Does College Matter?

This is based on a post originally published by the author in Consider Magazine (http://consideronline.org/) in a point/counterpoint on the necessity of a university education.

These days many prospective students might ask if university is necessary for their success, and might ask if the investment is worth the return.  I believe that the university is a critical institution because of the value that it brings to students, and through them the value it brings to society.  A university education is necessary for young people because of the discipline and structure that a university provides for intellectual development.  This provides the strong foundation on which their future contributions to society are built.

Some of my readers are already chewing on what they imagine my arguments will be, searching for a single counter example to overturn them.  These are easy to find. Let's grab everyone's favorite: Bill Gates.  But of course Gates did go to college; he simply did not graduate.  Michael Dell.  Oops, same story.  Andrew Carnegie!  Never went to college at all.   Success!  University is not necessary!  Alas, if you accept this argument, then a university education is exactly right for you.

Andrew Carnegie did endow a college, which is now a rather good place called Carnegie Mellon University.  If university is not necessary, why did he do such a thing?   Because Carnegie recognized the importance of education, as do Gates, and Dell.  All three have supported higher education broadly, providing significant sums of money and public visibility to the higher education enterprise.

In fact, it is not useful to draw conclusions about the value of higher education from successful entrepreneurs like these.  Carnegie was a singularity, as are Gates and Dell.  They are not like everybody else: they were very lucky, especially in their timing; they were wicked smart; they were hugely ambitious and driven; they were not typical.  I'm sorry, but they are not you.

The question is not, “Can some people be successful in some measure without going to university?”  Of course, some individuals can, and this is a largely irrelevant fact.   The question is, “Can you be maximally successful in truly meaningful ways without going to college?”   The answer for most of you is “No.”

To be successful in meaningful and broad ways – including not only contributions to self but also contributions to society – you need to develop subtle capacities that for most of us are best developed and transmitted through the difficult intellectual work of a college education.  Education is not the accretion of facts but is rather the accumulation of habits of thought. This is what would remain even if you forgot all the facts that you learned.  Education is about the wisdom that you develop as you wrestle with interesting and difficult concepts, and as you learn to apply new modes of reasoning and analysis to complex problems.  Education is about learning to perceive problems, and this is harder than it sounds, for most problems go unseen.   And it is then about learning to then create solutions.  Education is about learning to be creative, acquiring persistence, and developing smart techniques to overcome barriers.  It is about learning to work with others who are very different and learning to understand and even see the value in their different perspectives.

Of course all of these capabilities can be developed without going to university.  But most of us would fail to fully develop them without the stimulation, the environment, and the challenges that the university sets for us both inside and outside the classroom.

The core to the development of these capabilities is the critique on our thinking that a university education provides to each of us.  This uncomfortable but critical critique on our approach to problems is the primary method by which humans improve as learners.  We can of course learn on our own, but most of us are very poor at self-critique.  We are generally overly critical, or insufficiently critical, or self-critical of the wrong things, or simply myopic about our own flawed thinking. 

While we can receive critique from other quarters and in other forms, a university is a space where we voluntarily place ourselves in the hands of professional and sometimes stern critics – professors.  This is a very different quality of critique than we can receive in other venues.  Perhaps we could all go start companies and receive critique from co-workers or investors.  But those critics have many inconsistent motives, and providing feedback is never their primary function; they give feedback only to advance some other agenda, such as protecting an investment or advancing the company plan.  In most contexts critique is a means towards an end other than your improvement, which is then only a potential collateral benefit.  In a university setting, critique is delivered with the primary purpose, and often with the only purpose, of improving the student’s thinking.

University education also provides structure and design.  Exercises and assignments are designed to produce intellectual growth.  On our own we don’t select the right exercises to develop ourselves; we select exercises that are too easy, or too hard, or poorly aligned with the areas we need to develop.  A curriculum is designed to be coherent and broad, rather than immediately or necessarily utilitarian.   While you could challenge yourself intellectually outside the university framework, the tendency would be toward narrowing to some set of perceived essentials that address some immediate needs.  This would be proper and efficient in that extra-university environment.  In contrast, a university forces you to stretch in directions where you might not want to stretch, because the primary goal is to improve your thinking.

There are many discussions these days about how a university education leads to better employment or better pay.  This is true in part because employers use university education as a filter to simplify their selection process, but more importantly it is true because, compared to those who do not partake of university education, graduates have developed stronger creative capacities, a greater ability to implement ideas, stronger intercultural skills, an enhanced ability to successfully communicate more complex ideas, and a deeper understanding of social responsibility.  These capacities have been honed by relentless critique and practice.  Graduates can then bring significant value to solving problems in “the real world.” Employers realize this; society realizes this.

