The 80% Rule

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I spent the previous post critiquing the idea of the “self-made man/woman,” but I should put in a word for the idea.  After all, our decisions, work ethic and efforts count for something.

But how much?

Economists, actually, can figure this out.

An economics book that is interesting and understandable: I am not making this up.

An economics book that is interesting and understandable: I am not making this up.

According to Branko Milanovic, in a rather interesting (and readable!) little book entitled The Haves and the Have-Nots:  A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality, this is how it works:  take the actual incomes of everyone in the world and compare it to the mean incomes of their countries.  The result of the global analysis that the nation where we were born determines 60% of what we have.  Not only that, but the family one is born into within a given nation counts for an additional 20% of one’s wealth.  (One might be born in Brazil, for instance, but there is a great difference between being born to the household of a professional businessman in Rio de Janeiro verses being born in a two-room shack in a favela – the slums — in Rio).  Furthermore, an undetermined amount of the remaining 20% is due to factors over which one does not have any control (gender, race, chance, etc.).  But somewhere in this remaining 20% of our wealth we find the factors like effort, decisions, and hard work.

The 80% Rule (my term, not Milanovic’s) means that the most of our economic destiny was determined at birth.  (Who knew that economists could be 4-point Calvinists?)

80%.  Really?   Less than 20% of our income is due to what we actually do?  Is that true?

You’d need to read the book to get a full picture (though you probably have to be an economist to figure out if this analysis is flawed), but I find it compelling.  Having lived six years in Kenya and spent time in Jamaica and Brazil (as well as having read a fair amount about the economic history of different societies) it is obvious to me that millions of people (billions, actually) do not have the resources and opportunities that I was born with in the United States.  The gap in income between a middle-class American and the vast majority of people in the world is really a stunning one. The world is not a level playing field.

At first glance, the 80% Rule looks rather discouraging.  Shouldn’t effort count for more than that?  The American Dream – the belief that one can be substantially better off than one’s parents if one just works hard enough – has motivated a lot of people.  It has produced a great deal of inventiveness and encouraged a great deal of hard work.  With that in mind, one might be hesitant to give up on the “Self-Made Man/Woman” myth.   It would be hard to inspire 7th grade boys by telling them that 80% of what they will earn in life is already determined for them (much less try to get them to understand exactly what is meant by that).  What would you say if you were to write inspirational posters for middle school classrooms?   “Something less than 20% of what a person achieves and something less than 20% of what they fail to achieve is a direct result of their own thoughts!”   Or how about, “If you dream it, the law of averages shows you can achieve up to 20% more than your family has now!”   Doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue.

On the other hand, the 80% rule has the potential to help us get a clearer sense God’s purpose for our lives.  Think of the 80% Rule as helping us to shift our perspective from the American Dream to the Parable of the Talents.  (See Matthew 25:14-30).  The master gives out talents in unequal portions to different people in the world.  The point here is not that the amounts are unequal.  Instead, we are to ask what we, as the servants, are to do with the talents we are given.

The talents God gives us refer to a lot more than money.  But let me just stick with the money point a bit longer.  40% of regular church goers in America give nothing to churches, charities or ministries.  The vast majority of the funds that support our churches, non-profits, and ministries come from 10% of regular church-goers.  (Non-church attenders give even less, on average – but that is a different discussion).  Most Americans are stingy, folks.  Tithing 10% of our income should be the bare minimum for American Christians, particularly when we realize that 80% of what we have is really none of our doing.

We also need to work on cultivating a deep sense of stewardship.  I know I need to get a better sense of this.  The 80% rule is merely empirical economic evidence that what we have comes from God and is not “owned” for eternity by us.  We should be ready and willing to listen to God’s call on our lives and put what we have been given to use for God’s purposes.

By the way, donating to the relief efforts for the victims of the Philippines typhoon right now would be a good way to put to use a very small part of what God has given us.  I recommend the Mennonite Central Committee, though there are plenty of other organizations that are active there as well.

Are You a Self-Made Man or Woman? I Know the Answer.

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No.

