Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck?: And Other Provocations, 2006-2012 (75 page)

What about retention rate? Well, if a school tells its students the truth and gives them tools to proceed and succeed in the real world, you’d imagine that more of those students would leave to go join the real world, no? If retention rate is a key metric on the agenda of a university’s leadership, I wouldn’t be surprised to see grade inflation, amazing facilities, and, most of all, an insulation from what will be useful in the real world. Why leave? Indeed, how can you leave?

To be clear, it’s entirely likely that some students will find a dramatic benefit from four years of college. Or six. Or perhaps three. But measuring retention as a way of deciding if a college is doing a good job is silly—if students are leaving early, I’d like to know where they’re going. If they are leaving to do productive work and are satisfied with what they’ve learned, I put that down as a win, not a failure.

The most surprising irony of all is that the average debt load of a student leaving the top fifty schools on graduation is less than $30,000. Princeton, ranked first, has an average debt of less than $6,000. No, the famous schools aren’t saddling their graduates with a lifetime of debt, one that’s crippling. In fact, it’s the second-, third-, and fourth-tier schools that lack the resources to offer aid that do this.

The lesser-ranked schools are less famous, net out to be more expensive (less aid), and, because many of them struggle to be on the list of the top fifty, offer none of the character-stretching that Loren Pope so relished.

A trap, caused by the power of marketing and the depth of insecurity among well-meaning parents raised in an industrial world.

In the words of a Columbia University student, that’s the truth. If you choose to get an education at the same time, well, that’s a fine bonus, but with free information available to all, why pay $200,000 for it?

Of course, once a college student realizes this truth, the entire enterprise loses its moorings. The notion of motivated students teamed up with motivated professors falls apart, and we’re back to the contract of adhesion, to compliance-based education, to a scarce resource (the degree) being dispensed to those who meet the measurable requirements.

Hofstra University spent more than $3.5 million sponsoring a presidential debate in 2008. In exchange, they got 300 tickets for students (that works out to about $10,000 a ticket) and, as they’re happy to brag, a huge boost of publicity, apparently worthwhile because it makes their degree more valuable (famous = good). That famous degree then leads to more applicants, which allows the university to be more particular about their SAT scores and admission rate, which leads to better rankings in
U.S. News
, which leads to more applications and, ultimately, more donations and a raise for the university’s president.

But did anyone actually learn anything?

Over the last twenty years, large universities discovered a simple equation: winning football and basketball teams would get them on television, which would make them more famous, which would attract students looking for a good school. Once again, it’s the marketing problem of equating familiar with good.

Since 1985, the salary of college football coaches (at public universities) has increased by 650%. Professors? By 32%.

There is no question that over this time, the quality of football being played has skyrocketed. Attendance at games is up. Student involvement
in sports spectating has gone up as well. And the fame of the schools that have invested in big-time sports has risen as well.

What hasn’t improved, not a bit, is the education and quality of life of the student body.

In fact, according to research by Glen Waddell at the University of Oregon, for every three games won by the Fighting Ducks (winners of the Rose Bowl), the GPA of male students dropped. Not the male students on the team—the male students who pay a fortune to attend the University of Oregon.

Further research by Charles Clotfelter, a professor at Duke, found that during March Madness, schools that had teams in the playoffs had 6% fewer downloads of academic articles at their libraries. And if the team won a close game or an upset, the number dropped 19% the next day. And it never rose enough later to make up for the dip.

We get what we pay for.

Colleges aren’t stupid, and as long as the game works, they’ll keep playing it. After the University of Nebraska entered the Big 10, applications at their law school went up 20%—in a year when applications nationwide were down 10%. As long as students and their parents pay money for famous, and as long as famous is related to TV and to sports, expect to see more of it.

Universities no longer spend as much time bragging about the size of their libraries. The reason is obvious: the size of the library is now of interest to just a tiny handful of researchers. Most anything that we want access to is available somewhere online or in paid digital libraries.

Stanford University has put up many of their courses online for free, and some have more than 30,000 active students at a time.

MIT just launched MITx, which will create ubiquitous access to information. The finest technical university in the world is going to share every course with any student who is willing to expend the effort to learn.

Measured by courses, MIT is going ahead and creating the largest
university in the world. If you could audit any class in the world, would you want to?

A university delivers four things:

Access to information (not perspective or understanding, but access)

Accreditation/a scarce degree

Membership in a tribe

A situation for growth (which is where you’d file perspective and understanding)

Once courses are digitized, they ought to be shared, particularly by nonprofit institutions working for the public good. Given that all the major universities ought to/should/will create a university of the people—giving access to information and great teachers to all (and if they don’t, someone should and will, soon)—which of the other three really matter?

Accreditation:
a degree from an Ivy League school is a little like real estate in a good neighborhood. It makes a lousy house better and a great house priceless. We make all sorts of assumptions about fifty-year-old men (even fictional ones—Frasier Crane went to Harvard) because someone selected them when they were eighteen years old.

With so much information available about everyone, it gets ever harder to lump people into categories. Graduating from (or even getting into) a prestigious institution will become ever more valuable. We need labels desperately, because we don’t have enough time to judge all the people we need to judge. It’s worth asking if the current process of admitting and processing students (and giving a “gentleman’s C” to anyone who asks) is the best way to do this labeling.

