"Are Universities Still Worth it?": a response
Traditional university degrees are still the way to go
Note: This piece is a response to a video essay by Victor Hu. Victor is a personal friend of mine, so I shall often refer to him by his first name in what follows.
In his video essay "Universities: Are they still worth it?" Victor Hu answers his own question with a resounding 'No'. I shall disagree. I believe Victor has misidentified the role of the university in society, and more fundamentally he has ignored the collaborative nature of learning. Before exploring this however, we shall give a brief outline of Victor's reasoning (his essay is linked at the end of the article).
Victor believes university degrees have become a low value proposition. Indeed, Universities have become a heavy expense. Even before the pandemic many were questioning the value of the education they provided in return for their mountainous fees. Between 1974 and 1989, Australian domestic students enjoyed free tertiary education. More recently, they can expect to pay around $30,000 AU ($23,000 US or £16,000) for a three-year degree. In the US, tuition fees at private institutions have increased four times as quickly as the general cost of living since 1978. While this pattern of increasing prices is not uniform across OCED countries (in many countries students do not pay tuition fees) it has been holding in the Anglosphere.
Increasingly, the job market has also come to expect applicants to hold a university degree, meaning that these qualifications are now considered by many to be crucial to securing long term employment. So, what was once considered an advantage in the labour market is now needed simply to place oneself on an even playing field.
This has meant, Victor argues, that university education has become a commodity to be bought and sold rather than an experience meant to enrich. He reckons that this commodity is not worth the asking price as we move further into the twenty-first century. With online courses and certifications abound, and with far more affordable pricing, one may question, if one's aim is simply to secure gainful employment, whether a university education is the right choice.
This I believe to be a fair summary of Victor's essay. We shall embark on an analysis of each point of criticism, beginning with the issue of commodification.
The traditional notion of a university education which we inherit from English thinkers of the enlightenment asserts that a university education is a means of enriching the person's mind and understanding of the world and must not hold any economic value in and of itself. Victor is beholden to this perspective. However, historical forces throughout the last one hundred years have made this view untenable. Economies now increasing rely on specialised knowledge and tools to remain competitive in a global market where barriers to entry are far lower than they were thirty years ago. That is to say, in developed economies, almost every sector faces heavier international competition than it did thirty years ago, hence innovation is no longer optional. Moreover, the breaking down of international barriers with respect to trade has pushed national economies to specialise: in Britain, manufacturing accounted for thirty percent of Gross Value Added (GVA) in 1970. By 2016 this figure stood at a humble ten percent. Meanwhile the services sector, where jobs are more likely to require university degrees, grew from contributing 55 percent to making up 80 percent of GVA in the same period, with much of this growth stemming from financial services. Employment in the services sector has seen similar growth.
A specialised economy requires a specisialised workforce. Realistically, a high school diploma is not sufficient to be competitive in most services subsectors (with the possible exception of hospitality). But that still leaves the question of whether a university campus is the best places for young people to prepare themselves for such a job market. Victor answers in the negative in his essay, citing the growth of online education services and claiming further that learning is done by the learner, regardless of outside input. In other words, he says, to learn it is enough to ask questions and seek answers. The latter claim encroaches on a discussion of epistemology. This we will leave for another day.
As far as competition facing traditional degrees from online courses and certifications, we must remain skeptical. While online modes of delivery have shown to be a great catalyst for the continued education of professionals, it is not at all clear that they can produce those professionals in the first place. Take, for example, the Computing and Software Systems major of the Bachelor of Science at University of Melbourne, which Victor and I both attended. After taking some important pre-requisite subjects in mathematics and rudimentary programming (in the Python language) students studying this major must undertake modules exploring algorithm design and development, database systems, object-oriented programming, software development, operating systems and network protocols, and models of computation. They must also complete an IT project in their final year.
This curriculum could not be summarised in a two-week boot camp or in an unsupervised online course. Doubtless, one may amass a collection of online resources that cover the above topics in such detail that if taken together could arguably constitute a ragtag computer science curriculum. However, the average budding computer scientist who has just graduated from high school could never be expected to bring together such a collection of resources. They would not know what to look for or where to look for it. Moreover, even if they were given a complete plan of self-study for computer science, the outcome of their labours in solitude would be far less impressive than the outcome of the same effort applied when surrounded by a cohort of other motivated students. Once students are placed in a strong cohort, they learn more from one another than from lecturers and tutors. In his assertion that learning can take place in a vacuum if only the will exists, Victor neglects the importance of the learner's environment in both creating this will to learn, and in the quality of the education that follows.
We cannot fault students for disillusionment with the "University experience". Universities do often promise magic; and they inevitable under-deliver. But the commodification of the university degree is the logical results of economic trends that have necessitated a focus on service sector jobs as well as a natural tendency in every field of work for further specialisation with time. These factors are driven by geopolitical forces that are beyond any institution's control, including universities. Despite their occasional grandiosity, universities remain the gold standard in education, and for good reason. Far from being outdated, they are needed now more than ever.
You may find Victor’s essay below.