In defence of universities…under fire from left and right

March 24th, 2018  |  Published in Education

Universities are under fire from both sides of politics. And I don’t like it. Not that I think that counts for anything, except to name my bias before I outline the arguments and respond in defence.

In defence of universities

Universities changed my life

People with my kind of background, particularly women, didn’t go to university when I left school. Not until Gough Whitlam made universities free.

I studied psychology, social theory, feminist theory, philosophy, and media – for three degrees, at three separate universities over twelve years (interspersed by children and paid work). I learned concepts and language that allowed me to express previously half-baked thoughts and unformed questions. The insights of the scholars I studied taught me to express some of the swirl in my head.

It was bliss. Challenging, but enormously exciting and endlessly enriching.

I may therefore be nurturing an idea of education that some would see as naïve, outdated, or both. I do cherish a concept of universities as crucibles for ideas, creative endeavour and critical analysis.

Beyond my own experience, I remember conversations with a young man from Vietnam who was sent to study policy development at university in Australia. His essays were routinely returned to him with comments about the need to be reflective. He didn’t know what that meant or how to achieve it. Being asked to think critically did not fit his concept of education. His experience in Vietnam had not prepared him for this expectation, although it has been taken-for-granted in Australia, at least in the humanities and social sciences.

My Vietnamese friend and I are presumably not the only ones who have been enriched by our university experiences.

Enriched by university

The case against universities

The current attack on universities comes from both sides of politics, as noted by  Glenn Withers.

The right argues that universities are doing a poor job of meeting the needs of employers. Students don’t gain work-related skills, except in a few narrow areas. Spending on universities is therefore a waste of public money.

The left argues that universities reproduce inequality under an umbrella of ‘merit’.  Universities merely ‘credentialise’ the pretensions of the elite, propping up their claims to positions of privilege on meritocratic grounds.

The argument from the left is about access and equity, rather than funding, but both arguments can be co-opted by governments intent on saving money and privatising education. Universities, it can be claimed, are a waste of public money and they are unfair.

Here follow the arguments, and my responses to them in defence of universities.

Universities fail employers…say the right

Bryan Caplan, professor of economics, is one of those currently arguing against universities as a waste of public money. He says qualifications are an inefficient tool for employers, and thus provide poor value. His argument goes like this:

  • Most education doesn’t teach you anything you use on the job.
  • Getting the certificate is all that’s important.
  • Education’s payoff comes from clearing the hurdles. “If you flunk a class, plenty of Universities as waste of moneyemployers will trash your application. But if you pass that same class, then forget everything you learned, employers will shrug.”
  • That is, qualifications are used by employers as profiling tools, and inefficient ones at that.
  • This kind of profiling leads to credential inflation. The education needed to get a job outstrips the education needed do the job.
  • We should, therefore, Caplan says, be pushing politicians for less education rather than more. “Taxpayers are mostly fuelling a futile arms race. Generous government support has caused massive credential inflation.”

Universities are more (and less) than conveyor belts for employers

Employment selection processes that screen people in, or out, on the basis of qualifications, regardless of their relationship to the work, need scrutiny. But, doesn’t the problem lie with the employment system rather than with the universities? Employers might be better off developing their own processes and tests, as Peter Martin suggests.

Universities not conveyor beltsReducing universities to preselection conveyor belts, and then saying they’re not very good at the job, and might as well have their money taken away, seems like putting the cart before the horse. It involves a distortion of the traditional role of universities, Justin Stover notes, one that’s become normalised within the prevailing political-economic climate.

Universities, Stover argues, are more than fee-for-service corporations and vendors for hawking skills. They are, for example, also research institutions.

“Uni is where I learnt how to learn,” a young woman told me recently. She completed an Arts degree including Japanese, cultural studies, ancient history, and philosophy, but has never worked in related areas. Learning how to learn, however, provided the basis from which she taught herself the drawing and computer skills she now uses in her employment as a digital artist and illustrator. Not a predictable trajectory from university to employment, but that’s part of the point.

Employers must surely carry primary responsibility for developing selection processes that effectively match applicants to jobs, whether university graduates or not. Many employers could start by paying attention to their job descriptions, which are often pretty generic in my observation.

Key selection criteria also frequently begin with terms like “demonstrated ability to…” or “experience with…” and thus assume prior workplace experience. Graduates looking for a first job in their field are likely to be blocked by this requirement.