New Picture (1)If you can trust historians, however, my great-great grandfather was a self-made man.  Zopher Case (yes, that was his real name — the nearly-biblical spelling was real, too) received the following treatment in the 1882 History of LaGrange County, Indiana:  “Mr. Case is representative of the self-made man. He began with nothing, at the age of twelve, working for $3.00 per month. By labor and economy, he has acquired one of the largest and finest stock farms in the county, and at present owns 800 acres, having given the remainder to his children.”

But I’m here to tell you that you shouldn’t trust historians.

Wait a minute. Don’t trust me when I say you shouldn’t trust historians.

Anyway, my point is that the LaGrange County historian may have gotten the facts right, but the idea of the “self-made man” is a flawed concept.  Zopher Case was not a self-made man.

We Americans sure like the idea.  We have embraced it ever since Benjamin Franklin wrote an autobiography that explained how he accomplished everything through his own wits, hard work and moral character.   And the idea is still alive and well today.  A few years ago I noticed the following inspirational poster on the wall of a middle school:   “Everything a person achieves and everything they fail to achieve is a direct result of their own thoughts.”  There it is.

This idea is flawed because it is based on bad theology and bad theology does not reflect how the world really works.   It is flawed because the “self-made man” completely discounts the idea that God might be at work amidst human activity.

How was God at work in the life of Zopher Case?  What does God have to do with his economic status?   Most American evangelicals would probably try to answer that by looking for characteristics of his spiritual life.  Was Zopher Case inspired by God to work hard?  Did God help him through the tough times?  Did Zopher flourish because he grew in Christian discipleship?

Those are good questions, but I would like to draw our attention to something else.  Consider the birth of Zopher Case, an event that stems from God’s creational activity.

What did Zopher Case do to get himself born in 1816 in Ashtabula County, Ohio, twenty years before he moved to Indiana?  He did not earn that birth through hard work, wits, high moral character, intelligence or “labor and economy.”  Furthermore, had he been born as a black man or an Indian or a woman, his opportunities would have been very different.  While I am sure that ol’ Zopher worked hard, he did not begin with nothing.  He was born with economic, familial and cultural resources that many others did not have.

Who made this man?

Who made this man?

For instance, what if Zopher Case had been born in Suipacha, Argentina in 1816?  (Disclaimer:  I actually do not know a thing about Suipacha except that it is a town outside of Buenos Aires.)  From the colonial era through independence and up to the present, small classes of wealthy elites have owned most of the land in just about every country of Latin America.  One family in Argentina in the 19th century owned 1.6 million acres of prime land – that’s bigger than the state of Delaware.  Another family in Mexico in 1848 owned 16 million acres, a piece of land about the size of South Carolina.  Right after independence, a group of 500 individuals in Argentina owned 21 million acres, which is about the size of Indiana.  If Zopher Case were born in 1816 in Suipacha to a family of modest means, it is very likely that he would have ended his life as a hired hand on a ranch, without any land to his name.  Furthermore, it is likely the same fate would have been true for his son, Riley C. Case, and his son, Riley L. Case, and his son, Riley B. Case and his son, Jay Riley Case.  (Apparently, my family found “Riley” to be a comfortable and reliable name. They must have been spooked by “Zopher.”)

But Zopher Case was born in Ohio and moved to LaGrange County, Indiana when he was twenty.  He was able to buy land there.

I have benefited economically from Zopher’s efforts.  My grandfather grew up on that farm.  The prosperity of the farm and the educational opportunities of LaGrange County (we also often forget that none of us earned or paid for our primary school education) enabled my grandfather to get a college education at Purdue University in 1914.  He used that degree to become a high school principal and then a county extension agent.  When the Depression hit, he not only had a steady job, but extra capital, which he invested – and he continued investing through the 1980s.  When my grandfather passed away in 1988, his estate passed down to my father and aunts.  My parents did not enjoy an especially high income on my father’s salary as a Methodist minister, but they then found themselves with a fair amount of capital.  So when I entered graduate school in 1993, my parents became our banker:  they purchased a house in South Bend that our family moved into.  We were able to make payments to my parents (enjoying generous terms in the deal) even though my graduate school income technically put my family of five below the poverty line.  When we left South Bend six years later, we owned half of the house.  We used the capital from that house to buy the house where we now live in North Canton, Ohio.

