In a New York Times op-ed (that’s a gift link, getting you past the pay-wall: You’re welcome!), a writing professor from Southern Methodist University reveals his epiphany regarding why today’s college students generally don’t read books. He writes in part,
Nationwide, college professors report steep declines in students’ willingness and ability to read on their own. To adapt, instructors are assigning less reading and giving students time in class to complete it.
It’s tempting to lament the death of a reliable pathway to learning and even pleasure. But I’m beginning to think students who don’t read are responding rationally to the vision of professional life our society sells them. In that vision, productivity does not depend on labor, and a paycheck has little to do with talent or effort. For decades, students have been told that college is about career readiness and little else. And the task of puzzling out an author’s argument will not prepare students to thrive in an economy that seems to run on vibes…
Once students graduate, the jobs they most ardently desire are in what they proudly call the “sellout” fields of finance, consulting and tech. To outsiders, these industries are abstract and opaque, trading on bluster and jargon. One thing is certain, though: That’s where the money is….All in all, it looks as if success follows not from knowledge and skill but from luck, hype and access to the right companies. If this is the economy students believe they’re entering, then why should they make the effort to read? For that matter, how will any effort in school prepare them for careers in which, apparently, effort is not rewarded?
Duh. You just figured this out, did you?
Many years ago I was the chair of a non-profit organization dedicated to helping educational institutions better prepare students for the workplace. In that role, I represented the organization at several high level national conferences, including some sponsored by the Department of Education.
Late in my tenure, I finally had heard enough: I stood up during the questioning period for a particularly annoying speaker and said, “I may have missed it, but nowhere in your presentation or even in the three days of this conference have I heard anyone support the concept of education for its own sake rather than for the purpose of getting a degree that will then lead to a well-paying job. That is exactly backwards. We are inculcating students with the idea that it is only the credentials that matter, not skills, not experience, not inspiration and the broadening of one’s mind and perspective. The natural progression of this misconception is grades that exist for their competitive value in career development, not to measure actual ability and academic achievement, and not to inspire effort and accomplishments. The reduction of higher education from its original purpose of making better human beings and citizens, to the crass purpose of facilitating more prestigious position and a more comfortable lifestyles, is an irresponsible and, I believe, a disastrous trend that we should be opposing, not embracing.” (I had prepared my comments to deliver at some point during the conference, and I still have those notes.)
The reaction of the attendees to my speech ranged from hostility to mockery. “What is the purpose of higher education,” I was asked,”if not to get a better job?” “To be a better human being,” I answered. I was laughed at.
I quit the chair position shortly afterwards, telling the idealistic president who founded the non-profit and who had invited me to join the board that higher education was heading for a catastrophic course with unlimited concomitant damage to America’s youth and culture.
Other factors have made the death spiral faster and more destructive (such as the internet, social media and DEI) but it didn’t take a genius to see this coming long, long ago.(After all, I figured it out.) And yet here is the New York Times in 2024 promoting the “Eureka!” ofsomeone teaching at a university who announces the trend like it is Discovered Truth.
This is how we ended up with prestigious college graduates who are conned by demagogues. It is why Harvard and other universities are so corrupt and miserably managed. It is why we have professors writing books and essays that are logically and historically absurd. It is why we have not one but two candidates for President who cannot make a coherent argument for anything without appealing to emotion, authority, or rationalizations, if you can figure out what they are saying at all.
The nation, society, and the educational establishment all abandoned the Aristotelian ideal of education for its own sake as a lifelong pursuit to optimize the individual human being. The results of taking this foolish course were completely predictable as well as avoidable. But now? I have no idea what can be done to reverse the damage.
Ethics Alarms 
Alternate hypothesis One: Failure to have, and apply, standards.
Two: Disparate Impact is even more poisonous than you already thought.
My senior year of college, a fellow English major in my class wrote a column in the college paper screaming about the fact he wasn’t going to be able to get a job with an English degree. My thought at the time was, “Hello, Teddy (the guy’s name), you didn’t know all along that sitting around reading great novels and poetry and play scripts would prepare you for little more than teaching high school English, or getting into a graduate program where you could teach other college kids after years of study and a thesis or two?” I loved undergrad. It was like being a kid in a candy store. And when I had a family and couldn’t really support them on a high school teacher’s salary, I went to law school and became seriously employable. And was law school broadening or intellectually engaging? No. As another college classmate, a philosophy major who went on to the University of Chicago law school after bailing out of philosophy graduate school, said to me recently, “Studying the law is about as interesting as reading the warranty on your toaster.” The concept used to be, you get an undergrad, and then you get a graduate degree. And anyone who thinks that’s stupid and a waste of time is a moron.
