What Is College For?

By Ezra Bowen

"I want to go to college to become a doctor," the high school pupil told the researchers. Why? "Basically so I can make some money and then take it easy." A college student described her priority as "having a job when you get out." As for broad scholarship that might expand one's vision or values, another student declared: "I'm not interested in hearing about the professor's Ph.D. dissertation."

According to a major new study, conducted by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and released this week, such careerist replies reflect the views of 90% of U.S. high school students and 88% of parents on the prime purpose of a college education. Only 28% of parents and 27% of high school students see college as a place to become a more thoughtful citizen. Nor were faculty more sanguine. "My students," commented a professor, "have no idea what scholarship in my department is all about."

The 242-page study, titled College: The Undergraduate Experience in America, draws on surveys of 5,000 college faculty, 4,500 undergraduates and 1,300 presidents and other administrators, as well as 1,200 high school students. The author, Carnegie President Ernest L. Boyer, points to the realities beneath such vocationalism: between now and 1990 there will be 12 million to 13 million jobs for some 15 million baccalaureate earners. The University of Illinois reports that only 19% of its humanities students have guaranteed jobs upon graduation, vs. 90% for business majors. Small wonder that according to U.S. Government statistics, bachelor's degrees in business have doubled from 114,865 in 1971 to 230,031 in 1984, while B.A.s in English and literature have plunged from 57,026 to 26,419. In the competition for enrollments, some schools have dropped B.A.s in subjects such as geology and music education to emphasize business specialties like restaurant management. - Says one college president: "It's all right to talk about liberal arts goals, but we have to face up to what students want today."

Since it yields in these ways to societal pressures, the report argues, the baccalaureate is a "troubled institution. Driven by careerism and professional education, the nation's colleges . . . are more successful in credentialing (for future jobs) than in providing a quality education." The document singles out several "deep divisions" in the typical undergraduate experience in the U.S.

Among them:

-- "A mismatch . . . between faculty expectations and the academic preparation of entering students." Said a math professor: "The biggest problem I have with my students is getting them to read and write."

-- A "disjointed" curriculum whose "disciplines have fragmented into smaller and smaller pieces, unrelated to an educational whole."

-- A cleft between undergraduates who expect to be taught and faculty for whom "promotion and tenure hang on research and publication."

-- A divorce between an undergraduate's major and general education requirements, which students often see as something "to get out of the way." Many schools permit such narrow focus on the major that what Boyer calls the 'great commonalities of learning" are lost.

-- Disagreements and confusion over goals. The student-body president at one public university told Carnegie interviewers: "If there are any goals around here, they haven't been expressed to me."

The Carnegie report is far from the only alarm being raised about the baccalaureate. Last month Secretary of Education William Bennett told Harvard that its undergraduate school, like many others, failed to manifest a clear educational purpose, and was wasting students' steep tuition payments. In a speech on campus, he also suggested that Harvard and others did not provide a solid "moral education." During the past two years, similar criticisms of undergraduate curricula and values have come from such authoritative sources as the National Institute of Education and the Association of American Colleges.

As for what can be done, Boyer argues that colleges should upgrade language proficiency by, first, requiring a written essay of incoming freshmen. Freshmen ought then to take a yearlong English course, with emphasis on writing that should extend to other courses through all four years. The heart of those four years, he declares, should be a required core curriculum that embraces language, the arts, history, social and governmental institutions and the natural sciences. Thus everyone, regardless of individual goals, gets a base of essential common knowledge. Moreover, the major subject must be enriched with related requirements on the history of the field, its socioeconomic implications and the ethical issues it raises. If, writes Boyer, a major cannot be discussed in these terms, "it belongs in a trade school."

The status of teachers, he continues, must be raised through higher salaries and departmental standing, as well as cash prizes for top instructors and grants to develop improved teaching methods. And the mismatch between secondary and higher education should be eliminated by various means, such as creating partnerships between schools and colleges to improve pre-entrance achievements and pushing standardized testing organizations to provide guidance counseling on the step into college. "If I were to open a college tomorrow," Boyer sums up, "I'd tell the students, 'You're not going to come away from this place without experiencing the common agenda that I call the core of the learning experience' -- so they'd have a set of values to encase their competence."