I generally try not to read the responses to the online versions of my columns. All right, I’m full of crap – I check every 10 minutes to see if anyone’s reading it at all. Unsurprisingly, I get a lot of angry messages. One of them on my Oct. 2 column, “The university: Imagining what it should be,” struck me as particularly interesting. A commentator calling himself Jimmy Bones wrote, “My degrees from the University of Maryland lose unrecoverable value every time this moron’s work is read by anyone anywhere.”
I think Bones is giving me a little too much credit here. The idea that corporate hiring managers everywhere read my column and, as a result, refuse to employ university graduates assumes a readership and influence I’m not sure I have. But what’s really fascinating to me is the idea that anyone’s degree could “lose value.”
We hear a lot these days about the “value of a diploma.” The assumption is that if you go to a school with a high level of prestige, you’ll be more likely to get a high-paying job than if you graduate from a “lesser” school. Thus the difference between a Yale diploma and one from this university should be measurable in terms of dollars made.
This is an incredibly convenient distinction, because it doesn’t require that anyone learn anything. This attitude turns a college education into a simple economic commodity. We pay our tuition money and four years of our time (with a calculable opportunity cost) for a line on our resumé that should increase our earning potential to an amount that is more than we paid. That’s why college is generally a good investment.
Still, in the wake of the country’s economic crisis, an Oct. 14 story in the Chicago Tribune questioned whether some students would benefit more from getting jobs than going to college.
This is a terribly sad view of higher education. We don’t go to a diploma factory. How do you quantify a class or a professor that turns your worldview upside down? How about a late-night dorm conversation or a guest speaker? Hell, how do you measure fraternity parties and taking the drunk bus? You can’t.
Most of what we do during our days in college isn’t measurable in terms of dollars. If you don’t allow for the possibility that you might just learn something new in college, then there’s no point in showing up. You’d be just as happy paying all the tuition in a lump sum in exchange for a piece of paper.
Of course, there is some (sad) truth to the commodification perspective. Corporations do associate college names with quality graduates. But if the economists are right, then these companies are missing out and won’t be as effective as firms that look a little deeper. Is someone who slept through their Ivy League classes a more valuable employee than a student who goes to a state school and stayed up all night debating class readings with his or her roommates? I don’t think so.
Reducing time spent in college to a dollar value that can be increased or decreased by a school columnist is an insult to everyone who spends his or her life trying to expose students to new concepts and ideas. I imagine these students looking into teachers’ eyes and seeing nothing but dollar signs, listening to lectures and hearing nothing but the “cha-ching” of a cash register.
At the end of the day, a university diploma is valuable not for what’s measurable in dollars but for what isn’t.
Malcolm Harris is a sophomore English and government and politics major. He can be reached at harrisdbk@gmail.com.