OK, I am going to call BS on this whole deceitful argument. I am quite sick of hearing it from no-nothing humanities types. The whole ‘education for education’s sake’ argument lies almost exclusively in the areas that suffer declines in times of economic depression. When jobs are tight, people major in fields where jobs are the most plentiful. It must be great to go to college and know that you don’t need to work for a living and can just learn what you want and sit around an read for the rest of your life feeling good that you are ‘educated’. I’m tired of the bait and switch. People are told they need to go to college because college graduates make more money than people who don’t go to college, and when you get to college the professors get mad at the suggestion that you would use your priceless knowledge to earn filthy lucre.
I’m really sick of the humanities faculty looking at me as a second class Ph.D. because in my field, you have to learn about reality, learn things that are useful, and learn to do things that employers will pay for. Sorry, I didn’t grow up with a trust fund and yes, I do use my hands in my work. The stigma against manual labor never dies and it is at the heart of these arguments. Even mathematics has rejected applied math. Mathematicians recoil at the thought of using calculus to solve real-world problems.
Now, the point this goes back to is the idea that only the humanities can teach you how to ‘think’. Only knowledge of the humanities counts as ‘educated’. When I hear this, I hear Michelle Obama talking about how obviously qualified Kamala Harris is. Why do they insist that education is only valuable if it is of no use but personal enrichment? I don’t see it. I see the humanities collectively as fields that have a canon of knowledge that is to be learned by rote, never questioned, and regurgitated. I tell my students that, much like British and Americans, the sciences and humanities are divided by a common language. When the humanities say ‘learn’, we say ‘memorize’. There is no word in humanities for what I mean when I say learn, which is to understand how something works and how the system that makes it work works… When the humanities say ‘theory’, we mean ‘idea’. Our theories have to have experimental evidence to back them up. The idea that learning physics and understanding quantum mechanical processes is not ‘real education’ is one of the common insults I routinely suffer from the crowd that makes arguments like the ones above.
I don’t see any thinking coming out of the humanities. I see no writing skill coming out of the humanities. I once was granted an ‘audience’ with the English faculty to discuss what I wanted to see out of the 12 credit hours of English my majors have to take. I said that I wanted them to be able to write a report about what they did and what the results mean in passive voice. I was told by 3 English faculty that they couldn’t do that because they don’t know how. I have to do that. I spend 4 years teaching my majors how to think, reason, and express their results and conclusions on paper and I have to fight the humanities faculty to do it. All the humanities have to offer is grievance studies and updates on all the new genders and pronouns they invented in the last 6 months.
Now for an example. One of the last faculty book studies I participated dealt with the question of what was an educated person. When we finished the book, we went around the room and were supposed to answer “What do you think an educated person should know?” Well, everyone else answered with the usual suspects. “I think they should know Plato”. “I think they should know the Divine Comedy”. It went on like this through the room until it was my turn. I thought long and hard and said “I think they should know how lightbulbs work”. Everyone got mad at me and said I was making a mockery of the book study. So, I asked “How do lighbulbs work?” No one knew. They then asked “OK Mr. Smart Guy, how do lighbulbs work?” and I answered “What type, there are 3 main types of lighbulbs. Each one produces light by a different mechanism. To understand them, you need to know quantum mechanics, some calculus, Boltzman distributions of energy, light scattering processes, and how the eye perceives light”. That is what I mean by understand and it blew them away. I don’t think any of them had ever even thought about understanding something at that level.
Don’t tell me students aren’t reading or educated because they had to understand quantum mechanics. Don’t tell me students aren’t reading or educated because I taught them how to understand bonding models. Don’t tell me the students aren’t reading or educated because they spent a lot of time learning about heat flow. Stop saying that the students aren’t reading or educated because I made them think about the 3 systems of oxygen transport in living things on this planet and asked them why the one in mammals is also the one in plants.
I have to go, but I may post a few more examples to make my point later.
Outstanding! From a much lower limb on the tree of knowledge I make similar arguments to those who will listen (I have no “captives” in a classroom to impose my thoughts on— the Mrs just smiles and nods). I expose my inner Mike Rowe using examples of plumbing, welding, gear cutting and such. My mantra is “learn to do something useful to others”. When the lights won’t come on or the toilet won’t flush you don’t call a gender studies major.