Universities are the unique intellectual space specialized to challenging young people and critiquing their response to that challenge in order to make them more skilled and capable at recognizing and addressing problems.  This brings value to the students as individuals and to society as a whole, and this value proposition far exceeds what could be achieved through other intellectual growth in an environment not actually focused on that growth.

Could some singular individuals contribute greatly to the world without a university education?  Of course.  But the rest of us are not singularities: we are capable individuals with that special human gift: the ability to grow through smart effort molded by useful feedback.  The university is the place where we are directed in that smart effort and receive that feedback.  The university is the place where we grow, and where we learn to continue that growth even after we leave.

The College Bookstore

Need to learn thermodynamics?  Type “thermodynamics” into the Amazon search engine.  You will find a large selection of texts and monographs that can be delivered to your door tomorrow.   Keeping with my Michigan theme, I popped up Fundamentals of Thermodynamics by Borgnakke and Sonntag (this is the descendent of the text from which I learned thermodynamics in my own undergraduate days).  I can have it in a day – it is $176, but I can also rent it for my kindle for $27 and have it right now!

Even 20 years ago it would have been difficult for a student to find and buy a decent thermodynamics text without the help of an engineering faculty member to select the text and a college bookstore to stock it.   Today it is trivial.

But surely I can’t learn thermodynamics well without a good lecture.  No problem.  One Google search and I found literally 100’s of free online video lectures on thermodynamics.   But are they good?   Of that I can’t be sure, but a bunch are from MIT.  They are probably as good as any, and we can be certain that all of these will get better.

Selecting a textbook and engaging the logistical support of the bookstore, with its connections to book jobbers and publishers, was a service we once had to provide to students.  The selection of a text and the requirement that a student read it is a symbol of the content delivery approach to education that has characterized higher education for the last 100 years.  Faculty would select a text and require it.  The bookstore would make it available to students.  This all used to be a difficult and time consuming process and it was of value that we provided this service for students.  Similarly, faculty selected ideas and topics – sometimes aligned with the text, and sometimes not – and presented those ideas in a lecture in order to give emphasis and order to an area of knowledge.  Our job was to curate the knowledge and present it to students in a manner we believed would be best for their learning of it.

 

Neither service is particularly unique anymore, and both are now being provided for free or for very modest cost.   The collapse of the college bookstore as a viable business is an ongoing and accelerating process.  These stores are closing, and those that are still open do as much or more business selling sweatshirts with footballs on them as they do selling books.  Can we be sure that the value we do still provide to students is still worth what they pay for it?  Can we even be sure that students still need to buy lectures, or should we be selling sweatshirts in our classrooms?   

Lost in Translation

This is a version of the story that I told for the Lost in Translation event in North Quad, November 9, 2012.

It’s 1984 and my wife and I have moved to England.  This is the year that the IRA tried to assassinate Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher by blowing up the entire Grand Hotel in Brighton.  It’s also the year of the great British coal strike, when miners from Cornwall and Wales struck for the right to have their sons work in the mines like their fathers had, and electricity was somewhat scarce in Cambridge.

The year we arrived was the year that Peterhouse, the oldest College at Cambridge, first agreed to admit women.  And brave women they were too, because the Master of the College – that’s what they call a Dean – said, and this is a quote, “they had let the scrubbers in.”

The reason we moved to England was so I could do a study abroad year in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at Cambridge.  Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics.  D – A –M – P – T.   Dampt.  The word captures perfectly the English climate.  Dampt.  Snuggled at the wrong end of the Gulf Stream the British Isles are blessed with rain.  Rain, and chill.  It don’t get any better than that. 

My wife and I lived in a place called the Wolfson Flats at Churchill College.   Churchill College was named after Winston Churchill, who apparently had something to do with World War II.  He was a man after whom whole colleges are named.  Wolfson, on the other hand, seemed to be man after whom flats are named.   Kinda like CC Little, a man after whom, it seems, UM bus stops are named.

Now you may wonder why they call these places flats in England, rather than using the proper English word, “apartment.”   The reason, apparently, is because the roof is dead flat.

So the roof is flat, but also with a low parapet surrounding it.  And did I mention the rain?  Flat roof, with a parapet, in the rain --- what could go wrong?

Our flat was on the top floor, and we had a wonderful skylight right over the card table – excuse me over the dining table.

