Viewpoint 1: Regaining Credibility: The Academy's First Priority

Abstract

many other major American institutions, higher education has recently become the object of widespread skepticism. After an era of unprecedented growth, affluence, and exalted status in the 1960s, it stands now very much on the defensive. Doubts are being voiced as to whether its benefits are outweighed by its costs and burdens. Some of these new doubts are well-intentioned and well-informed. Others seem prejudiced and occasionally tinged with vindictiveness. Still others appear to be part of a new media fad of disparaging the value of college attendance. Whether justified or unfair, these criticisms constitute a clear danger, and a challenge to the academic community to set about regaining the public's confidence as rapidly as possible. What is now urgently required is the building of a new consensus about the role of higher education in America. Higher education, one needs reminding, has always had to compete with other public needs for its share of the tax dollar. Even in its heyday it could make a case that it was underfunded. Today, however, when the nation remains in the throes of the deepest and most prolonged economic recession in decades, the issue of where the campus should stand in public funding priorities is infinitely more acute than at any time in recent memory. Indeed, today it is probably higher education's greatest cause for concern. Public officials in Washington and across the country are now asking themselves whether it is morally right to be spending so much money on higher education when the cities are in a state of fiscal crisis, when mass transit in most places is badly underfunded, when crime runs rampant, and when unemployment stands nearly at its highest level since the great depression of the thirties. Still another public doubt has been triggered by recent assertions that a college degree is no longer worth a person's investment because of its declining economic return. It stands to reason, of course, that an indefinite expansion of the numbers of degree holders would sooner or later bring about declining personal monetary returns. And some widely publicized recent research does seem to confirm a substantial drop in the starting salaries of new graduates relative to the earnings of their co-workers, though more so for white males than for women and minorities. It also indicates that recent graduates have had to take jobs for which they were overqualified, have landed in fields for which they were not trained, or have found no employment at all. (See Declining Value of College Going, Change, September 1975.) From such evidence, a spate of popular books and articles have erroneously concluded that the economic value of a degree is somehow indicative of a wholesale failure on the part of higher education. The mischievous implication is that this is yet another reason for losing confidence in it. Such a verdict rests on three utterly fallacious assumptions: The first is that because the relative economic value of a degree to the individual is declining, so is the general economic value of higher education to society at large. But the economic value to the nation lies, of course, in its research and service capabilities and in the trained manpower higher education produces, and is only marginally related over the long term to questions of the relative earnings of graduates and nongraduates. Only if the earnings of the former in certain fields essential to the economy, such as engineering, fell to a point where there was little incentive for anyone to enroll would there be a connection between individual and societal economic returns. It would not be long, however, before the unsatisfied demand for engineers forced the relative earnings of graduates in this field up again, thereby stimulating increased enrollments. In short, market forces remain a powerful correcting mechanism. The second assumption is equally dubious: that the value of going to college is to be measured principally in economic terms. One cannot blame young people for making such assumptions, since college has often been sold to them on the basis of such tawdry and selfish rationales. The appeal to them should, of course, have been made on the much more legitimate grounds that higher education helps individuals develop intellectual abilities, humanistic understandings, and aesthetic sensitivities that will enable them to enjoy life more fully and contribute more effectively to the welfare of mankind. The third false assumption is that the decline in the relative economic