Hilda Solis, Secretary of Labor, was interviewed on NPR yesterday. Among other things, she promoted the value of education as a way toward a higher standard of material well being, pointing out that she was the first in her family to go to college. She was challenged by a caller who complained that the only thing her college degree produced was a heavy loan she could not repay because she couldn’t find a job. What good is a college education if it can’t produce a well paying job, or any job at all?
That’s a pretty good question, and I’ll add one more; Is that what a college education is supposed to do?
We talked about that during the years that I had weekly meetings with a few students at one of our local liberal arts colleges. My counsel was that they were there to learn to become educated persons and not to get a job ticket. Our conversations about what it might mean to learn to become an educated person turned on acquiring the basics for life-long learning and the ability to think critically on the grounds that a democratic society cannot long exist without a critical mass of educated citizens.
That smacks of bit of elitism, and my politically liberal students would bring that up as an objection. Well, it is elitist. These students were of the elite. They were very smart: the few out of many selected to go to a college not all that easy to get into. Their curriculum was very challenging. They were receiving an education that relatively few others would ever attain. It does no one a favor to pretend otherwise. The more important question had to do with what might that mean for their future role in society.
None of that would guarantee a job of any kind. If getting a job ticket was a goal it would have to come through some other kind of technical training either in graduate school or a local community college. Most went on to graduate school somewhere and I lost track of them. A few went to local community colleges to become chefs, mechanics, machinists and so on. More than a few spent the next year or two working for AmeriCorps. Now and then I run into some working locally as secretaries, waiters and retail clerks. In every case they are educated persons able to take up the role of informed citizen. Perhaps they will.