NMH Magazine : Winter 2006

Education and the Money Chase

Harvard English professor James Engell ’69 is coauthor of Saving Higher Education in the Age of Money (University of Virginia Press, 2005). In the following interview he discusses how America’s focus on money is affecting students and institutions of higher learning.

What motivated you to write Saving Higher Education?
I began teaching English at Harvard in 1978 and have been involved with higher education my entire professional life. Over the last several decades, significant forces have shaped the goals of higher education. Perhaps the strongest of these has been economic—especially the idea that higher education carries a clear economic benefit for the individual and for any institution. My coauthor, Anthony Dangerfield, and I wanted to do a factual study of what’s happened.

What’s the basic premise of the book?
The premise is not that economic motivations are wrong or should not exist—far from it. It’s that higher education actually involves several goals, and economic ones are only part of the story. Other goals include social and democratic good, the expansion of knowledge, and its ethical application.
What’s been happening in higher education is that the simpler, more easily measured economic motives (“I’m going to college so I can be very well off financially,” or “We’re going to do this research to create a revenue stream”) have been gaining ground steadily. If that continues to happen, we’ll lose the other benefits of higher education, ones that are less tangible and harder to measure. More directly stated, wealth creation has come to be seen as an end, or as the end of higher education, rather than as one of its means.

How has our society’s preoccupation with money affected higher education?
If a field seems to promise money, studies money, or receives significant grant money, then it has expanded its role in higher education in the last 35 years. If a field of inquiry doesn’t meet one of these criteria, then it has shrunk. Is this good or bad? To a degree it’s inevitable, but higher education should not be run by pure market forces. Something in theoretical physics or natural history might look today like a backwater, but in a decade or two could be providing new sources of energy, helping us find cures for illnesses, or facilitating reconciliation between groups torn apart by ethnic strife or religion. Moreover, the study of languages, library science, ethics, history, and the arts doesn’t meet any of those criteria either. Do we want to see them continue to shrink? I hope not. We’d be impoverished without them.

What’s wrong with an education geared toward achieving financial success?
Nothing at all, especially if that’s one of several goals. But if it becomes the only one, it will push out other aims. It’s a question of maintaining balance, and, of course, each institution and student will need to judge what the right balance is. But financial success without any other kind of success seems a poor bet.

Given how expensive college is, doesn’t it make sense to major in something practical?
There’s nothing wrong with that, but studies run by associations of liberal arts and sciences colleges indicate that students who major in things that supposedly aren’t practical (such as the classics or French literature) end up with incomes comparable to those who choose the so-called practical majors. Twenty years ago many students were advised to learn software and programming skills; now many of those jobs are exported or have become less lucrative. It’s hard for any four-year education to prepare anyone for a lifetime career. What is most practical is often broad: good skills in reading, writing, and analytical or quantitative reasoning.

How do qualitative measures such as US News & World Report’s rankings affect colleges and universities?
Institutions pay attention to those rankings but complain about them too, simply because they aren’t completely objective. Too many people take them as objectively quantifiable when, at best, they’re drawn from a bundle of figures. The best thing to do is to look for the right fit between a student and a college—and that means some reading, visiting, and conversation: these are much more important than constantly referring to a list.

What majors are most associated with economic success?
The applied sciences (such as chemical engineering), computer science, law, and premed come in high. However, law schools report that, on average, their best students come from math, the classics, and literature before they come from any prelaw or even political science majors. And most med schools simply want students to complete five courses (math, physics, organic and inorganic chemistry, and biology) rather than come from a certain major. The humanities come in on the low end, but plenty of humanities majors do very well and end up in business, consulting, communication, and government work, where they may well earn more than students who majored in business administration. Of course, so much depends on the quality of the institution and what students make of the opportunities given to them.

What are the most popular fields for undergraduate degrees?
Business administration is the largest major in the country. It’s multiplied a great deal in the last several decades, particularly at state universities and at colleges not rated as highly selective. The humanities have dropped off, though they’ve rebounded slightly in the past few years, while the sciences have enjoyed an overall increase. Engineering programs do well, and economics and political science continue to be quite healthy in size. Then there are other majors that have grown: communication (which can mean anything from TV production to marketing to rhetoric), physical education, occupational therapy, security services—majors that in effect are an apprenticeship to a skill or service.

If academic standards are slipping due to our culture of money, how can we reverse the trend?
We need to keep asking ourselves the difficult question: What is higher education for? What is it good at doing? I think there are multiple correct answers to each of those questions. And we should question the myth—for it is a myth—that higher education has monetary enrichment as its sole goal. That’s one motive and one important product, but only one of many.

How well does higher education teach ethics these days?
The short answer is not well enough. Teaching ethics can be a specific part of a curriculum, but it also needs to be embodied in many subjects because our entire lives have an ethical dimension.

Is there a middle ground between the world of academic ideals and our preoccupation with money?
It would be good for us to debate what that middle ground—or what I call “balance”—might be. It certainly can’t be to let the desire for money dictate academic business to the exclusion of other ideals. Then again, it can’t be to exclude money, which is key to any institutional existence and to the idea of prosperity. Mark Twain said all money is tainted, but then he followed up by saying, “Trouble is, ’taint enough!” I do worry that we’ve been heading in a direction that validates money as the measure of all things. It’s time for us to reconsider where we’re heading and to reaffirm the other aims of higher education and education in general.

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