Implicit in the demand for relevant experience is an assumption that applicants have done their on-the-job training in some other workplace (unless the practical placements included in some courses are counted). Perhaps, in addition to refining their selection processes, employers might need to consider more targeted on-the-job training (by which I don’t mean internships, especially the sort graduates pay to do, but that’s another whole can of worms).

Cart (employers) before horse (learning)In sum, the onus of responsibility for meeting the needs of employers surely rests with employers. They may form productive partnerships with universities, but universities are both more, and less, than conveyor belts from lecture theatre to hot desk.

Employers may need to consider their selection processes and their on-the-job training provisions. Approaches that extend beyond individual employers, such as this digital portal for matching students and the tech industry, also raise interesting possibilities.

Universities reproduce the meritocracy and hence inequality…say the left

The critique of universities from the left is based on a perception that they promote inequality by propping up an invalid notion of meritocracy.

The idea of the meritocracy, Michael Young argued 60 years ago in 1958, is the most significant fact of modern society. It carries the idea that people rise to the top because of their abilities, rather than because they have money behind them or are ‘well connected’.

The meritocracy has been enabled by Education Acts (implemented in Australia from the 1850s onwards) which made education “free, compulsory and secular”. Assessments within the formal education system divide society into exam-passers and exam-failers.

Exam-passers have an entrée into the meritocracy. Parents therefore expend great effort to get children into the ‘right’ schools and universities, send them to cram-schools and provide extra-curricular tutoring.

The meritocracy has thus inevitably become linked to money. Your life chances increase with the amount of advantage your parents can buy. Private schools “have turned themselves into exam factories” because those with the means have learned the importance of ‘merit’.

The meritocracy is thus a misnomer. Everyone does not have the same chance of success, even if they are prepared to put in lots of hard work. Rather, privilege and money reproduce privilege and money with the education system as vehicle. The mythical ‘meritocracy’ provides a smokescreen for reproducing the status quo in terms of the distribution of wealth and power.

A cursory look at the demographics of those who hold powerful positions in governments, bureaucracies, corporations, universities, churches, and the media demonstrates the point.

The ruling political party in Australia, for example, which staunchly endorses ‘merit’, has almost 80% male Members of Parliament, many of whom attended elite private schools. The opposition, by contrast, has much closer to a 50-50 split, and (in terms of gender equity at least) has jettisoned the notion of the ‘meritocracy’ in favour of a quota system. Party politics aside, it would be difficult to sustain an argument that the current government demonstrates sufficient merit to justify its gender imbalance, or any other demographic imbalance.

The myth of meritocracy

Inequality reproduces itself with or without universities

So, the argument goes, if the ‘meritocracy’ is a delusion and universities are enabling the delusion, then universities are problematic. In fact, they’re helping to increase the inequality they’re meant to subvert.

However, I want to interject at this point, isn’t the problem the spurious notion of meritocracy rather than universities per se? In which case, isn’t that what should be challenged, rather than universities and education?

The power elite has always reproduced itself one way or another. The ‘meritocracy’ may have superseded the nobility, and it might sound more legitimate, but if it’s a delusion it negates the claim of fairness. In fact, it promotes unfairness.

Prevailing notions of ‘merit’ need debunking, but this challenge needs to be addressed directly. Defunding universities will not do the job. Inequality would inevitably reinvent itself under some other camouflage.

The ‘meritocracy’ has become a way of masking privilege, and privilege creates an uneven playing field. Take privilege out of the reckoning, and merit might be a legitimate basis for a social reward system. Until that happens, appeals to the ‘meritocracy’ deserve to be treated with suspicion.

Rather than undermining universities, shouldn’t the focus be on exposing and dismantling the links between the myth of ‘meritocracy’ and privilege?

Meritocracy masks privilege

Now what?

In sum, the argument against universities, from the right, relies on artificially narrowing their role to conveyor belts for employers and then calling them out when there’s a less than perfect fit. The argument from the left rests on a link between universities and a notion of meritocracy that is clearly invalid. Both arguments can (and no doubt will) be co-opted to justify funding cuts.

Neither argument honours the role of universities as centres of learning and research. Neither addresses the real issues of developing efficient employment selection processes or dismantling the pseudo-meritocracy. Cutting funds to universities will not solve these problems. It might save money in the short term but will leave us poorer in other ways.

So, I would argue, we need to pull apart:

  1. The role of universities
  2. Employment selection processes
  3. Inequality, ‘meritocracy’, privilege, and fairness

All of these issues need serious consideration, each in its own right, and also in relation to the others. Collapsing the second and third into the first, however, is at best a simplistic knee-jerk.

