Wednesday 29 September 2010

Defending Higher Education

I'm not very good at debating politics, or more accurately, policies. When I look back on these conversations, I realise that the problem was setting the stage at the very start. It's so easy to be trapped into arguing expediency and incrementalism within a system when it's actually the system itself that needs change. What I need to learn to do is frame the argument around the principles that are worth fighting for. If we're not fighting for principles then what are we doing anyway?

It seems like the debate over higher education is stuck in a similar kind of rut. Universities have plenty of defenders, but they all seem to be making broadly the same points as the attackers. There's a vital principle that they seem to have conceded, and that's to do with the purpose of university: essentially, there's a consensus that the whole point is the pursuit of economic growth. So the debate hinges on an apparently technical question, does higher education promote growth, and if so how can it do so more effectively?

Of course the answers are generally ideological: if you support universities you'll say that expanding education creates more highly skilled workforces and boosts the economy; you might even say that higher education is "the powerhouse for economic growth." You might also find yourself in a debate about which subjects are best at promoting growth. It creates (for government-funded higher ed systems like ours) what libertarians will tell you is a classic central planning problem: how do you work out what you're going to need? If you're on the other side of the issue, you'll say:
"What's the point, you end up with a lot of debt and you may not get a job out of it anyway - what good is university?" (@ 23.38)
When we're trying to answer that question - what good is university - we shouldn't let ourselves be trapped into all these arguments about jobs and skills. Because we all know it: if that's really the point of university, then what we have is a monumentally wasteful and inefficient system. After all, they weren't thinking much about economic growth when they started founding universities in the middle ages. That was never what they were for. We need to start making that point again. Our answer should have no dollar value attached. It should start with something like this (from the same radio debate linked above):
"The purpose of university is to encourage students to think, to be critical, to be informed."

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