Meanwhile, about 174 million people in Latin America make less than $2.50/day.

I have worked hard in my life (well, maybe not so much during those junior high years), but I am still not a self-made man.  Nor was Benjamin Franklin.  Nor are you.  For some mysterious reason, God decided where and when you would be born.

What do we do with that reality?  More on that in a later post.

Thanksgiving Eels and Other Historical Challenges

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A few years ago my parents were on one of those big air-conditioned tour buses that retired Americans sometimes find themselves on.   They were out west somewhere and the tour guide was talking about Native Americans.  The guide retold the story of the first Thanksgiving and concluded by saying that the Pilgrims gave thanks.to the Indians.  He did not mention God. My father, who as Methodist minister is attuned to things theological and historical (and is descended from Puritans, to boot) approached the tour guide afterward and informed him that the Pilgrims gave thanks to God, not the Indians.  The guide responded by saying, “I know, but mine is a better story.”

Today one can find not just tour guides but educational curriculum that marginalize religion or neglect to even mention God while teaching us about the Pilgrims.  Many Christians are rightfully bothered by this.  I know my first instinct is often to turn to historical accounts for ammunition.  After all, we want the truth to get out.

But we might be careful what we wish for.

McKenzieIf you pick up Robert Tracy McKenzie’s new book, The First Thanksgiving:  What the Real Story Tells Us About Loving God and Learning from History (and I urge you to do so), you will find that there are a lot of inaccuracies in both traditional and contemporary accounts of the First Thanksgiving.  For starters, we don’t know for sure whether or not the Pilgrims and Indians actually ate turkey (though it was quite likely they feasted on geese).  Pumpkin pie and yams were definitely not on the menu.  They probably served eels, parsnips and turnips, which means that an authentic Thanksgiving dinner would please nobody in my family except my father, who gets excited about eating strange vegetables odd aquatic creatures.  Moreover, the Pilgrims didn’t wear big buckles on their shoes and they most likely wore bright clothing.

OK, most of us could live with these adjustments (well, maybe not the eels).  But McKenzie pushes the point further, into areas that might bother us more.  For instance, the Pilgrims were not a particularly tolerant lot and had enjoyed religious freedom in Holland before they set sail on the Mayflower, which means we need to readjust conceptions that they came to America for religious freedom.  Squanto, that friendly Indian whose agricultural advice to the Pilgrims probably warded off starvation during that first winter, was not simply a good-hearted humanitarian who exemplified multi-cultural cooperation, but seemed to be using both the Pilgrims and the local Wampanoag Indians for his own ends.  Apparently, neither side trusted him.  And that is just the beginning of our historical misperceptions.

It should be pointed out that McKenzie, a history professor at Wheaton College, loves Thanksgiving and is inspired by the Pilgrims.  Most of the book, in fact, does not concern itself with correcting historical errors.  McKenzie has deeper goals here, deeply Christian goals.  As the subtitle of the book states, he wants us to be better at loving God and learning from history.

That means many things.  I was helpfully reminded that we ought to turn to history for illumination, not ammunition.  McKenzie argues, correctly, that since we are much better at judging others than judging ourselves, authentic education ought to change who we are.  He writes about erroneous conceptions of Thanksgiving to help us consider how we have a tendency to distort the past because we want our heroes to be just like us.  In fact, if we really dug into the historical record, the Pilgrims would seem strange to us in many ways.  That is actually fine, as McKenzie points out, because “if they were just like us, they would have nothing to teach us.”  We prioritize rights, for instance, while the Pilgrims prioritized responsibility.  There is plenty to ponder there.

We learn how stories of the Pilgrims have been created and put to use by Americans down through history.  I did not know, for instance, that the only documentation we have of the first Thanksgiving is a single 115-word paragraph in a letter William Bradford’s assistant sent back to London merchants.  Bradford never even mentioned Thanksgiving in any of his writings, though there is a fake document (containing at least six factual errors) circulating on the internet that purports to be a Thanksgiving Proclamation issued by the governor.  (False information on the internet?  Who knew?)  Curious, I googled “Thanksgiving Proclamation William Bradford” and found that the very first link on the list took me right to the imposter proclamation.   I was entertained by the fake “Olde English” language of the thing, which was signed by “Ye Governor of Ye Colony.”  However, I cringed a little bit to think of all the fifth-grade reports, Christian devotionals and presidential speeches (yep, even our Presidents have fallen for it) that have employed this fake document to inspire us all.

