Is US higher education a public good or a status marketplace?
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Is higher education still the great American public good, the critical institution that made opportunity, class mobility, and a more liberal and tolerant society a reality and not just a slogan? Or have the many major hits our college students and system absorbed in recent years reduced its public good status to one that that does more to freeze class mobility, and turned the university experience into an almost solely personal consumer good and a signal of status?
Yeah, yeah, these kids today... Of course, from the individual student's perspective college always was always a means to get a better job/career, although also a place to broaden one's horizons via exposure to new ideas and different kinds of people. But higher ed probably has been the USA's most important engine of class mobility and social development. From Lincoln's land grant colleges to the post-WWII GI Bill to federal student loan guarantees and massive research funding, accessible and affordable college made America great. Many states replicated the model, such as California's 1960s-era 3-tier master higher education plan.
On Monday, May 4th, join Civilized Conversation to discuss whether college education still performs its crucial social functions, or whether it has narrowed into a marker of individual privilege and a stalled engine of frozen class mobility.
Background Readings (optional) –
- AI of your choice queries: Try (1) Is college a public good or a status symbol in the United States; or (2) Does American higher education still serve as a public good for social mobility and opportunity?
- The College Class Crisis. 2021, but excellent.
- The "today's college students are terrible" thesis.
- AI's staggering impact on higher ed: What is the university's purpose now? Recommended. How universities are responding to AI reveals their own flaws.
- The this-is-the-end of college POV. Your must-read, although not necessarily all true.
- Hard, but you all went to college! U.S. higher ed is bifurcating by strength of degrees and health of institutions.