The story Wes Davis told on The New York Times Op-Ed page on June 16 makes sobering reading for those of us (we include ourselves) who advocate investment in higher education in significant measure because of the economic benefits it provides. Davis describes a program created by AT&T, back in the 1950s when it was “the” Bell telephone company, to provide a heavy dose of liberal education (complete with literature, architecture, music, and other humanistic subjects) to some of its most promising leaders, whose education was mainly technological.
In inventing the program, Bell judged, as reported by the prominent sociologist E. Digby Baltzell, that these well-trained rising executives “knew how to answer questions,” while those who were liberally educated might better know “what questions were worth answering.” The ambitious program was, by those standards, a considerable success. By the end of their year, the executives found reading James Joyce’s Ulysses (a challenge that has defeated both of us) to be “a liberating intellectual experience and a measure of how much they had been enriched by their time at the Institute.”
Unfortunately, as the program proceeded, a dark cloud appeared, at least from Bell’s, if not from the students’, point of view. According to the same sociologist, one man reported that before the program he had been “like a straw floating with the current down the stream” and added: “The stream was the Bell Telephone Company. I don’t think I will ever be that straw again.” These educated men (all men) turned out to have minds of their own: “While executives came out of the program more confident and more intellectually engaged, they were also less interested in putting the company’s bottom line ahead of their commitments to their families and communities. By 1960, the Institute of Humanistic Studies for Executives was finished.”
Pretty much anybody thinking about college—other than the independently wealthy—will want to know if spending years in school will “pay off” in economic terms. But if we buy into the view that this financial calculation measures either the only or even the biggest payoff of education, then we at once underestimate what education is worth and demean those who seek it.
6 Responses to Money Isn’t Everything
11167997 - July 7, 2010 at 8:27 am
Warren312—Bronze by Gold (they were two women in Ulysses, but let’s say they were two economists) say, and it’s about time, that “how much didja’ earn?” should be a minor outcome of higher education, not the first outcome, as virtually every other economist and nearly all drum pounding policy-makers and advocates would have it. One might consider, too, the common sense economic postulate that if everybody makes more money, nobody makes more money. That should turn our heads in the right direction, too, as Baum and McPherson have done here.
11159995 - July 7, 2010 at 9:52 am
These reflections raise the whole issue of whether education’s main purpose is to produce compliant workers for the capitalist economy or independent thinkers who might–horrors!–raise questions about capitalism’s limitations. It is no accident that in many foreign countries the seedbed of political unrest is found first and foremost in their universities. And that unrest tends to increase when there are not enough jobs available in the economy to absorb all the new university graduates. Liberal education is at heart a potentially liberating experience that can foster those habits of critical thinking that make democracy’s coexistence with capitalism a forever tense and uneasy relationship. The leaders at Bell seemed to have learned this lesson.—Sandy Thatcher
22221103 - July 7, 2010 at 10:38 am
If income shouldn’t be the number one payoff in higher education, then faculty should also not put their income as the number one priority. But since I’ve been involved in higher education for the last ten years, my experience is that income is number one. I can site the fact that faculty compare themselves to each other nationally and don’t want to consider cost-of-living in their local setting, think they are immune to economic stresses the rest of society is subject too, disregard for sky-rocketing textbooks and no desire to curb publishers changing their books every few years, using “academic freedom” to thwart every move administrators may try to make to shift resources to more desired courses. The “ivory tower” analogy is very apt. Recently our Board asked what they thought of the out-of-control tuition and student debt as compared to the stagnant median income – their answer was that the cost of a degree was worth it and that they were not going to reduce salaries when all other government employees did get their incomes reduced, not to mention the increasing unemployment rate.It’s amazing how faculty think they are immune to what’s going on around them. Very arrogant. Amazing!
crankycat - July 7, 2010 at 2:56 pm
It is very telling that they discontinued the “experiment” when it succeeded beyond their wildest dreams – their employees learned to create their own values instead accepting those fed to them. That is precisely the priceless worth of a liberal education and we should hope to do so well for our students.
tgroleau - July 7, 2010 at 3:45 pm
When the sticker price on a private college BA typically runs $100,000 or more, the financial return on investment has to be a significant consideration. If not, then only the wealthy leisure class could afford to be educated. Do we really want to return to that world?Sure, public universities are less expensive but they’re far from cheap and those students still forgo 4 years (or more) of full-time wages to pursue a degree. Rather than fight the financial return issue, we should embrace it and think of it as the sugar that makes the medicine go down. Most of the students in this country who read Shakespeare and study mathematics only do so because of general education requirements. That may not be our ideal student group, but we’d have very few students without them and, as #3 points out, most of us are rather fond of our salaries.What’s ironic is that the most affordable education is usually found in community colleges and they tend to be even more focused on career/financial return than 4-year schools.
bjgeorge - July 10, 2010 at 6:33 pm
A liberal arts education does not end in college. College may be the starting point for such an education, but it becomes the person’s responsibility to continue his/her liberal education after college. Also, it does not require a college education to read classics and to be an informed. In all, it is the desire and effort to learn broadly and that applies to everyone.It seems to me that one factor in the success of the Bell program was that adults were receiving a liberal arts education that they were eager to have, for what ever reasons (i.e. that they had not had such education before, they had the maturity now to see its value, etc.). The success of the program had a downside for Bell, but if Bell had decided to see that they now had a new problem to solve in having more independent thinking executive employees because of their Institute, they may have managed to make a decision on how to retain both the Institute and their independent thinking executive employees.