A picture of what the First Thanksgiving really looked like. Wait a minute -- How did the Sioux Indians from South Dakota get to Massachusetts? And where are the Wampanoag?

A picture of what the First Thanksgiving really….wait a minute! What are the Sioux Indians from South Dakota doing down at the end of the table? And what did they do with the Wampanoag Indians?

But then, this sort of thing has been going on for a long time, as McKenzie demonstrates.  How about the historical novel from 1889 that described how the first Thanksgiving dinner was an occasion just packed with numerous budding romances – the widower Bradford making eyes at Mary Chilton, for instance?  The novel imaginatively described, in great detail, the dishes and foods that the Pilgrims supposedly ate at the First Thanksgiving, which the 1897 Ladies Home Journal accepted as historical fact.  We’ve been enjoying the historical inaccuracies ever since.

Meanwhile, the “example” of the Pilgrim story has been used to support causes ranging from capitalism, communal living, the melting pot, the war in Vietnam, the regulation of Big Business and, of course, peace in the Middle East.  This is just part of the reason why McKenzie argues we should just drop the term “revisionist” when discussing history.   History has always been “revisionistic” project and has never been written in pure form, as if it could be special revelation, like Scripture.  Furthermore, McKenzie points out that cries of “revisionism” can lead us to mean-spiritedness and self-righteousness, rather than humble self-reflection.

There are a host of other thoughtful points in this book that I can’t even get to.  But if we are concerned with historical truth and want to love God better, we should follow McKenzie’s proposal that we approach the past with a stance of “moral reflection” rather than “moral judgment.”  Moral reflection requires humility by asking us to question ourselves and engage in respectful conversation with others.  Aren’t those some of the qualities that we want Christians to be known for?

This is the kind of history that Christians ought to read.   And since The First Thanksgiving does the sort of things that a Christian liberal arts education seeks to do, I’ve decided I’m going to assign it as a text in my American history class.

Surprise! Actual Costs of College Have Leveled Off

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This one caught me by surprise.

According to a major analysis of college costs done by the College Board, the net cost of tuition, fees, room and board for the average student at a private college is pretty much the same as it was ten years ago, when adjusted for inflation.

New Picture (1)I have been hearing so many media reports about the rising cost of college and mounting student debt, that I did not expect to see this. Yet, there it is:  not only have the actual costs at private colleges leveled off, but the actual cost is far less than the “sticker” price that one gets when looking at tuition, room and board.

So, you want to get a rough idea of what the average student will actually have to pay for a private college?

Figure it to be about 57% of the published costs for tuition, fees, room and board.

How can this be?  We’ve all been inundated with story after story about the rising costs of college in recent years.  Is this report completely off base?

As I look at it, it makes sense to me.  We have to keep several things in mind.  First, college costs did increase well beyond the rate of inflation in the 1980s and 90s.  That is real.  It seems likely, though, that popular perceptions are about a decade behind reality.  We first started worrying about high costs of college in the 1990s and especially in the 2000s.  Meanwhile, it appears that the costs have stabilized (for private colleges) in the last decade but popular perception hasn’t kept up.

Second, other than health care, there is no cost that is so complicated and confusing to calculate as that of higher education.  You can’t just figure it based on the stated cost of tuition.  You have to take those costs, and calculate in grants, tax benefits (ah, our wonderful tax code!), and this mysterious thing called the “discount rate.”  But a student usually won’t know what the actual cost of a given college will be until they have applied to a college, submitted a financial aid to the government, and then received the financial aid offer back from the college.  (The last part is where the discount rate kicks in).  Most people also fail to calculate what they will save in taxes after that point.  Actual costs, then, vary from student to student.  Confusing, isn’t it?

On top of that, these are all moving targets:  tuition, discount rates, tax breaks, inflation, family income, offers by the financial aid office.  For instance, ten years ago, you could figure the actual costs of tuition, fees, room and board to be 68% of the “sticker” price, which is significantly different from the average 57% of “sticker” price today.   So, yes, sticker prices of tuition have been going up (the price that is quoted most often in reports you see) but actual costs have not.