Skylight.  Flat roof.  Low parapet.  Rain.  What could go wrong?  The amazing thing was that it did not drip.  It did not ooze.  It did not even spot.  It simply opened up one day like someone was pouring a pitcher of water from the roof of the Wolfson Flats right down onto our card table.

Now next to the card table was a large metal box.  Inside that box were several hundred bricks.   These bricks had but one purpose: to get hot.  Also in the box was a 220 volt high current electric heater.   This sounds like a great place to pour water.  

Fortunately, because of the coal strike, we could only run electricity through the heater in the morning, the theory being that the bricks would get hot and radiate heat for the rest of the afternoon.  And evening.  And through the night.   Like evolution, it’s only a theory.  

In reality the first thing we did in Cambridge was retreat to London, go to Harrods, and buy sleeping bags.  These served as our bed linens for the entire year in the Wolfson Flats.

The meal that was on the table had been bought and prepared that very day.  This was possible because we had a full kitchen – which is to say we had a two-burner camp stove and a dorm room fridge.  You can’t store food.  And you can’t cook much because you only have a two-burner camp stove in your flat.  So in Cambridge you hunt up what you will eat that day, and skin and cook it on your camp stove that night.  Then you clean the dishes by putting them under the skylight and letting the Wolfson Flats pour water on them.

But the camp stove had a vital purpose: the flat had a bathtub too.  Did I mention that the British Isles are at the wrong end of the Gulf Stream, and it is cold and DAMPT?   Fortunately the flat came with a tea kettle, and the kettle fit nicely on the camp stove.  So with the bath tub, the camp stove, and the tea kettle, you could take a hot bath in the Wolfson Flats.

So let’s face it, Wolfson had his name on a kinda cruddy set of flats. 

Sir Issac Wolfson made his money through a company called Great Universal Stores – or GUS.  GUS sold clothes mail order, also owned furniture stores and, ironically, do-it-yourself stores. 

But Isaac Wolsfon said “No man should have more than 100,000 pounds.  The rest he should give to charity.”   He made lots more than 100,000 pounds, and give it away he did.  He gave to found a hospital in Israel.  He gave to New Hall, one of the first women’s colleges at Cambridge. He gave to the Waterford School in Swaziland, where Nelson Mandela’s children and grand children went to school.  He gave to University College, the first co-ed college at Cambridge.   And University College is now called Wolfson College, so I guess that, like Winston Churchill, Isaac Wolfson is the kind of person who has colleges named after him.

I lived in Cambridge nearly 30 years ago, and did not know until this year what good Isaac Wolfson had done.   To me he was just the name on a crappy set of flats where I lived.  His contributions had been lost in translation.

And CC Little? He was the 6^th president of the University of Michigan. 

The Social Network

This is based on a talk given to the first SCEEP reunion.

In the College of Engineering we are unashamed seekers after excellence.  As students you are all here because you are, or will be, excellent.

To be an engineer in the 21st century you must start with a foundation of technical excellence.  But that is not enough: you must develop that technical excellence plus the abilities that will let you use that excellence to make an impact.  These other abilities include creativity and innovation, an entrepreneurial mindset, intercultural intelligence, a collaborative spirit, social and environmental responsibility, and effective communication.  Developing these broader abilities is important.

Notice that I say developing.  Intelligence is not a fixed quantity.  Your capabilities are not static, and your potential is not limited.  Your intelligence, your capabilities, your potential for impact, can all grow.  And your job here at the UM is in fact to grow.

You do this through your classes, of course, but you also do this through the other experiences in which you engage at the UM.   When will do you research?  When will you work on an engineering project team?   When will you go abroad?  All of these experiences are educational and all are key to allowing you to grow into more than you currently are.

As SCEEP students you share a special bond – your experiences during the summer on our campus give you a special perspective on engineering in the CoE, and give you a special perspective on each other.   Because of SCEEP you come into the College with practice in working on teams – with an understanding of how to work across and to take advantage of differences between individuals.  You have begun to learn how to take advantage of the strengths of others, and how to contribute your own strengths to their efforts.

This general pattern – taking advantage of the capabilities of others, and contributing your capabilities in turn – is a key skill for success.  The social network that you build will contribute as much to your success as will the intellectual capabilities you develop.  So as you make yourself smarter and more informed, remember that success in engineering will come not just from technical excellence, but from that host of other competencies as well.  And remember that success will come from connecting with as large a network of others as you can.

You will never know when or how you might take advantage of your network.  This is an exercise in capacity building – you must meet others and learn about them without knowing how that connection might later matter to either of you.  Have faith: the social capital you build when you connect with another will pay off for both of you.

