CHAPTER 13
College
It’s Not as Bad as You Think; It’s Worse
OLD SHANGHAI stood across the street from campus my freshman year. It was the sort of Chinese restaurant you see in those Hollywood movies of the 1930s about rickshaws, tong wars, and opium. They served a punch drink called the Dragon Bucket, basically a quart of rum cut with lemon-lime Kool-Aid, navel-orange wedges, maraschino cherries, and a tray of ice cubes, all sloshed into a ceramic basin like the one my grandmother used for soaking her corns. Each of the boys around the table would get his own long straw and suck the concoction out of the common trough. I say “boys”. Alas, girls made up only one-third of the freshman class, and they were already dating upperclassmen. That often left half a dozen of us in the Old Shanghai, lacking anything better to do. One November, at midnight, we decided to climb the church.
There was a nineteenth-century Baptist church a couple hundred yards away. It was crumbling and had been under repair since we arrived. Scaffolding—a rather official-sounding word to describe a few creaking two-by-fours balanced on mildew-covered iron rods—ran eleven stories up to the tip of the black stone steeple. Workmen clambered all over it on weekdays. Jeff Kline was the first of our group to go. There he was, three stories up the scaffold, while the rest of us were still mustering the nerve. As Jeff was hollering down that we should come see how beautiful the city looked, flashing lights appeared. Lots of them. Three squad cars meowed to a stop at the curb.
Jeff was a straight-A student from the Ohio suburbs of Cincinnati. He had probably never exchanged a cross word with a policeman in his life. We had been warned by proctors and counselors at orientation that we ought to obey the campus police (occasionally exasperating) because their job was to protect us from the city police (class-conscious, crime-hardened, thoroughly unpredictable). Here came the city cops now. Jeff looked scared as he descended hand-over-hand. The sergeant, a truculent Boston Irishman, was already wagging his sneering face at Jeff, as if in disbelief and pity.
“Go to school here, son?”
“Yes, sir,” Jeff replied.
“You nawmally make a habit of trespassing in houses of wehhhship?”
“No, sir.”
“This whatcha fathah’s paying five thousand bucks a year faw?”
Jeff paused: “Ten thousand bucks,” he said. “Sir.”
That was a generation ago. Already back then, a year of college cost twice the amount a working-class person considered preposterous—about the price of a big car. Today the cost of private universities has risen to half a dozen times what it was: sixty thousand bucks a year, sometimes more. The price, in certain markets, of a modest house. That adds up to a quarter-million per BA. If your goal in sending your child to university is giving him the wherewithal to stand on his own two feet, you might as well eliminate the middleman and buy him a house outright.
College is both the most important project that upper-middle-class parents and children will ever collaborate on, and the most seemingly irrational. The financial fear it induces has a chilling effect on fecundity: Nobody has extra kids out of a sense that the American university system is a boon. On the contrary. It might well be the most dysgenic social innovation since the invention of priestly celibacy. And there is a mystery at the heart of this exorbitant contrivance: That Irish police sergeant’s question, posed back in the days of the Cold War, still has no obvious answer. What do fathers think they’re paying so many tens of thousands of dollars a year for?
Education, yes. But we seldom agree on what we mean when we say “education.” In the most general sense, it’s the process of transmitting culture, values, and civilization from parents to children. This process often involves a watershed moment in the life of the youth in question, a moment when he moves from being under the tutelage of adults to dealing with them eye to eye, as comrades and equals. It is usually marked by some rite of passage, the model being the Jewish bar mitzvah. All such rites rest on the idea that there exists lore, writ, and gospel that, while it may not give you all the answers, will at least show you the right way to conduct yourself as you wait to discover the answers.
Religious initiation carries lots of weighty promises that the most up-to-date Americans aren’t so sure about anymore. But the very same Americans ingenuously expect those promises to be fulfilled by a humanistic, liberal, secular college education. My father believed this. One of the worst arguments we ever had came the summer before I went off to college. The university had requested a photo for the facebook (in this case, an actual book filled with faces) that would be handed out to the whole freshmen class. My father told me to put on a jacket and tie and comb my hair, and he’d take one of me standing against a blank wall.