(The next time you see a report about the rising costs of college, look to see whether the figures are based on “sticker” prices of tuition or actual costs.  Chances are, it will only give you the “sticker” price rather than the actual cost).

What a mess.  It just isn’t as easy as walking into Best Buy and comparing the costs of different HD TVs, is it?

Third, the media doesn’t always report these things very well, particularly since the system is so confusing.  And thanks to the Great Recession we’ve been battling, debt of all kinds is on our minds.  Some media handle these issues effectively and some do not.  Recently, an area newspaper featured a Malone graduate on its front page, making the point in the opening sentences that this student was $80,000 in debt.  Far down in the story, it was mentioned that the average Malone student graduated with $23,400 in debt, which is, quite frankly, a big difference.  Most students are in a very different situation than this grad and nearly 20% of Malone students do not have any debt when they graduate. But the headlines and structure of the story leave the reader with a perception that college costs are much worse than what they really are.

And let’s face it, a story about a student who leaves a private college with a debt of, say, $2500, probably is not going to attract as many readers.

At any rate, the economics of higher education is certainly a complicated and confusing system.   But this latest report from the College Board gives one reason to hope that things are actually better than what they seem.

So, if you know of anybody who is considering a private college, but is getting scared by the sticker price, encourage them to dig deeper than just the sticker price when they are figuring costs.

A Crisis in Christian Higher Education?

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If you are a Christian, you really ought to think carefully about the role of Christian colleges in our society and the current economic dilemma (trilemma, actually) that they find themselves in.  I recommend that you read this open letter from Chris Gehrz, a historian at Bethel University in Minnesota.

Thoughts, anyone?

 

 

 

 

Trix Cereal or Augustine?

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(This is the last post in a series of I am doing entitled “Why It Doesn’t Make Economic Sense to Run Education like a Business.”)

Trix or Augustine?  Which would be a better model for how we think about education?  I’m afraid that we too often approach education as if we were buying breakfast cereal (if we are students) or trying to sell breakfast cereal (if we are in charge of education).

Think about this.  We don’t run our family economies like a business.  And we shouldn’t.  (“Justin, that’s the third time in the last month that you forgot to clear the dishes from the table.  This has really cut into our household productivity, so we’re going to have to let you go.   But chin up, buddy.  I’m sure it won’t be long before you land on your feet with another set of parents somewhere who are in need of a nine-year old boy.”)

We don’t run our church economies like a business. (Well, most churches do not).  And we shouldn’t.  (“Here at Bob’s Discount Baptist Church, you get two sermons on John 3:16 for the price of one offering!  But wait, there’s more!  Just present this coupon to the usher and Pastor Bob will take an additional 25% off of your next altar call!”)

Hmmm. Should we follow the impulses of a silly rabbit……

We should not run our educational economies like a business, either.  The market has its place, but it will not take care of the challenges of education, just like it won’t take care of the challenges of parenting or of ministry.

And yes, there is a proper role for government, but government will not solve these problems, either.  (Insert your own joke here).  I say this because Americans tend to react to non-individualized problems by turning either to the market or to the government.  There are more than two options out there, folks.

I’m afraid, though, that I don’t have a good model for how the economics of education should work.  It would be great if a really smart economist, who understood the ways that humans behave when confronted with the dynamics of learning, would work all of this out.

My primary concern, though, is not exactly the question of how to fund education.  My bigger concern is that, socialized as we all are in deep patterns of consumerism, we carry a consumer mindset to so many aspects of our life where they don’t belong.  (See “Cereal, Trix.”).

And it is in this realm where we can find a much better model:  Augustine.

Now, I am not an expert in Augustine.  His thought can get quite complicated, but there are real riches to be found there, especially for the Christian faith.  Let me summarize and over-simplify a huge body of work here by saying that Augustine wrote that the best education is built upon gratitude, sacrifice, humility, love and true delight.  These are qualities that take us in very different directions from consumerism.

Let’s unpack these a bit.

