A liberal education does not depreciate
Parents, with the May 1 deadline fast approaching for your student to decide which college to attend among colleges to which he or she has been admitted, I have some advice for you that is important both to your child's success and your wallet.
Whatever else you do, make sure your son or daughter gets a liberal education. Many colleges offer this kind of education, but not all of them. Knowing the difference will make all the difference to your child's future.
Unlike a college education that is narrow and vocational, a liberal education does not depreciate. American employers get this. In a 2010 report "Raising the Bar: Employers' Views on College Learning in the Wake of the Economic Downturn," employers make it clear that they want both knowledge and competence in specific fields and the intellectual and practical skills acquired in liberal education: inquiry and analysis; critical and creative thinking; integrative and reflective thinking; written and oral communication; quantitative literacy; information literacy; intercultural understanding; teamwork and problem solving-because these learning outcomes are the keys to success in any job, including the jobs that are even now being invented in our rapidly changing economy.
Research shows that the learning outcomes employers consider essential are most fully achieved by students in colleges characterized by high levels of student engagement, when, in other words, students are challenged academically; experience high levels of purposeful, active, and collaborative learning; enjoy quality interactions with faculty around their academic work; experience the enrichment of such opportunities as well-designed internships, collaborative research with faculty members and study of other cultures (abroad or in the U.S.); and benefit from supportive campus environments.
The extent to which campuses provide these kinds of engagement for their students is measured well by the National Survey of Student Engagement. You often can find a college's NSSE scores online. (If a campus won't share its NSSE data, that's cause for concern.) A 2010 Wabash College-University of Iowa collaboration also shows that NSSE scores are strongly correlated with direct measures of such critical skills as reasoning and problem-solving.
Authors of the recent book "Academically Adrift" make the same point — where expectations of students are high, the right kinds of student engagement are present, and students major in liberal arts and sciences disciplines, students work hard and achieve the outcomes and levels of learning they need for 21st century challenges.
But there is more — related to your wallet. Campuses characterized by high levels of student engagement also have high four-year graduation rates, because students are more successful academically and are more highly motivated to learn and to persist in college. They leave college less often for academic reasons, and they graduate at higher rates because they love what they are doing and value the personal educational transformation they experience.
In these environments students are inspired to become lifelong learners, motivated to teach themselves new things, especially the new things required by an evolving and changing workplace.
I have written elsewhere about how the increased efficiency of high four-year graduation rates lowers the cost of higher education for all stakeholders — students, families, colleges, states, the federal government, and the American public, which subsidizes higher education through gifts and taxes.
If your child finishes in five, six or more years, instead of four, the costs of delay will be immediate in additional tuition and the self-multiplying costs of not earning a salary in a full-time job (economists call these costs "opportunity costs") as he or she loses ground professionally and personally.
In contrast, a narrow, vocational education geared to a particular job requires its recipients to be retrained for the next job at significant cost to the jobholder, employers and taxpayers who fund federal and state job programs. The graduate's education/training, in other words, depreciates.
A liberal education does not depreciate. Its recipients are constantly educating themselves in their current jobs and for their next jobs because they have the curiosity of lifelong learners and skills which transcend the particular. A liberal education actually appreciates in value as its beneficiaries become more valuable in the marketplace — good for them and good for the rest of us who benefit from their improved productivity. Remember too the very great personal benefits of a life enriched and made more meaningful by a liberal education.
No one has estimated the enormous size of the depreciation cost borne by individuals educated narrowly and vocationally and by those who must then subsidize their retraining. These costs do not figure in to the debate we are having in America about college costs, and political leaders of both parties are shaping a public discourse that argues for narrow, short-term educational solutions.
It is an enormous challenge to break through an anxiety-fueled policy and public dialogue that too often treats college as a 21st century version of trade school.
Just as Japanese automobile makers taught us all how getting it right the first time during manufacture and assembly results in huge cost savings, so must we in America first commit ourselves to liberal education for all and then provide for learning environments characterized by high levels of student engagement.
If we do so, the necessity to fund the extraordinarily high cost of the depreciation of narrow educations will decline dramatically and employers will be increasingly pleased with the number and qualities of people they can hire to fuel their engines of growth.
The writer is president emeritus of St. Lawrence University.
