The popular notion that there was a golden age of higher education tends to argue that higher education once was a place where young people came to have their minds opened by erudite academics, gain the skills and work ethic necessary to succeed in the workplace, and develop into the mature, successful young adults ready to take on the world — all at a fair price. This was a time when higher education was a place that prepared young people for the world ahead of them. This was a time when getting more young people to attend college is one of the best things a society could do — it could invest in its future.
This notion is decidedly wrong.
There never was a golden age of higher education. There never was a time when college was the best place to prepare young people for the lives ahead of them. There never was a time when it was the best option for a young person to go to college for four years immediately after high school, study, and then go into the workplace.
This time didn’t exist fifty years ago, and it certainly does not exist today when access to educational capital sits in the pocket of every person in a modernized country through their smartphones and high-tech laboratory equipment sits in startups and multinational corporations alike.
A Place for Bureaucrats
College is an institution that is good at creating highly-specialized experts in a select few areas, all of which have academic cartels in common as their central means of employment: professors, doctors, lawyers, and bureaucrats.
Beyond these highly-specialized savants, spending four years in college is one of the worst things an ambitious young person can do. Not only do they subject themselves to an institution that was decidedly not built for their goals and is run by people decidedly not in their aspiring fields, they do so at the cost of being entrenched in the marketplace.
Diving into the marketplace and learning and applying a skill set there carries a variety of strong advantages over studying in academia and then attempting to carry over skills to the marketplace.
Better Options in the Marketplace
First, the market is a multifaceted system of positive- and negative-feedback loops. Through a price system of profit and loss, firms can get a better idea of what works and doesn’t work than by going to a central authority whose expertise is to be trusted on the matter (as in academia). Further, individuals in firms can get a better idea of what tactics, skills, and strategies work better for them within the firm by working with a small team whose projects make an impact on the profit-direction of the firm. In this way, the marketplace is a more robust short-term adaptation mechanism to guide individuals for what they need to learn and better in their day-to-day habits and training.
Second, the market as a whole responds more quickly to technological innovation and cultural evolution than academia does. By not only being the primary benefactor of new technology — but often the mother of new tech — marketplace firms have a strong incentive to hire for and train their employees in the most efficient and effective technology and skills needed to produce value.
I was recently speaking to a young coder and designer who wanted to learn a highly specialized skill set for a program he is working on. He was too young to enroll in collegiate courses on the topic, but didn’t seem to care. He found the information available online, skipped the superfluous prerequisite courses, and gleaned the skills necessary to feel confident in launching his project. I asked him why he didn’t just go audit courses at a local (acclaimed) university.
“Why would I? They would be years behind where the companies working on this tech are right now.”
In an academic setting, he would have been told that he must take the prerequisite courses before he could study what he wanted to use for his project — and then likely wouldn’t have gleaned the necessary information given the outdated and slow-moving nature of academia.
This isn’t a blunt insult against academia or a bias, either. It makes sense when you look at the incentives that professors have.
Incentives Matter
A tenured professor of computer science doesn’t have much incentive to update and improve his courses for his students. At best, it’s his conscience that guides him and tells him he shouldn’t be teaching incoming freshmen something that he knows is 10 years outdated. Maybe some advisors of some sort urge him to update his class.
This takes work, though, and he likely has a research agenda that helps him stay well-fed and funded. Updating the syllabus to stay up-to-date with technological developments would take hours of work, research, and putting together new assignments.
It gets pushed to the backburner. He’ll take care of it when he has time, he says. He probably has a GA revise it in a few years (who, himself, has incentive to turn his attention elsewhere).
A company, on the other hand, has every incentive possible to stay up-to-date on new tech. Entire departments are hired just with the goal of training employees on new developments. Firms undertake espionage missions against each other to figure out what their competitors are using and developing. They hire for candidates with the most up-to-date knowledge of the relevant technology and skills.
Failure to do so leads to failure of the employees to build the best product possible for consumers (relative to the marketplace). Failing to build the best product possible (in the consumers’ minds) is a recipe for disaster.
If you want to learn new skills that are highly relevant and will be the best for you to add value to society, go to the marketplace, not academia.
And this has always been the case.
Just because Penn had the laboratories that were able to build some of the first computers doesn’t mean it was the best place to learn how to use computers. IBM had more incentive to train employees in the relevant tech than Penn did to train students.
Incentives Matter for Students, Too
Think of the incentives that act upon students in K-12 and then in college. What do they get disapprobation for? What do they get approbation for? How is the institution structured with which incentives for young people?
A typical student is going to focus on what the person with immediate and direct control over their quality of life in a given context wants. In classes, this is the instructor. Students will focus on what they believe will make the instructor give them a high mark rather than what they believe is the best quality of their work or what is the best approach they can take. Sometimes, instructors succeed and providing students with the right incentives to turn in assignments that would be acceptable in the marketplace (for which the students are supposedly being prepared).
This is rarely the case, for the reasons stated above.
We shouldn’t expect students, then, to put in inordinate time outside of class to learn what the market wants — they have little immediate incentive to do so while enrolled as students.
If they were to throw off the shackles of academia and jump into creating value for others, they would have to follow a different beat. The immediate incentive is set by what their client wants. They have incentive to figure out how to best create value for other people — if they fail to do so, they feel the pain of loss/if they succeed in doing so, they feel the reward of profit.
Incentives matter for both professors and students. The best incentive for self-betterment and skill development comes outside academia entirely.
Don’t Lie to Young People
There’s never been a golden age of higher education for a young person who doesn’t want to be a professor, doctor, lawyer, or bureaucrat. The incentives have always been this way. Trying to tell young people there was or is is dangerous for them and for the quality of the value they can add to society in the future.