Gratitude.  It sounds strange to say that we should be thankful for a college education when tuition costs so much.  But you can’t buy an education.  A college education is actually a gift from God, in an odd sort of way.  Not everybody has the ability to do college-level work.  Some people are more “gifted” intellectually than others.  Get it?  Furthermore, there are millions of people in this world who have the gifts to do college-level work, but do not have the opportunities to get a quality university education.  Those of us who have been given these opportunities should be grateful for them.  If we are not grateful for a college education we will feel entitled; we will think we deserve our educational opportunities and the benefits that come from it.  And entitlement is not a good thing, is it?

....or one of the great theologians in all of history? Hmm. Decisions, decisions.

….or the thinking one of the great theologians in all of history? Hmm. Decisions, decisions.

Sacrifice.  Ah, yes, a good education requires one to work.  That means sacrificing short-term desires like Facebook, video games, shopping, eating, hanging out, movies, or all that other stuff for the long-term good of one’s education.  Sacrifice is hard; consumerism is not.  Barlow’s Law, baby.

Humility.   The best education provokes us to admit that we do not have everything figured out.  The best education pushes us to respectfully consider the ideas of others.  The best education requires that we submit to the methodologies, theories and practices of an academic discipline.  The best education demands that we change our understanding, beliefs and practices when confronted with our own misperceptions, errors, or faulty processes.  Those are all elements of humility.  Consumerism, by contrast, puts us in charge of buying what we want.  Not much humility in that.

Love.  The best education helps us to better love God and love others.  In fact, every academic discipline, properly understood, can and should be about loving God and/or others in some way.  Education should direct us to God’s purposes for the world and a deep concern for the common good.  It is in these highest biblical commands to love that we truly find life.  Much of consumerism, as so many advertisements declare, is all about me.  And that is a distinctly un-biblical sort of way of thinking and desiring.

True delight.  When all of these things come together, we discover the true delight in learning.  We are grateful for our learning, we don’t mind the sacrifice, we embody humility and we love more completely.   Meanwhile, it’s rather odd that the happiness I experience when I buy my new iPhone lasts for….two weeks?  And the thrill is definitely gone when the newest iPhone hits the market.  Consumerism fools us into thinking we are finding true delight, but it fails to deliver.

Augustine’s principles do not just apply to students.  Teachers, professors, administrators, and anyone involved in or concerned with education should give his principles careful consideration as well.  I myself need to be reminded of these points regularly.

 

 

 

Is the American church dying?

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No.

(I’m interrupting my series on why we shouldn’t run education like a business because I ran into this helpful article analyzing the statistics.  Thanks to Tommy Kidd for alerting me to the article). 

You may have heard in the news sometime during the last few years  that Christianity is fading away in the United States.  These claims are made because of the rise of the number of people who claim no affiliation.  But it would be poor statistical analysis to conclude that the church in the United States is shrinking because of that data.

Take a look at this article. 

 

 

Case’s Law #3: It is Impossible for Students to Know Exactly What They are Buying

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(This is Part 4 in a series of blogs I am doing entitled “Why It Doesn’t Make Economic Sense to Run Education like a Business.”)

One day, when I was about eleven years old, I was in the Ford station wagon with my dad when the engine light went on.  He stopped to pop the hood and we got out to peer at the workings underneath.  “One thing to do when something is wrong is smell the engine,” he said.  I looked at him, waiting for that important bit of advice that fathers pass on to sons.  “I don’t really know what I’m supposed to be smelling,” he said with a chuckle, and we slammed the hood and got back into the car.  This was the moment when it dawned on me that the entire automotive world was something of a mystery to my father.

My father, a Methodist minister, has many gifts. Automotive knowledge.  I have several vacation memories of sitting on the side of the road, while we waited for the tow truck to haul away of one of the many station wagons we went through.  A mechanic once informed my father that his Buick Skylark was actually two different cars  — a 1980 body had been jerry-rigged onto a 1981 chassis by some mysterious party that had sold the vehicle to him.   Our family still talks about the bright yellow Chevy Nova that blew out three different engines.  And then there was our 1972 Chevy Vega.  This car ran fantastically for years.  Since this particular model has been called “The Worst Car Ever Made,” it is apparent to me that my father pretty much relied on dumb luck when he made his decisions to buy cars.