My questions to readersPlausible defence of universities

What do you think? Do universities have value beyond producing employees? Can the role of universities be disentangled from spurious meritocracy? Is my defence of universities plausible, or am I sadly out of touch?

………………………………………………………………………………………………..

 

Scroll down for COMMENTS.
First-time comments
have to be moderated.
I try to complete that process, and respond, within 24 hours.
Do check back.

Social justice is for everyone (previously 2020socialjustice) is also on Facebook (click here)
Twitter (click here)

 

…………………………………………….

NOTE: If you like this post, you might also be interested in The convenient fiction of ‘merit-based success‘, The writing on the wall for public education and posts in the  category Power & Politics

………………………………………………………………………………….

Get free monthly emails about new blog posts

8 comments on “In defence of universities…under fire from left and right”

  1. Clem says:

    Hi Joan,
    Thanks for the reply.

    Incremental changes to school funding were made as the political parties became increasingly neoliberal. Neoliberals are now dying off faster than millennials are supplanting them, so over the long run, a reversal of those funding conditions could happen. However, given the immense vested interest of the Old Parties in their private school social networks, that’s simply not going to happen until and unless their dominance in politics is ended: when they are unable to *ever* form independent governments, then you will see the improvements our democracy needs, including a federal ICAC, an end to political donations, cancellation of politician retirement entitlements if they *ever* go to work in corporations, etc.

    However, it’s important to note that it’s always harder to take something away from voters than it is to give it.

    As for ‘affirmative action’: I believe this only applies when the population so assisted is a minority which is also under-represented in the area under consideration. In this case, the minority is private school graduates who are over-represented in high-ranking university courses. As for denying the privileged their self-entitled ‘rightful’ places at Uni: that would be the point.

    An alternative approach would be to normalise public school entry scores to adjust them to match the distribution of private school scores. That would erase any *educational* advantage of a private school education, of course, which is pretty much what research is finding: such schools confer no meaningful advantage at Universities, which could probably do their own adjustment, irrespective of government policy.

    • Morning Clem,
      You make it sound as if change is possible, and that’s encouraging.
      In relation to reversing current trends, I realised after posting my comment that it was a bit ill-considered in failing to take account of the point you make about it being easier to give something than to take it away. And yet, when you look at the erosion of welfare and public health and education services, there has in fact been a lot taken away from many. Regardless, substantial numbers of those who are disadvantaged by the trends appear to remain mesmerised by the spin. The Age (7 April) reported that almost 50% of voters now support the corporate tax cuts. I find that hard to comprehend, given that the spin pivots on the thoroughly debunked notion of trickle-down.
      Your idea of normalising score distributions for private versus public schools is intriguing. It wouldn’t fly in the current political climate but could be part of a reconstructed one such as you describe. And, parallel adjustments do already happen in the sense of some subjects being given a weighting compared to others in determining the final marks in my understanding.
      I think I know that change will happen, but I would like to be able to see its shape, and I’m impatient.

  2. Clem says:

    Hi Joan,
    I think it’s pretty clear that money is corrupting universities: whatever their alleged role in society, they are becoming one more way for the rich to get richer on the back of the workers.

    Your point about the meritocracy is fundamental: the rich think that they have merit because they were (usually) born rich, a circular argument that a good university would teach them is fallacious in the extreme. To deal with the cycle of positive ‘meritorious’ feedback, the means is simple: put an end to private schools of all kinds, everywhere and apply the Gonski funding principles for funding – needs-, not achievement-, based. This would incidentally end the public-private revolving door, breaking up the social networks that private schools foster in our elite, self-entitled ‘meritocratic’ political-business class.

    Once the secondary school field is levelled and disadvantaged kids are given a leg-up, then and only then will merit truly be earned, rather than purchased.

    As the outlawing of private schools is simply never going to happen, short of bloody revolution, an alternative would be for all universities to draw their students from the applicant population in representative ratios, determined by the ratio of public to private school numbers of applicants for places across all universities. This would mean each school type would have a prescribed number of places in every course, so private school kids would be competing only with each other for places; the same would be the case for publci schools.

    Regarding the question of the societal function of universities: that is to produce people capable of independent thinking. Businesses don’t enter into the equation and, if they want graduates trained how they want them to be, they can start training people on the job, rather than skimming the cream off the top of graduating classes in return for the pitiful payroll tax they effectively pay on their current employees’ wages. There’s another regressive – non-tiered – tax that has to go in order to end the constant war on worker’s time and energy.