While traveling in China this summer a colleague and I met a UM student who was studying there; I she was there because she knew another of our colleagues who was advocating for her to take this chance to go to China.  If she had not had that connection, I would likely never have met her.  And because of that meeting she has a really cool job working with other students who are interested in going abroad.  That chance connection occurred because she was open to meeting new people and to approaching every new situation with an open mind and positive attitude, combined with hard work.    Her network of connections lead to positive results that none of us designed or intended; it was her social network that facilitated the good outcome.

This SCEEP reunion is itself the result of that same trip to China.  Chance connections and conversations there led directly to this event.

This event is a chance to renew your connection to your colleagues from SCEEP, and to meet students from other SCEEP cohorts.   But you need to build beyond these cohorts as well.  I encourage you to connect with as much of the UM community as you can, and to keep your education in mind as you do so.  Those chance connections into our community will pay off.

So let me ask again: When will do you research?  When will you work on an engineering project team?   When will you go abroad?  And who will you meet when you do these things, and what amazing outcomes will result from your doing so?

An unlikely comparison

My parents were white and middle class.  My dad is a physician, and my mom was a classics major who taught school from time to time.  When I was young they talked with all of us about many careers, from anthropologist, to army officer, to curator, to doctor, to engineer, to musician, to professor, to sociologist.  It was a large list.

Maya Beasley’s book, Opting Out: losing the potential of America’s black youth (University of Chicago Press, 2011) describes how the lack of social and cultural capital in African-American families with students in highly selective institutions leads these students towards limited career choices.   Beasley writes that “responses from the students who participated in this study suggest that differences in social capital enable white parents to offer career advice and other support that is more insightful and more effective than the support provided by black parents.”  This difference is an effect of the different educational and career histories of white and African-American families coming out of the civil-rights movement of the 1960’s.

One difference that Dr. Beasley notes between the white and African-American students who she studied regards the sense of financial obligation that many black students feel, and that many white students do not.  Based on interviews with a number of students at highly selective colleges similar to the University of Michigan, she notes that African-American students often shape their career aspirations around a need to provide financially not only for themselves, but also for their parents, their grandparents, and even for their brothers and sisters.  The black and white families were equally involved in raising their children and equally stable but the African-American families, while middle class, did have lower median income than the white families, and had less chance to build wealth for the long-term.  This led the African-American students to design their career aspirations around their perception of the financial return of the occupation. In one example Beasley describes a student named Jason whose middle class family could not invest adequately for retirement.  Not only could they not transfer wealth to him to launch his future, but Jason felt an obligation to support his parents in their future retirement.  “There was no safety net for Jason; rather, he was to provide the safety net for the rest of his family,” Beasley writes.

This passage struck me because I work frequently with Chinese students.  When I first started doing so, I was struck, and indeed puzzled (from my own cultural perspective) by the narrow way that Chinese students selected their major.  Many of these students seemed to me to be focused on financial success rather than on how they could best make the world better, or where they could develop their own interests; they were focused on a narrow set of majors that they considered popular and potentially lucrative.  Over time I came to understand some of the realities that gave them this view: they have grown up in a tight job market and volatile economy; they are only children, born under China’s one-child policy; they are obliged under Confucian ideals to respect their family and build their primary loyalty around it.  And they are their parents’ retirement plan.  Because the relatively weak social safety net of the People’s Republic of China may prove inadequate to support the parents, these Chinese students will have to provide the safety net for the rest of their family.

This is an unexpected parallel: African-American students and Chinese students share a desire for economic stability for not only their own but also their parents’ and family's futures, and this impacts the way they think about career options.  White students in Beasley's study did not feel this economic instability; their families had accumulated significantly more wealth, their parents' futures were secure, and their own career aspirations ranged over a wider more diverse set of choices.  The Chinese students' families, like those of African-American students in Beasley’s study, could provide only limited perspective on career options, and this is strongly reflected in the students' choices.

The reality, discussed in Beasley’s study, is that the greater diversity of career choices apparent to white students may actual lead to greater economic stability than the more narrow choices of the African-American students in her study.  I suspect this would be true for our Chinese students as well.  The challenge is in finding a way to provide the social capital that could empower these students to think more broadly.

Acknowledgement: Drs. Amy Conger and Cinda-Sue Davis brought Maya Beasley's monograph to my attention last week.  I recommend it.

