Colleges Can’t Have Their Cake and Eat it Too.

George Leef recently used National Review to highlight Adam Ellwanger’s Martin Center essay on students who treat education as an afterthought. They are describing a real problem. I share their frustration.

But frustration is not the same as explanation.

Ellwanger asks: “If you’re a serious student, it ought to be a priority. And if it isn’t a priority (or if you’re not a serious student), then why do it?”

They do it because they have to. Many students are not seeking intellectual transformation. They are seeking a credential because the labor market told them they need one—told them brutally.

Many students are not seeking intellectual transformation. They are seeking a credential because the labor market told them they need one.

That is not merely anecdotal: Strada and Gallup found that many Americans pursue higher education chiefly for work-related reasons, and Harvard Business School’s research on degree inflation shows that employers often require bachelor’s degrees for jobs that previously did not require them. 

For such students, college is less a calling than a requirement: a way to keep a promotion path open, qualify for higher pay, survive HR filters where a real person may never see their résumé, or be considered for jobs that should not even require advanced academic preparation.

To tell such students that they should not be in college unless they can put education first is not rigor. It is tone-deafness dressed up as seriousness. It asks ordinary people to honor an idealized vision of college while living inside an economy that has turned college into a practical necessity.

If a working adult needs a degree to move into a better job, what exactly are we asking when we say education must come first? Is he, in effect, supposed to tell his spouse or children, “Sorry, I cannot pursue the credential this economy requires because I cannot put college ahead of work, rent, caregiving, and family obligations”?

That seems unreasonable to the point of being detached from reality.

We should not romanticize students. Some are lazy, distracted, underprepared, or simply not cut out for college at a high level. But many are not choosing between education and leisure. They are choosing among obligations.

Higher education has long wanted it both ways. We justify college largely in economic terms — Georgetown’s Center on Education and the Workforce estimates that bachelor’s degree holders earn substantially more over a lifetime than workers with only a high school diploma — then act wounded when students treat it instrumentally. We build enrollment models around mass credential demand, then invoke older ideals of scholarly seriousness when those models produce students who behave like customers.

Those of us inside higher education should admit our own place in that arrangement. The credential economy that frustrates professors also sustains many of our livelihoods. My own job, in part, depends on it. That fact alone should discipline our tone. If the degree has become a toll booth, we should not pretend we are merely innocent bystanders watching students line up at the gate.

None of this means standards should collapse. A student who refuses to attend, refuses to work, or refuses to learn should not be carried through a course out of pity.

Colleges are not restaurants, and faculty members are not waiters serving whatever the customer ordered.

Colleges are not restaurants, and faculty members are not waiters serving whatever the customer ordered.

There are obvious and non-negotiable exceptions—medicine and engineering among them—but not every degree serves a strict gatekeeping function. Many are meant to improve judgment, writing, reasoning, and professional conduct. Those degrees still need standards. They still need effort. They still require rigorous, honest assessment. But the question is often not whether every student becomes a scholar, but whether the degree leaves the ordinary student better than before.

Many ordinary students now pursuing degrees are not failed academics. They are people who, in an earlier economy, might have found stable work, earned promotions, raised families, and contributed respectably without needing a bachelor’s degree. We changed the terms on them. We helped build a labor market in which even ordinary, uneven, distracted, overworked, and sometimes mediocre students need the same credential once reserved for the more academically inclined.

If colleges recruit and enroll such students, we owe them more than a weary reprimand that they should take it all more seriously. We owe them real standards, but we also owe them a real chance to meet those standards inside the lives they actually have, as the people they actually are.

The answer is better design and clearer expectations. Attendance still matters. Effort still matters. Honesty still matters. A student who does no work should not pass simply because credentials are economically valuable.

Students should have to show direct evidence of learning, not only submit files that may or may not reflect their own understanding. They should be able to explain their work in person, answer basic questions about a reading, apply a concept to a new example, or defend a decision they made in an assignment.

But when some cannot, the answer cannot always be failure. It should be a required redo: revise the paper, correct the analysis, explain again face to face. That is not more grade inflation. It is the hard work of building competence—not exceptionalism.

So, we should be careful before asking why a student is in college if learning is not his or her highest priority. In the current economy, that question should answer itself.

They are there because we made the credential functionally compulsory. If we dislike what that has done to education, then whatever else we may justifiably blame students for, we should stop blaming them for complying.

Dr. Peter D. Simonson teaches Supply Chain Management at the University of South Alabama in Mobile, Alabama.  He has his degree in Transportation and Logistics from North Dakota State University in Fargo, North Dakota.  Before teaching, he was in the lumber and building materials business in North Dakota with his family.  He lives with his wife and two children in south Alabama.