I don’t have more knowledge of cars than my dad, but I decided long ago to use a different method when purchasing a car.  I have discovered research.  I read Consumer Reports before I start to think about models.  I have bookmarked Edmunds.com where I can determine the fair value of a car I am thinking about buying.  And I always take a used car to be examined by my trustworthy mechanic before I buy it, since he has far more expertise I do.  This research doesn’t guarantee that there won’t be surprises in the future, but it gives me a much greater sense that I know what I am getting into.

So we ought to be able to do this kind of research for a college education, right?

No.  I don’t think it can be done.

Education is a different animal.  Its unpredictability functions in a different way than car purchases.

What if you bought a vehicle and you thought this is what you were getting into.....

What if you bought a vehicle and you thought this is what you were getting into…..

Even if we believe college education is about getting training for a job (a definition of education that is so narrow as to be impoverished, in my estimation), we can’t know for sure what we are getting into.  For instance, many students are told, when they research potential colleges, they should choose a college with a good major in the field they want to study.  On the face of it, this is solid advice as one sets out on a career, like looking for a car with good reliability ratings.  But I have had conversations with countless numbers first-year college students over the years who aren’t really sure what they want to do.

Some say that if you don’t know what you are going to do for a career, you should take some time after high school graduation to do something else.  This kind of “research” may be of great help…and it may not.

It would not have helped me.  Like many young people at high school graduation, I did not know what I wanted to do, or what I would be well fitted for.  The existence of hundreds and hundreds of possible career options did not help.  What did I do?  I had fooled around with one of the very earliest personal computers that our high school had obtained and thought it was cool, so I declared myself to be a computer science major when I entered college.  I was unable to get into any computer science classes in the fall semester, but it took me about two weeks of a computer science class during my spring semester to realize that this was not for me.  Programming, which is very different from fooling around on a computer, was not what I expected.  Though I could do it, the work was a real struggle – I just did not “get it” as quickly as my classmates.  And I did not find the work interesting, inspiring or fulfilling.  I was not well fitted for it.

Meanwhile, I had taken a world history class during my first semester.  I not only did well, but I enjoyed it greatly.  And I had no thought that history was in my future until, late in the semester, my professor told me I had a knack for it.  He asked if I ever considered becoming a history major.  By the third week of my spring semester I had switched to history and it has proven to be a good fit.  Indeed, I would say that God called me down this path.

...only to learn that you had really been driving this around for the previous six months? What kind of world is that? It's college!

…only to learn that you had really been driving this around for the previous six months? What kind of world is that? It’s college!

How could I have ever known that this is what I was getting into before that first tuition payment was sent in before fall semester?  I only discovered this about myself by taking a computer science class and a college-level history class.  Pre-college research would not have helped.  In fact, that is the point.  How can we know something before we learn it?  A good college education is about education  — which includes gaining a deeper understanding of who we are and how the world works.  I can’t know what I am buying ahead of time in education, because education is about learning what I do not yet know.

And I’m just scratching the surface here.  Even if you know what career you will pursue, how do you know how a particular college will affect your ethics, politics, religious faith, or relationships?  How will a college education affect your understanding of science, culture, the arts, social institutions, gender, race, nationalism or thousands of other things?

It makes sense, of course, to choose a college with high academic standards.  It makes even better sense (in my estimation) to choose a college that will direct your mind and your desires to what is good.  Research can give you a rough idea of these qualities in a college.

But even this sort of research can be misleading.  Just what do the U.S. News and World Report rankings tell us about the kind of education we will be getting?  A recent Atlantic article argues, quite persuasively, that this ranking system is not what it claims to be.

And how about this:  this very popular system of ranking colleges may be raising the cost of education.  And, surprise, surprise, status (rather than educational outcomes) plays an outsized role in the ranking process – as I mentioned in an earlier post.

Consumer Reports gives me pretty good odds of how reliable my car will be.  A college education, however, is a four-year process that involves the unpredictability of human growth, development, learning, and desires, all cast in a context with hundreds (thousands?) of others whose impact on us is unpredictable as well.  We can learn much ahead of time about the type of college we might go to, but we can’t really know what the education will do to us.