Failure and Guanxi

THERE is a broadly perpetrated fiction in modern society. . . The fiction is that society consists of a set of independent individuals, each of whom acts to achieve goals that are independently arrived at…

Roger D. Goddard

Imagine you are in China; you do not speak the language; you do not know how to behave; you don’t know what those around you consider important. But you have important business to do. You will likely fail, not because you are incapable, but because you do not understand the system. Your failure will seem unfair.

The UM is a very selective place. All of our students were amazingly accomplished in high school. But some fail when they come here. A few fail by choice, but more fail because they do not know how to succeed, and do not learn the tools necessary for success in a demanding, complex, foreign environment. For many students the transition to college is not just a shift to a new academic environment, but is rather a move into a foreign culture. This transition is all too often disguised by the apparently familiar language (English) and activities (going to class), and the feeling of alienation and isolation goes unrecognized for the culture shock that it is.

Back to China: What do you do? Change China? Not likely. You will need to make connections with those who can help you. The social network you will build gives you what the Chinese call guanxi. You can think of it as capital on which to build success. Just as you need financial capital on which to build your business, so you need social capital on which to build success in any complex community setting. The importance of such social capital is demonstrated in the business setting by GM’s entry into China, as deftly described by Michael Dunne in his book “American Wheels, Chinese Roads.” GM’s many failures, leading to eventual success, can be traced to a failure to understand China and a failure to understand the importance of guanxi. But the principle applies more widely; there is a considerable sociological literature on social capital and its utility in creating success in a social setting, and a branch of this literature focuses on the role of social capital in college success.*

To succeed you need connections within the existing power structure and you need to understand the norms of the community – in the university setting you need connections with faculty and staff and other students, and you need to understand what is expected and what works. Students who understand the university as a community of people and understand this community's expectations – especially its implicit, hidden, unarticulated expectations – can much more easily do what is needed and can more easily find the support that we all need to be successful. Students with good guanxi are more robustly positioned to deal with roadblocks and setbacks. Those for whom the university is unfamiliar, like a foreign country, need to build a store of social connections and understand to help navigate the place or else they will fail.

These human connections can share understanding of community expectations, knowledge of success strategies, and transmit the social norms that lead to success – what are the most productive study strategies? where can you reach out for help? what are good co-curricular activities? ... and so on.

Your social connections can share their own connections within the broader organization, and they can even take actions to your benefit. I’ve met many students who succeed, and many who fail: those who fail often feel they have little control over their situation; they feel buffeted by outside influences and lack a sense of agency. Your social network, your guanxi, will provide information, influence, and control over your fate. Your social capital provides confidence.

*Roger Goddard, “Relational Networks, Social Trust, and Norms: A Social Capital Perspective on Students’ Chances of Academic Success,” Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 25, pp 59-74 (2003) is one example of this literature.

The Day I Became a Study Abroad Parent

I put my son on a plane today.  He’s headed to Shanghai to study for 8 weeks at the University of Michigan – Shanghai Jiao Tong University Joint institute. I’ve written before in this blog about the benefit of international experiences, and this experience is going to make a huge difference to him. He’s stepping outside his comfort zone and will discover capabilities within himself that he does not know he has.  So why am I uneasy?

He’s talked about spending a summer in Asia since middle school. He’s now a young man just about to turn 22, and will realize this dream. He’s traveled overseas on shorter trips with me, and he’s even been to Shanghai before. He’s highly capable. I know that there will be unexpected challenges for him, and things will not go “according to plan.” But that’s the whole point: a huge part of the value for him will be learning to cope with the unexpected.  He’s well prepared for this.

But this blog is about me, and why I’m uneasy.  I really should not be: I’ve lived abroad several times, and know it’s doable, adventurous, and leads to growth; the folks in Ann Arbor who have arranged this program are amazing and I trust them completely; I’ve been to Shanghai many times, and I know most of the staff and faculty in China with whom he will interact.  With all this inside information and all these personal contacts, if I’m even a bit uneasy I can only imagine what other parents, lacking my contacts, might feel.

As we pulled away from the airport I picked up his smartphone, which is not going to China because the cost would be prohibitive.  It physically represents the loss of contact: I can’t call to see if he made the flight; I can’t email tomorrow to see if he arrived.  I probably won’t hear from him for several days.  The journey he’s launched is something like a test - the work will be his alone, and he will completely own the successes and failures of the adventure.  It’s that loss of control that causes my unease.  Seeing my son head to China is an act of faith: an act of faith in him.

It occurs to me that I too am going to learn something from his overseas experience.  I too am stepping outside my comfort zone and I too will discover something within myself.  But I don't yet know what.