2013年12月英语四级阅读长篇阅读原文来源

Vedder also notes the decrease in teaching loads by tenured faculty, and the vast increase in nonacademic amenities like plush dorms and intercollegiate athletics. “Every campus has its climbing wall,” he notes drily. “You cannot have a campus without a climbing wall.”

Just as homeowners took out equity loans to buy themselves spa bathrooms and chef’s kitchens and told themselves that they were really building value with every borrowed dollar, today’s college students can buy themselves a four-year vacation in an increasingly well-upholstered resort, and everyone congratulates them for investing in themselves.

Unsurprisingly those 18-year-olds often don’t look quite so hard at the education they’re getting. In Academically Adrift, their recent study of undergraduate learning, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa find that at least a third of students gain no measurable skills during their four years in college. For the remainder who do, the gains are usually minimal. For many students, college is less about providing an education than a credential—a certificate testifying that they are smart enough to get into college, conformist enough to go, and compliant enough to stay there for four years.

When I was a senior, one of my professors asked wonderingly, “Why is it that you guys spend so much time trying to get as little as possible for your money?” The answer, Caplan says, is that they’re mostly there for a credential, not learning. “Why does cheating work?” he points out. If you were really just in college to learn skills, it would be totally counterproductive. “If you don’t learn the material, then you will have less human capital and the market will punish you—there’s no reason for us to do it.” But since they think the credential matters more than the education, they look for ways to get the credential as painlessly as possible.

There has, of course, always been a fair amount of credentialism in education. Ten years ago, when I entered business school at the University of Chicago, the career-services person who came to talk to our class said frankly, “We could put you on a cruise ship for the next two years and it wouldn’t matter.”

But how much, exactly, does credentialism matter? For years there’s been a fierce debate among economists over how much of the value of a degree is credentials and how much the education. Heckman thinks the credentialism argument—what economists call “signaling”—is “way overstated.” His work does show that a lot depends on outside factors like cognitive ability and early childhood health. But he says flatly that “no one thinks that schooling has no effect on ability.”

That debate matters a lot, because while the value of an education can be very high, the value of a credential is strictly limited. If students are gaining real, valuable skills in school, then putting more students into college will increase the productive capacity of firms and the economy—a net gain for everyone. Credentials, meanwhile, are a zero-sum game. They don’t create value; they just reallocate it, in the same way that rising home values serve to ration slots in good public schools. If employers have mostly been using college degrees to weed out the inept and the unmotivated, then getting more people into college simply means more competition for a limited number of well-paying jobs. And in the current environment, that means a lot of people borrowing money for jobs they won’t get.

But we keep buying because after two decades prudent Americans who want a little financial security don’t have much left. Lifetime employment, and the pensions that went with it, have now joined outhouses, hitching posts, and rotary-dial telephones as something that wide-eyed children may hear about from their grandparents but will never see for themselves. The fabulous stock-market returns that promised an alternative form of protection proved even less durable. At least we have the house, weary Americans told each other, and the luckier ones still do, as they are reminded every time their shaking hand writes out another check for a mortgage that’s worth more than the home that secures it. What’s left is ... investing in ourselves. Even if we’re not such a good bet.

Between 1992 and 2008, the number of bachelor’s degrees awarded rose almost 50 percent, from around 1.1 million to more than 1.6 million. According to Vedder, 60 percent of those additional students ended up in jobs that have not historically required a degree—waitress, electrician, secretary, mail carrier. That’s one reason the past few decades have witnessed such an explosion in graduate and professional degrees, as kids who previously would have stopped at college look for ways to stand out in the job market.

It is in that market that students may first, finally, have begun to revolt. For decades, when former English majors wondered how to get out of their dead-end jobs, the answer was “go to law school”—an effect that was particularly pronounced in economic downturns. In 2010 in the Los Angeles Times, Mark Greenbaum warned prospective lawyers that “the number of new positions is likely to be fewer than 30,000 per year. That is far fewer than what’s needed to accommodate the 45,000 juris doctors graduating from U.S. law schools each year.”

That was the year that LSAT taking peaked, with 170,000 prospective lawyers signing up for the test. But then students apparently started heeding Greenbaum’s warning. Two years later that figure dropped to just 130,000, lower than it had been in more than a decade. Law-school applications also dropped, from 88,000 to 67,000.

That’s a heartening sign for those of us who believe that we’ve been graduating too many unemployable lawyers. But as we saw with the housing and dotcom booms, what comes after a bubble is not usually a return to a nice, sustainable equilibrium; it’s chaos. Of course, the first thing to do when you’re in a hole is stop digging. But that still leaves you in a pretty big hole.

Everyone seems to agree that the government, and parents, should be rethinking how we invest in higher education—and that employers need to rethink the increasing use of college degrees as crude screening tools for jobs that don’t really require college skills. “Employers seeing a surplus of college graduates and looking to fill jobs are just tacking on that requirement,” says Vedder. “De facto, a college degree becomes a job requirement for becoming a bartender.”