The following is a slightly edited transcript of the remarks made by Jennifer Frey during a meeting Weekly newspaper Podcast debate on higher education. You can listen to the podcast here:
[In the Pairagraph debate,] I don’t think I have articulated the position as I tried to reconstruct the problem. I feel overwhelmed by this very general question. So I tried to narrow it down to something more specific. The general question is, is it worth it to go to college? But when I think about this question, I find myself asking again and again: Who is it worth?
Because higher education is a very unequal environment, especially in elite institutions, I think we need to be aware that the institutional environment we are talking about will produce unfair privileged elites. And there is a big gap between the noble self-concepts of these institutions and their actual practices and policies. So I tried to elicit some of it-so we are discussing whether it is worth part-time faculty, who are basically exploited labor in most institutions? We are discussing whether it is worth it for students who come from a working-class background and find themselves very alienated from their peers in many different ways. So I tried to talk about this. I asked my parents that they are largely burdened with increasingly high and extreme tuition bills: Is it worth it for them? So really, I want to ask this question: Who is it worth?
I also want to mention the student debt crisis, because I don’t think we can talk about this issue without considering that at least two generations of us now carry heavy debts for most of the time, that is, whether college is worthy of adult life. Of course, my husband and I are also included. For most of our careers, we are scholars who are still trying to figure out how to repay their student loans. So I wanted to narrow it down, and then I finally said, okay, look, we can’t really answer the question “is it worth going to college” without asking who is worth – but at the same time, what is a university, right?
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Because if the university is really just for vocational training, I think it’s worth the question even more headaches. If an educational university becomes a kind of trade school, then the question of why it must take four years and why so much money—just to find a job—becomes even more urgent. If we insist on thinking about higher education What is the old way of education. So this is basically where I started.
I think there are too many people in universities who are not ready to succeed for various reasons, usually because they have not received a decent education before university. Also because they don’t know why they are there, they don’t have real resources to figure out why they are there. I think if universities do better to make the difference between parents and future students more prominent, the difference between higher education and just getting a trade, I think we will all live better because I think it will help people Better identify whether they need to go to college.
However, having said that, I do think it is complicated. I come from a working-class background-my father spent most of his adult life driving forklift trucks in the paper mill. So he has no college education. When Rust Belt started to withdraw from manufacturing jobs, people like my father were really trapped without any chance and without real knowing what to do. When you lose your livelihood at the age of 50, you don’t have time to really go back to school or learn coding or anything else. So I did realize that my father did not have any college degree and it was very difficult to find a decent job after that. This was devastating for him and prevented his retirement and various other things. So I think this is not just the responsibility of the university. It’s not just universities that may overestimate university degrees. I think many employers also overestimate it. I mean, many good jobs need a bachelor’s degree for no reason, but they do.
Jennifer Frey is an associate professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of South Carolina.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author.