“No,” I said. This was not a word I used a lot in front of my father, but I wasn’t going to look like a doofus.
The problem was that we had two different visions of college. My father looked at it as a destiny, a task, and a privilege. Gestures of respect and even institutional deference were in order. He probably hadn’t been any keener to get his picture taken as a freshman at Bowdoin in the 1950s than I was. But he had done it. Back then, one did all that uncomfortable stuff in order to grow into something different: a man.
If I can be blunt about this, perhaps it will explain something about my generation, the last backwash of the baby boom: I wasn’t interested in becoming a man. I was interested in becoming a more dashing, brilliant, charismatic, mysterious, attractive-to-girls version of what my suburban, television-age upbringing had turned me into—which was basically a collection of appetites. And there was no way that was going to happen if my official photo showed me dressed up like one of the pallbearers at a farm-town funeral.
So my father and I argued for the reason people usually argue: because we were both right. I was right about the pecking order of my peers. The cold pragmatism of a seventeen-year-old’s libido made me an unassailable authority on the subject. My father had a nobler, a more time-honored, and (I would say now) a truer sense of what college was for. But this was a fight that my father could not win, alas, and the now-parents of my own generation appear destined to lose it, too. Father-son arguments today are over different questions than whether a tie makes a young man look like a loser, questions like, “Do you pronounce it ‘vaygan’ or ‘veegan’?” … “You mean LGBT like the sandwich?” … “What’s that in your nose?”
But, today as yesterday, every tool that society has at its disposal is used to prop up the young person’s vision of the university as an emancipation, rather than the adult’s vision of the university as an inheritance.
This is not an oversight. As they say in Silicon Valley, it’s a feature of the university system, not a bug. The modern university is the institution through which the next generation’s elite is formed. It inculcates the two essential, nonnegotiable principles of the American ruling class: consumerism and relativism.
The one thing our university system can’t countenance is a sturdy, devoutly held system of values that might compete with the established ones. And unfortunately for you, the most likely source of such dangerous values are parents. As such, a main purpose of college is to undermine, and to reverse where possible, the passing on of values from parents to their children. Colleges won’t say that out loud, of course. But what they’re doing isn’t especially new. It’s what nineteenth-century ladies’ finishing schools and twentieth-century communist training programs once did. In all three cases, the goal of the institution is to set the price of entry into the top social class. (The price is usually steep.)
The experience can feel phony to students and frustrating to parents. College academic programs are a bit like college athletic programs. They are antiquated systems of preparation for professional life that have survived the collapse of their own logic. There is no reason why college athletic departments should serve as the privileged feeders to the NFL and the NBA, especially since this often means a wasteful and humiliating academic charade for young men, ill-suited to it. But there is no reason either why college French, women’s studies, or even economics departments should serve as the anteroom to a seven-figure job at Goldman Sachs. The illogic is actually more glaring in the academic case. The Alabama Crimson Tide and the Oregon Ducks make no pretension to attack privilege and battle injustice. Top-flight humanities departments do, and yet their own privileges always go untouched.
Whether or not the parents of college students are paying for an education, they are not mainly paying for education. Consider the way colleges have responded to the emerging possibilities of education on the Internet. Yale happily lets Robert Shiller give his course on financial markets on YouTube. Stanford does not object to Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig offering their artificial intelligence course, complete with homework assignments, by free video. But if both schools are charging students more than sixty thousand dollars a year while giving away the educational part of their product for free, then what, exactly, are they charging for?
One suspects that the true value-added in their product is the elite credential it offers, and that the credential is more a validation than a qualification. Being shown worthy of admission to a great university impresses people more than anything learned there. Yes, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard before taking their respective degrees. Yet this does not reflect poorly on Harvard; rather the opposite. The institution actually gains prestige so long as people know that it was Harvard the two of them dropped out of.
Alas, this is where discussions about higher education always wind up: Is the university a place to gather professional credentials and expertise (training) or a gentlemanly outlook on the world (education)? These are very different things. The way you bring up your child hinges on your preferences. Most seventeen-year-olds will already have a strong predisposition to one view or the other by the time they start making decisions about college.
