The Ivy Lie

Below is an email I received which makes some interesting assertions, among others that I’ve judged my alma mater too harshly, since it is but a part of a broader American problem of churning out high-dollar, useless degrees. My responses (in bold) follow each section.

“Dear Clayton,

Your blog is a great revelation, and I agree with much of what you wrote. However, you are being unduly harsh on Duke. The biggest problem with Duke is the exorbitant cost, which was explicitly stated and accepted by you. Duke is known as a school for rich kids. If the price puts a financial strain on your family, then you shouldn’t go there. This is certainly not unique to Duke, and unremarkable private universities charge a similar amount for a vastly inferior education. It appears that Duke gave you what it promised—a great education. Furthermore, many other universities provide an awful, unpleasant, difficult undergraduate experience.”

I agree with you on the financial side of things – the trouble with private education in general is the enormous cost and potential debt incurred. In hindsight, it wasn’t a good choice for a middle-class family like mine, but my parents encouraged it. And since there are an awful lot of Americans willing to gamble $200,000+ on an education these days, I didn’t think to question this. I didn’t have an appreciation for the value of these assets at the time, either. Now that I’ve worked in industry for a while, to spend such an amount on a degree is almost unthinkable.

I’m not sure what you mean by “a great education.” Neither was my degree marketable, nor were my 4 years at Duke particularly pleasant. I’ve yet to attend any of the reunions or yearly events as a result. I did make some good friends, though. I suppose that’s the silver lining to an otherwise depressing educational experience.

There are definitely far worse schools, and I don’t dedicate enough time on the blog to these lesser private schools, which provide even less value for money than their top-rated counterparts. But the reason I focus my frustrations on top-tier universities is that they hold the promise of something better than 4 years of mundane study just to attain a bachelor’s degree, and everyone seems to believe in this promise. It almost goes without saying that a little-known school with poor ratings won’t offer much. If one chooses to attend such a school even though it’s expensive, then it begs the question, what motivated that decision? But if a student opts to attend Yale or Stanford, no one questions their logic – they just assume it will be a positive and worthwhile experience with a great ROI… but this isn’t really a safe assumption. I’ve tried to bring this to light by sharing stories of hardship from graduates of these top universities.

“A better target for your ire would be Biology. Of all the worthless majors, Biology requires the greatest amount of time and effort. The other natural sciences provide a modicum of market value, but a bachelor’s degree in Bio is as useless as most of the other liberal arts. Bio is especially painful when you compare it to other worthless majors that are less demanding and allow for some enjoyment and sanity. I am curious whether your horrible experience with Bio was due to the fact that you were a bad match for the curriculum in Biology. Most of the material in Biology requires rote memorization by brute force. Even in courses such as organic chemistry or biochemistry that come from other departments, the amount of memorization is overwhelming. Are you bad at memorization, or is memorization your weakest ability? The fact that you could readily switch to computer science indicates that your abilities lie elsewhere, not in memorization.”

In hindsight (and hindsight’s 20/20, as they say), Biology is indeed a worthless degree. I get the impression that pure chemistry and physics degrees also aren’t much good, and also require a lot of effort to complete. Virtually any core science requires a graduate degree (and likely a PhD) to be put to productive use, but my advisors never bothered to share that detail with me, so I learned this lesson the hard way.

Was I a bad match for bio? Yes, but I think not for the reasons you suggested. My memory is actually quite good, and learning to program requires plenty of memorization as well. I also study a lot of foreign languages, which is largely memorization of vocabulary, declensions, verb conjugations, etc. once you’ve mastered the grammar.

The problem for me was that I lacked passion for the material, and I couldn’t really see the point in what I was learning. I voiced this complaint to both my parents and advisers, but was basically told by both, “Don’t worry, this is how it is. You just need to complete the work and then things will be fine.” In hindsight, my gut feeling unfortunately proved to be correct: I was spinning my wheels, memorizing huge volumes of information that had almost no applicability outside the classes for which I was learning it. Oh, if only I could get that time back to spend on virtually anything else…

“Finally, Duke is somewhat innocent because much larger forces are playing a role. In the U.S., the entire university system and society are putting graduates into a terrible situation. For much of the last century, your situation would have never occurred. At that time, college was only for smart, talented, studious kids that were serious about education. A bachelor’s degree virtually guaranteed good employment because there weren’t many graduates, and a degree symbolized intelligence, perseverance, and the ability to learn. That entire framework has been utterly destroyed. All of society and every family push kids into college, regardless of ability or desire. Feckless idiots go to college because some school will accept them, and some organization will lend the money. The bachelor’s degree has lost its value. Far too many people have a degree, and a degree does not guarantee competence or intelligence. It is hard to blame Duke for modern, pervasive forces that Duke does not control.”

I totally agree with you that there are larger forces at work, and Duke is only a participant in this problem. And the problem is by no means confined to Duke – far from it – which is why I’ve made an effort to document the pattern at other universities as well.

But should we not hold schools accountable for the problems of which they are a part? To give a different example: If a society has a culture which encourages or tolerates criminal behavior, that will likely lead to more individuals committing crimes… but does that mean the individuals aren’t culpable? Should we not still judge the individuals committing those crimes, and hold them responsible for their actions? Or do we let them off the hook, and say, “It’s not their fault – their culture is to blame”? How do we fix the culture if we don’t fix the individuals who contribute to that culture?

In the case of universities, I think it’s the same thing. To address this phenomenon of expensive, useless degrees requires actions by the individual universities. It seems to me that the logical first step in this process is to hold universities accountable for the educations they provide.