But there’s really no reason at all to lump the expense and time and process of traditional schooling with the labeling that the university does. In other words, if we think of these schools as validators and guarantors, they could end up doing their job with far less waste than they do now. They could be selectors of individuals based on the work they do elsewhere, as opposed to being the one and only place the work has to occur.

Membership in a tribe:
this is perhaps the best reason to actually move to a college campus in order to get a degree. While access to
information is becoming ever easier (you’ll soon be able to take every single MIT course from home), the cultural connection that college produces can be produced only in a dorm room, at a football stadium, or walking across the quad, hand in hand. Catherine Oliver, an Oberlin graduate, remembers living in one of the co-ops, planning a menu, cooking, baking, washing dishes, mopping floors, and sitting through long consensus-building meetings.

All of it builds tribes.

For centuries, a significant portion of the ruling class has had a history with certain colleges, been a member of the famous-college tribe, sharing cultural touchstones and even a way of speaking. The label on a résumé is more than a description of what you did thirty years ago—it’s proof, the leaders say, that you’re one of us.

Until that changes, this tribe is going to continue to exert power and influence. The real question is how we decide who gets to be in it.

A situation for growth:
and here’s the best reason, the reason that’s almost impossible to mimic in an online situation, the one that’s truly worth paying for and the one that almost never shows up in the typical large-school, laissez-faire experience. The right college is the last, best chance for masses of teenagers to find themselves in a situation where they have no choice but to grow. And fast.

The editor at the
Harvard Lampoon
experiences this. I felt it when I co-ran a large student-run business. The advanced physics major discovers this on her first day at the high-energy lab, working on a problem no one has ever solved before.

That’s the reason to spend the time and spend the money and hang out on campus: so you can find yourself in a dark alley with nowhere to go but forward.

There’s a generational problem here, a paralyzing one.

Parents were raised to have a dream for their kids—we want our kids to be happy, adjusted, successful. We want them to live meaningful lives, to contribute, and to find stability as they avoid pain.

Our dream for our kids, the dream of 1960 and 1970 and even 1980,
is for the successful student, the famous college, and the good job. Our dream for our kids is the nice house and the happy family and the steady career. And the ticket for all that is good grades, excellent comportment, and a famous college.

And now that dream is gone. Our dream. But it’s not clear that our dream really matters. There’s a different dream available, one that’s actually closer to who we are as humans, that’s more exciting and significantly more likely to affect the world in a positive way.

When we let our kids dream, encourage them to contribute, and push them to do work that matters, we open doors for them that will lead to places that are difficult for us to imagine. When we turn school into more than just a finishing school for a factory job, we enable a new generation to achieve things that we were ill-prepared for.

Our job is obvious: we need to get out of the way, shine a light, and empower a new generation to teach itself and to go further and faster than any generation ever has. Either our economy gets cleaner, faster, and more fair, or it dies.

If school is worth the effort (and I think it is), then we must put the effort into developing attributes that matter and stop burning our resources in a futile attempt to create or reinforce mass compliance.

Don’t wait for it. Pick yourself. Teach yourself. Motivate your kids. Push them to dream, against all odds.

Access to information is not the issue. And you don’t need permission from bureaucrats. The common school is going to take a generation to fix, and we mustn’t let up the pressure until it is fixed.

But in the meantime,
go
. Learn and lead and teach. If enough of us do this, school will have no choice but to listen, emulate, and rush to catch up.

When we teach a child to make good decisions, we benefit from a lifetime of good decisions.

When we teach a child to love to learn, the amount of learning will become limitless.

When we teach a child to deal with a changing world, she will never become obsolete.

When we are brave enough to teach a child to question authority, even ours, we insulate ourselves from those who would use their authority to work against each of us.

And when we give students the desire to make things, even choices, we create a world filled with makers.

The best way to complain is to make things.

—James Murphy

Not too much to ask, is it? It was in 1935 when Allen Lane, Managing Director of Bodley Head Publishers, stood on a platform at Exeter railway station looking for something good to read on his journey back to London. His choice was limited to popular magazines and poor-quality paperbacks – the same choice faced every day by the vast majority of readers, few of whom could afford hardbacks. Lane’s disappointment and subsequent anger at the range of books generally available led him to found a company – and change the world.

We believed in the existence in this country of a vast reading public for intelligent books at a low price, and staked everything on it’
Sir Allen Lane, 1902–1970, founder of Penguin Books

The quality paperback had arrived – and not just in bookshops. Lane was adamant that his Penguins should appear in chain stores and tobacconists, and should cost no more than a packet of cigarettes.

Reading habits (and cigarette prices) have changed since 1935, but Penguin still believes in publishing the best books for everybody to enjoy. We still believe that good design costs no more than bad design, and we still believe that quality books published passionately and responsibly make the world a better place.

So wherever you see the little bird – whether it’s on a piece of prize-winning literary fiction or a celebrity autobiography, political tour de force or historical masterpiece, a serial-killer thriller, reference book, world classic or a piece of pure escapism – you can bet that it represents the very best that the genre has to offer.

www.penguin.co.uk

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