The Narrowing of the American Mind
The Narrowing of the American Mind - Commentary - the Chronicle of Higher Education
Envision this: You’re an employer, interviewing a candidate for an entry-level position in your unit. The applicant is very direct.
“I’m in it for the money,” she explains. “I make all my choices on the basis of how much I can expect to earn. I chose my major based on earnings reports. I applied for this particular position because you pay more than any other company in the region. Actually, I’m a bit sorry that I didn’t stop with a two-year degree, since I read in the newspaper last week that I could have made almost as much in my first job with half the time spent on college. I hate thinking about all the time I wasted.”
You have no difficulty deciding not to hire this new graduate. The job applicant who arrives talking money first, money only, lacks common sense, and career sense, too.
And yet our candid candidate did nothing more than parrot—with chilling accuracy and very recent data—the current national dialogue about what really matters in college.
With Americans now experiencing acute anxiety over jobs, money, and our larger future, policy analysis and public discussion of higher education—from the White House down—have focused with laserlike intensity on the connections between college and earnings. The U.S. Department of Education has led this effort with its “gainful employment” regulations—ostensibly aimed at for-profit excess, but all too clearly a blunt instrument waiting to be used on all parts of postsecondary education.