What’s College For?

An Associated Press story from the other day caught my eye. It was about a controversy stemming from a new policy limiting how much a student can borrow under federally supported student loan programs.

The policy itself is sound. It limits how much a student can borrow based on their likely income once they graduate. So, students who are in professional programs can borrow more on the theory that they’ll earn more. The idea is to keep students from being saddled with too much debt while forcing schools to restrain tuition. Makes sense, and this is so much better than the Democrats’ absolutely insane idea to just pay off everybody’s loan, no questions asked.

The dust up is over what is defined as professional. Specifically in this case the story was about nurse practitioners who are now unduly limited — advocates say — as to what they can borrow because their vocation is not currently defined as a profession. Maybe they have a point. Somebody will have to figure this out. This is why we have bureaucracies.

But it got me thinking about the broader question. Why do we think everybody should go to college in the first place? If you want to be a nurse why not just go to nursing school? Why pay for four years of college and then have to go to graduate school to pick up a nursing degree?

The lament in that AP story is that we have a nursing shortage and the loan limits could now make that worse. But that’s not a given. Why not just eliminate any requirements that hospitals, nursing schools or professional certification programs might have for a four-year degree before getting the necessary technical training to become a nurse? If it’s already possible to do that, won’t the loan limits get more people to go straight to nursing school and thus get them into hospitals faster — and with less personal debt? Isn’t that a good thing?

Especially among liberals (there’s a strong correlation now between a college degree and being a liberal), there’s this educational snobbery — the idea that their degrees and advanced degrees make them smarter. Actually, some of the dumbest people I know have advanced degrees while some of the smartest didn’t finish or even start college.

Like the revolt against experts, there is now a questioning of the value of a college education. But unlike the pushback against expertise, which has profound negative effects for public health and the environment, the pushback on college is mostly a good thing. Just as the expert class became detached from too many average people, the academy became untethered and openly hostile to the values of most people — and in the case of public universities, the values of the people who were picking up some of the bills.

Schools of education have become Marxist incubators, gender studies programs are about casting straight men as oppressors, anti-Semitism has been allowed to grow unchecked on campuses, it’s almost impossible for a straight white man to get a tenure track job in the humanities, conservative speakers get shouted down while hard-left speakers can’t be even politely questioned, DEI programs have been essentially allowed to spend whatever they want on whatever they want, rocks got moved, good men had their reputations tarnished for no good reason, etc.

And on top of all that, standards have been slipping. There are now literature classes in which there are no full books that are assigned reading. A college education used to mean that a graduate had successfully completed a fairly rigorous and broad course of study and that he had acquired a rational turn of mind, demanding that facts and reason support any argument. Now, students are taught to “trust their feelings” and to value “lived experience.” Classic literature and thought is denigrated as being about “dead, white men.” For more on this, I suggest “The Coddling of the American Mind,” by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt.

And so now there’s been a reckoning. This is good. The fact that this reckoning is coming from one of the great idiots ever to occupy the White House is unfortunate, but it doesn’t make the needed corrections any less positive.

And the changes aren’t just coming from hard-right populists. A couple years ago Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania eliminated the college degree requirements for 92% — or about 65,000 — of state jobs. The truth is that for the vast majority of jobs in our society a four-year degree simply isn’t necessary. And even most advanced professional jobs don’t really need it. Lawyers used to be able to read law without going to college. Lincoln did that and some say he was a pretty good lawyer.

The value of a college education has not been undermined by Donald Trump. instead, it’s been eroded by the snobbish elites who turned college into a hard-left indoctrination factory, eliminated standards of rigorous instruction and replaced reason with intuition — provided that those feelings led one to the correct hard-left ideology.

If the idea that you’re limited as to how much you can borrow and that (gasp!) you actually must pay it back someday, makes more high school seniors look hard and long before committing to a college education, it might mean that those who decide to take that step take it much more seriously and demand much more for their money.

And if we could rid ourselves of the idea that being smart is the same as going to college that would be a big plus.