In our generation, high-tech moguls and their political apologists have sought to pretend there is no difference between training and education—that this is what Bill Clinton used to call a false choice. “The average eighteen-year-old American will change jobs eight times in a lifetime,” President Clinton said when he signed NAFTA in 1993. But this has the ring of propaganda. A twenty-year-old man missing bedtime with his children in order to sit in a junior-college classroom learning to debug some ephemeral software program is not the same as his contemporary who gets to discuss Gibbon at a sherry party. Skilling up so as not to be exploited or pauperized by technological change is not the life of the mind.
Yet the American university system as we know it was founded on this very confusion. When he became president of Harvard in 1869, Charles William Eliot noticed that young men were less interested in knowledge for knowledge’s sake than they used (or ought) to be. They wanted a credential in law, medicine, or one of the professions. So Eliot separated the “liberal” arts from “professional” training, requiring the former as a prerequisite for the latter. It has at times been a glorious system. For a century or so it gave us a leadership class that was (for a democracy) highly cultured and (against the odds) a worthy defender of European culture. But that system was totally arbitrary. The illogic of requiring that a young man translate Sappho, memorize Goethe, and know who fought on what side in the Wars of the Roses before he is permitted to try a case in court has grown more and more glaring. Abraham Lincoln would have spent his life tilling the fields if Eliot’s system had been in place in his youth.
And anyway, Americans are ambivalent about whether it is better to be a generalist or a specialist. In The Great Gatsby, Nick Carraway settles in New York trying to teach himself the bond trade with the help of a dozen books about banking and credit. But he wants more. “I had the high intention of reading many other books besides,” he recalls. “I was rather literary in college … and now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the ‘well-rounded man.’”
Well-roundedness may seem like a virtue appropriate to the more class-based society of Fitzgerald’s time, when needing to make a living was a sign of low birth. The idea that it constitutes a virtue at all may have something to do with the way ambitious immigrant children of the day were using examination systems to root the children of alumni out of the meritocratic corners of the university system. The term “well-rounded” was meant to introduce arbitrariness into a selection process that had begun to produce results that elites disapproved of. We have our own such terms.
These days college admissions officers profess to want well-roundedness but find themselves dragged into the wider society’s quest for “excellence.” Parents have made these preferences their own, and now demand from their kids excellence in many things—which is both an impossibility and a great sower of intergenerational tension. In soup kitchens across the country, a familiar sight is the strivers’ son, arrived by cab from Dalton, Sidwell Friends, or one of their regional equivalents, spending twenty minutes inattentively ladling out gruel to the destitute, in between studying for tomorrow’s Chinese exam and prepping for the debate team. (He got a doctor’s note to get out of fencing practice.) His parents have signed him up to “volunteer” so as to demonstrate that he’s not all-work-no-play—that he cares. Yeah, he cares. Cares about getting into Duke.
The sentiment that the acquisition of culture is a lifelong adventure, one that can be mixed with a vocation, has endured since the 1960s. It is in most cases a pernicious myth. If you are not a rich genius like Tolstoy, if you are not working as a writer, professor, artist, or scientist, you can, it is true, learn on the job. But it is unlikely to be book learning. People have a hard time acquiring book learning in middle age not because they are deadbeats or philistines, but because it is the human condition. In all societies, the prime of life is a time when people compete with each other to execute projects—and the com petition is more intense in our market society. A person in his thirties, forties, or fifties who is still spending part of his time conceptualizing projects (a good description of what education is) will not be able to compete effectively against those who have already done their conceptualizing and can now devote all their energies to executing projects.
This is what Samuel Johnson meant when he told James Boswell of an old man who had warned him, in his own time at Oxford, “Young man, ply your book diligently now, and acquire a stock of knowledge; for when years come upon you, you will find that poring upon books will be but an irksome task.” What fortunate parents continue to pay up to a quarter of a million bucks for is an insurance policy against the rainy day when poring upon books becomes irksome. They are buying a space of four adult years when the pressures of earning a living are seemingly (but only seemingly) far off. Those years are for acquiring the lore, writ, and gospel to which, in decades to come, children can turn for guidance, delight, and consolation. Not all kids manage to acquire it. But college is still a bargain for the parents of those who do.