It's a question that is being asked a lot lately.
To be honest, my terribly incorrect response to this is, "If only". Whether you think finishing schools are a good idea or not, they had a purpose and that was to prepare girls for public life. They'd actually learn stuff there. As near as I can tell all girls are learning from university is how to be drunken pigs who dress like call girls and can't manage a successful relationship with an actual man.
What you might not guess if all your experience of universities comes from recent decade is that universities were not originally intended to be places people went to in order to be able to get a better job. A long, long time ago they were set up to train people for the church. But they gradually became the place where upper middle class people sent their sons in order that they would be exposed to the right sort of culture. They were, in fact, finishing schools for boys. Actual professions—law, medicine, engineering—were only grudgingly allowed in. And even once in, the assumption was that a boy would learn about other stuff.
After the Second World War, researchers started noticing that people who went to college had better jobs and made more money than people who did not. And they assumed that what they were getting was "education" by which they meant training. They didn't think "education" as in being exposed to a culture and set of experiences you couldn't get anywhere else.
From the second they started accepting government money, universities started playing a double game. They had always intended to use the money to support a way of life. For that is what university is for the people who work at one. They wanted to support a kind of culture and behaviour. At the same time, though, they had to concede to government demands to "train students for the rapidly changing modern world" or whatever boilerplate you wanted.
It is because that culture is what really matters to them that universities do such odd things sometimes. Why did Harvard spend so much of the twentieth century trying to exclude Jews even though that meant excluding many of the best students? Because Harvard is about the culture and experience more than the education and they believed that letting a lot of Jews in would destroy that culture. Why do elite universities now spend so much time excluding Aisians today even though means excluding many of the best students? Same reason.
And that is why it shouldn't come as a surprise that not only are universities failing to produce students with degrees that are actually needed, there has actually been a surge in humanities and soft social science degrees that, while they may have all sorts of other benefits, are not good for getting a job.
And, are you ready for this unexpected result, seventy percent of the graduates with useless-for-jobs degrees are women. What is more, during the recession, an increasing number of women have dropped out of the labour force and gone back to school to get further not-good-for-jobs degrees. And thus you get the young woman on the "I'm the 99 percent" website talking about her four degrees in comparative literature and her $150 thousand student debt and she's working part time at a coffeehouse. And she's not happy about it.
You know, teaching girls how to be good wives and housekeepers is an antediluvian notion but such an education would actually be of some use to them.
UPDATE: Before someone puts words into my mouth, no I'm not advocating a return to anything. The point is that even if you see what you are doing as replacing an outmoded idea of education you still have to replace it with something better.
To be honest, my terribly incorrect response to this is, "If only". Whether you think finishing schools are a good idea or not, they had a purpose and that was to prepare girls for public life. They'd actually learn stuff there. As near as I can tell all girls are learning from university is how to be drunken pigs who dress like call girls and can't manage a successful relationship with an actual man.
What you might not guess if all your experience of universities comes from recent decade is that universities were not originally intended to be places people went to in order to be able to get a better job. A long, long time ago they were set up to train people for the church. But they gradually became the place where upper middle class people sent their sons in order that they would be exposed to the right sort of culture. They were, in fact, finishing schools for boys. Actual professions—law, medicine, engineering—were only grudgingly allowed in. And even once in, the assumption was that a boy would learn about other stuff.
After the Second World War, researchers started noticing that people who went to college had better jobs and made more money than people who did not. And they assumed that what they were getting was "education" by which they meant training. They didn't think "education" as in being exposed to a culture and set of experiences you couldn't get anywhere else.
From the second they started accepting government money, universities started playing a double game. They had always intended to use the money to support a way of life. For that is what university is for the people who work at one. They wanted to support a kind of culture and behaviour. At the same time, though, they had to concede to government demands to "train students for the rapidly changing modern world" or whatever boilerplate you wanted.
It is because that culture is what really matters to them that universities do such odd things sometimes. Why did Harvard spend so much of the twentieth century trying to exclude Jews even though that meant excluding many of the best students? Because Harvard is about the culture and experience more than the education and they believed that letting a lot of Jews in would destroy that culture. Why do elite universities now spend so much time excluding Aisians today even though means excluding many of the best students? Same reason.
And that is why it shouldn't come as a surprise that not only are universities failing to produce students with degrees that are actually needed, there has actually been a surge in humanities and soft social science degrees that, while they may have all sorts of other benefits, are not good for getting a job.
And, are you ready for this unexpected result, seventy percent of the graduates with useless-for-jobs degrees are women. What is more, during the recession, an increasing number of women have dropped out of the labour force and gone back to school to get further not-good-for-jobs degrees. And thus you get the young woman on the "I'm the 99 percent" website talking about her four degrees in comparative literature and her $150 thousand student debt and she's working part time at a coffeehouse. And she's not happy about it.
You know, teaching girls how to be good wives and housekeepers is an antediluvian notion but such an education would actually be of some use to them.
UPDATE: Before someone puts words into my mouth, no I'm not advocating a return to anything. The point is that even if you see what you are doing as replacing an outmoded idea of education you still have to replace it with something better.
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