Buried Treasure

No, this column wasn’t prompted by the release of the latest pirate movie. Rather, it was prompted by a minute spent looking through my library.

Hunting for another book, my eye landed upon a book I hadn’t looked at in years – Education: Assumptions Versus History by Thomas Sowell. Sowell is a black economist who has had a distinguished career teaching at some of American’s top universities. His prolific writings have touched on just about every important public policy topic, including education.

The book was published back in 1986. It’s a collection of papers that date back as early as 1966. What makes this volume a buried treasure is the fact that Sowell’s observations and predictions about the trends in higher education in the 1960s and 1970s are so very pertinent today. It’s as if someone had written a book in 1930 describing the course of the American space program.

The earliest piece in the collection deals with the question of the “need” for more college education. This is a hot topic today, with many people declaring that it’s an economic imperative that the country enroll and graduate more students from college. Sowell reminds us that the same calls were starting to be heard at least forty years ago. He writes, “It has become a cliché that there is a flood of students at the college gates demanding an education to which they have a ‘right’ and for which society has a ‘need.’ … (O)ne need not look very far below the surface to see how flimsy the case is for the great expansion of enrollments and facilities that is being constantly urged.” Remember, he wrote that more than forty years ago.

Few students, Sowell maintains, are really much interested in education. What they were (and are) interested in is merely a credential that they believe will afford them an advantage in the job market. Sowell could see that there would be adverse consequences to admitting large numbers of academically indifferent students who want to go to college just to get a piece of paper. “The pressure of numbers,” he wrote, would compel colleges to “resort to expedients which undermine the educational process.”

Many faculty veterans who have been around for thirty or forty years would agree that courses today have been watered down, academic standards and expectations lowered and yet grades inflated compared to the way things used to be. That is especially true at schools whose leaders have made growth their mission. Some small, mission-oriented colleges have stayed pretty much the same over the decades, but many big universities are today pale imitations of their former selves.

But what about the alleged need to put more students through college? Sowell writes that “a vast literature has grown up in recent years, insistently arguing that money invested in meeting rising educational ‘needs’ pays a big return to society.” Then as now, this literature used plenty of charts and graphs to demonstrate that more education means higher earnings, thereby proving that college studies pay off for society. Sowell countered that all those studies ignored the screening function of college. Colleges attract people who are naturally brighter and more ambitious and their degrees help employers identify such people. We shouldn’t assume, however, that a college education necessarily does much to raise their productivity. Worse, the pressure to expand had already by the 1960s led schools to recruit students with minimal academic aptitude: “(A)n elaborate and costly charade is enacted on campuses across the country, with ‘education’ being directed toward people who do not want it, but go through the motions in order to qualify for jobs that do not need it,” Sowell wrote.

Besides the sales job that universities have done on students — getting so many of them to believe that a college degree makes the difference between success and failure — Sowell also dislikes the sales job that universities have done on the public. “The university has also sold itself to the public,” he writes, “as a veritable panacea for personal and social problems, playing on the credulous notion that processing everyone through ivy-covered buildings for four years was ‘education’ and therefore a ‘good thing.’” In their quest for more public funding, university leaders often claim that their institutions do (or at least could if they had more money) accomplish all kinds of social improvements, ranging from better health to economic stimulus.

Sowell has long argued that people are prone to turn to government to solve all kinds of problems that it cannot and should not get involved with. It’s the same with colleges and universities – they should stick to what they can do well. “If a university is going to make a real contribution, “ he writes, “it must make it as a university, and not as a general fix-it shop. A proliferation of Quixotic endeavors may produce more glowing feelings and more good publicity, but it is a waste of specialized resources that can do more in the uses for which they were meant than anywhere else.”

Academic research is another issue where Sowell’s words ring even more true today than when they were written – in this case, 1975. The main problem is that such research is often completely divorced from reality. “It is not merely that professors have never had to meet a payroll; they have also never had to meet a scoreboard – or any other crucial experiment whose outcome would determine their fate, by testing how closely their ideas fit the actual reality.” Academics are not only protected by tenure, Sowell observes, but also by their own facility in creating verbal complications and mystification. “Academics will research anything, he concludes, “except the effectiveness of their own schemes growing out of previous research.”

Among all of his decidedly contrarian positions, the one that has surely gotten Sowell the most vitriolic attacks is his opposition to “affirmative action,” or to use the language more accurately, preferences for certain groups in admissions and hiring. Because of his belief that those decisions should be based on academic merit and not race, gender, or any other irrelevant characteristics, Sowell has been attacked as an “Uncle Tom” and a “race traitor,” but his arguments against preferential policies were (and still are) based entirely on the harmful consequences he sees stemming from them.

One bad consequence was the emergence of double standards that accept lower results from minority students than from whites and Asians. That’s bad enough, but Sowell could see that inconsistency of standards would make things even worse. He wrote that “double standards are a fact of life on virtually every campus, but not necessarily in a majority of courses. This situation may in fact present the maximum academic danger to the black student: enough double standards courses to give him a false sense of security and enough rigid standards courses to produce academic disasters.”

Sowell also questioned the arguments usually given for racial preferences in hiring. For example, it was (and still is) said that minority students can “relate” better to professors who are “like them.” But is that true, and if so, exactly what are the benefits? “It would be very useful,” he writes, “to determine empirically whether black faculty members with high intellectual credentials (however measured) have more black students in their classes than they would by random chance. My impression is that they do not. However, the important thing is to find out, and it may be significant that no real effort has been made to check this key assumption of those who seek black faculty quotas.”

That’s the wonderful thing about Sowell. He demands evidence where others are content to live with comforting assumptions.

Education: Assumptions Versus History is still available from Hoover Press and I strongly recommend it for anyone who is concerned about current trends in higher education.