PhDs for Everyone!

Sunni links to and discusses an article by Charles Murray in which the author advocates more vocational training and less college prep: http://www.sunnimaravillosa.com/archives/00000890.html

I pretty much accept the premise that we are more or less born with a certain degree of smarts and that we are never going to get any smarter. There are things that can make us stupider, such as poor nutrition, disease, head trauma, watching Fox News; however, we can’t add to our intelligence. Each of us is equipped for just so much schooling, and going beyond our capabilities is a waste of time and money and energy. Accordingly, schooling might be more efficiently and cheaply provided if efforts were made to identify the potential of pupils as early in the process as possible so they could be placed in appropriate tracks. A pupil of low normal intelligence is not college material, and it would be better to equip that pupil for adult life by teaching her the skills she will need to succeed.

I was lucky to have been born relatively smart and with a good memory. School was a breeze for me, and I backed into a full ride scholarship from a local manufacturer. I ended up with a college degree and almost no prospects. I sold calculators, a job for which college was superfluous but which was required as a qualification by the company. I managed a movie theater, and I drifted up and down the coast doing this and that (but not the other). I decided that I had to go to law school or that I would never do very well financially with my liberal arts credential. Many of my classmates had their sheepskins from the same expensive private university and ended up working at jobs that required no college at all. One went to a short tech school and got into computers. Another became a TV cameraman. Yet another became a stand up comedian. Others went into various sales jobs or police work or bureaucracies. Others went to grad school like me to delay their dates with destiny.

Frankly, I don’t reckon that a college degree was really necessary for me to have gone on to law school (which I loathed every minute of). You don’t need any of that undergraduate book learning to study lawyering, and you could easily crank out lawyers in an undergraduate course. College was just a sorting mechanism and was not preparatory at all. Frankly, I went to college because I felt like I had to. By the time I went to college, it had become the equivalent of a high school diploma from my father’s day. You had to have the credential to do much of anything white collar, and you had to have graduate level training to match what college used to mean.

In fifty years, I predict that all but the most profoundly retarded will have college degrees, that 75% will have masters or professional degrees and that the other 25% of the population will have doctorates. You will need a bachelors degree to take tickets for the tilt’ a’ whirl and a masters to sell encyclopedias. Kindergarten teachers and cashiers at Barnes & Noble will have PhDs. Every third person will be a lawyer or MBA. By today’s standards this will seem like a success, but at that time the goal of the Department of Education will be doctorates for everyone!

Because of the premium placed on Ivy League degrees, it will be necessary for the Ivy League schools to expand and open franchises all across the country. By 2057, 90% of all college degrees will be granted by Ivy League franchise institutions. State colleges will specialize more and more in graduate schooling.