Jack will have an easy time coming up with a COTD on this post. You nailed it sir.
Keep going: great topic. (Remember, my son is an auto-tech who decided, with my blessing, that college would be waste of time and money.)
However, you have to deal with the attitude that “anything that doesn’t get you a high paying job isn’t wortb knowing. That’s the pervasive ethos among multiple generations.What good is literature? History? Georgraphy? Government theory? Economics? Philosophy? Writing (AI can do it for you)? Art? Music? ETHICS? Why do you think students are protesting the Gazan war, without a clue regarding how the Israel vs, Palestinian mess came about?
But you are making my point for me. The people clamoring for the ‘education for education’s sake’ are the same people who failed to educate the people who are protesting for the ‘Palestinians’. The professional ignorant protesters are the result of the ‘education for education’s sake’ approach.
We don’t reward academic excellence and hard work in college, we punish it. If you look at studies in grades, you will find that Education courses award the highest grades (average 3.9+) and physics is near the bottom (typically 2.8+). So why would I take physics, that requires a lot of difficult math only to have to work hard, destroy my GPA, lose my GPA-linked scholarships, and get no respect on campus because what is valued are extracurricular activities and GPA? GPA’s are a lie because the most accomplished students often have some of the worst GPA’s because they are taking difficult courses.
Now, I will agree that the credentialism is a problem, but not necessarily for the reason you think. The real problem is that people are getting paid lots of money in fields where they don’t have to do anything. Investment fund managers make obscene amounts of money and less that 25% of them can beat a random number generator or a houseplant (they actually hooked a houseplant up to electrodes and had it run an investment fund). Physicians make outrageous amounts of money with modest educational requirements. One of the things that destroyed education is that teachers make too much. They have minimal education and they have the best pay of all the humanities majors.
These high-pay, low-modest requirement jobs attract lots of people because they are low-hanging fruit. These people are in it for the money. That is why teacher absenteeism is currently at 20% nationally. The average teacher is absent for the classroom 1 day/week on average. In manufacturing, this is indicative of paying people too much. Most people will take a day off if they can live on 4 days/week in pay. They won’t work the 5th day to get savings for the future or get ahead, they will take the day off. That is why UBI programs always fail.
As someone whose profession is to promote reading and information I despise the reading testing programs that took over schools. As a parent I was frustrated because my son couldn’t “earn points” toward his middle school English grade because the school didn’t have the test for the book he read. He was reading great books (okay, I helped in guiding his selection). He learned to maximize his points each semester by reading the book with the most points available. Fortunately it meant he was reading “Treasure Island” and other classics. But, then he could focus on reading for pleasure.
Over the years I had many parents bring their middle school sons to me because they didn’t like reading. I would recommend a book that echoed their other interests and wasn’t 500 pages. I could see the excitement in their eyes. Too often it was snuffed out because the book wasn’t “on grade level” or the school didn’t have a test and no points could be earned.
Reading became purely transactional.
Many of my peers derided books such as the Twilight series or “Fifty Shades of Grey” because they weren’t literature. I didn’t care. When an adult who doesn’t have the reading habit gets excited about a book, it makes me happy. It gives me the opportunity to introduce them to other books.
Reading for pleasure needs to be nurtured. I could cite the studies on the importance of free reading. The essence is that not all education needs to be transactional.
I’m not sure what I think on this entirely. In my more cynical moments, I suspect that the rise of the internet has done a lot to set back reading. The internet thrives on relatively short pieces, and may be undermining the attention span needed for a book. I would discuss this more but- oh, look, shiny!
I will say that when I was in college in the 1990s, I got rather the opposite impression. Much of academia seemed to be of the opinion that there was something vaguely disreputable about gainful employment, particularly in the for-profit private sector. I suspect that much of the demand for education that leads to well-paying jobs comes from rising college tuition. If people are going to be taking on years worth of debt, that are likely to feel that it had better be for something that will pay off.
While I’m here, one of the most popular lawyers on Youtube has voiced the opinion that this is the most important election of our lifetime.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bTpbDL5dcg&t=10s I seem to recall, though, that in 2004, George Bush Jr was literally Hitler who would destroy democracy if he were reelected. I even vaguely recall that in the 1980s, if Ronald Reagan were elected, World War III was inevitable. Now, just because the boy has cried wolf repeatedly doesn’t mean that there are no wolves. But if authoritarian government comes to this country, the I suspect that it will have less to do with any particular president, and more to do with the increasing power of the executive branch, and both parties are guilty in that.