    • Hi Clem,
      I like the idea of debunking the myth of the meritocracy through (compulsory?) study of circular reasoning as a logical fallacy. And not just in theory, but with a requirement for application to lived experience. I remember Malcolm Turnbull, when he first became Prime Minister of Australia, asserting he had ‘worked hard’ for all he has. No doubt, but also no doubt that the silver spoon helped things along.
      I agree about the abolition of private schools, and am a bit curious that you think it couldn’t happen short of a “bloody revolution”. I’m old enough to remember when the Democratic Labor Party fought for state funding of Catholic schools. I don’t remember the details, and it probably took a long time, but it did happen. So, why not in reverse? I know, it sounds unlikely, but for a government with a genuine commitment to ‘fairness’, wouldn’t it be an obvious starting point? To at least withdraw all public funds from so-called ‘independent’ schools?
      Your idea for university entry processes sounds a bit like a form of affirmative action. I think it would be an advance on current practices, but can also almost hear the outcry about ‘discrimination’ from the privileged who might miss out as a result. I get a lot of that kind of response already on the social media associated with with this website (the Facebook page more than Twitter) whenever I post anything with a theme of affirmative action in relation to gender, race, or disability, for example.
      I also agree with your comments about businesses providing their own “on the job training” and made a similar point in the post.
      The overriding question is how we get from where we are to a reconstructed vision of universities. I fear we have gone so far down the track of corporatisation that it would take a major overhaul. I believe it could be done, but wonder how it is to come about.

  3. Stef says:

    Thanks for this article which I read quickly and will reread over the week. I tend to agree that universities ought to be more than conveyor belts for jobs OR bastions of privilege. Sadly cutting funds reduces the access of diverse people to universities and increases the latter.

    I suspect that even if in the “real world” universities are far from perfect, as you say they have an important role and we need to look at how to make them more open to those who need the enrichment of a good education (also stop intensifying OR dumbing down learning for the sake of any market, including the jobs market). We need to stop lying to people that going to uni equals a job necessarily and make sure we make education worthwhile in other ways (I had excellent teachers and classmates in my uni degrees so I could experience how liberative uni can be).

    I have made lifelong friends and learned to articulate things I only understood on a gut level by going to university. Neoliberal governments can’t see a value in this because it does not increase exports or profits and because it makes me more likely to criticise the government instead of being a shoppoholic or alcoholic to deal with my instinct that something is wrong. I have got a humungous hecs debt which I am unhappy with and I do realise I am massively privileged to have gone to uni. I want my children to have the same opportunity. I want more people not less to have the time and headspace to stop and learn and really, really challenge themselves to think and make thinking friends.

    I want more of what university gave me, not less. ANd I want it for everyone (who wants it). I also think related to this is the need to save TAFE

    • Your comments pretty much sum up all I wanted to say, Stef, and added more, particularly about the effects of shaping education to markets, the neoliberal aversion to thinking, and the need to revive TAFE.
      Once I started this piece it was a can of worms. I did several tangential wanders, including into the future of work in a globalised, roboticised world. The person who wields a red pen for me before I push the ‘publish’ button said I should take it out and generally clean up the flow.
      Your comments, and what I didn’t include, are part of what needs to be said when funding cuts come onto the political agenda. Getting heard against the din of spin is the challenge.

  4. Kate Vavasour says:

    That was a great essay. I do believe that the role of Universities needs to be looked at, perhaps redefined and articulated in the ‘google’ age. Indeed having places to speak and think across a spectrum has a value that is undervalued. A large part of the problem is Universities have become commodotised. That in itself is a problem. Instead of think tanks, the focus changes to business and profit. With that, you get accountability merely reduced to profits. There in lies the root of most of the problem.

    • Thanks for your comments, Kate. They raise a question for me about who might be studying the changes in the construction of knowledge as a function of the shift from universities as “think tanks” to the focus on “business and profit”.
      Such research might once have been the role of epistemologists in departments of philosophy, I guess, but do such positions still exist in “commoditised universitites”?
      It seems to me that the meaning of ‘knowledge’ has been pared down to ‘that which is of use to employers’, an impoverished concept, and a key one for consideration as part of reviewing the role of universities.

Leave your comment

Show the 'Share' buttons
Hide Buttons