Do we need to use your tax dollars to educate more people who can’t get jobs in anthropology?” Scott asked a business group in 2011. “I don’t. I want to make sure we spend our money where people can get jobs when they get out.”
Actually, there’s evidence from a 2013 survey of employers by the Association of American Colleges and Universities that some employers favor students with a strong liberal arts background to those with degrees in “practical” fields such as business. But once we decide that the main purpose of college is to obtain a job, we inevitably diminish its other goals. Students come through to get their ticket stamped, not to get a deeper understanding of the world.
And that doesn’t seem to trouble Democrats, who have embraced the mantra of “more education” as the solution to underemployment, poverty and every other economic problem. As historian Jon Shelton shows in his new book “The Education Myth: How Human Capital Trumped Social Democracy,” liberals imagine that a more educated workforce will also be a more prosperous one.
Tell that to students who are struggling to pay back their college debt — which has soared to $1.6 trillion nationwide — or to those thrown out of work during the country’s periodic recessions. True, the average college graduate earns nearly twice as much as people who have just a high school degree. But a Bachelor of Arts is not a guarantee against poverty and unemployment, which can be solved only with wider social investments in health, infrastructure and workplace training. And those efforts will assist everyone, whether they’re bound for college or not.
So I was glad to see Biden announce programs to create better-paying jobs across the board. And kudos to Shapiro and Larry Hogan, who as Maryland governor likewise eliminated the B.A. requirement for thousands of state jobs.
Shapiro is a Democrat, and Hogan is a Republican, which suggests the making of a rare bipartisan consensus around the issue of college and employment. But it also raises a new challenge for colleges: How can we forge a purpose beyond preparing for employment?
The answer is to double down on what Hogan called our historical raison d’etre: to cultivate “civic virtue in public life.” A large swath of our students are either checked out of politics or afraid to express their opinions for fear of causing offense. A much smaller number spend their time policing or canceling others for alleged transgressions, which is bullying by another name.
And the faculty? Most of us are much more interested in furthering our own research — which is the best route to promotion and salary raises — than in enhancing the civic education of our students. We know that our students often lack the will or skill to participate in political affairs. We just won’t do anything about it.
At the University of Pennsylvania, where I teach, the SNF Paideia Program promotes events and courses that emphasize civic engagement and dialogue. Yet these worthy efforts are mostly preaching to the converted, because only people who are already disposed to the activity participate in it.
A more promising approach is taking root at Stanford University, which is piloting a core course for first-year students called “Citizenship in the 21st Century.” Most of the university’s 1,700 incoming students will take the class, which examines how humans can work together toward collective goals while also respecting individual differences.
You shouldn’t have to go to college to get a good job or to share in the bounty of America. But everyone who goes to college should have to prepare for the only job that all of us share: being a citizen. That used to be the main reason for higher education. We need to make it so again.
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ABOUT THE WRITER
Jonathan Zimmerman teaches education and history at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of “Whose America: Culture Wars in the Public Schools,” which was recently published in a revised 20th anniversary edition by the University of Chicago Press.
