Over at the National Association of Scholars page today there is a transcript of a debate between NAS president Peter Wood, writer Ashley Thorne, and Education Sector chief Kevin Carey. They are debating the question “Will a Push to Increase College Enrollment Lead to Lower Standards?” Wood and Thorne take the “pro” position, saying that too many people who aren’t prepared for college go anyway, causing myriad problems: Zimbabwe-level grade inflation, curriculum erosion on the scale of the Grand Canyon, an Hiroshima-sized explosion of remedial classes, and various other catastrophes that can be described geographically.
Carey takes the “con” position, accusing Wood and Thorne of–get this–“hobo-phobia.” The term is, as far as I can tell, a new one but has an old origin. Carey explains:
Fear of letting more people go to college is nothing new. When Congress was considering the G.I. Bill in 1944, University of Chicago President Robert Maynard Hutchins warned that giving returning soldiers a chance to enroll in college would turn the nation’s great universities into “educational hobo jungles.” Instead, the law helped create a thriving middle class and decades of unparalleled prosperity.
Carey concedes that there are huge problems in contemporary higher education, such as the astonishing lack of learning found by Arum and Ropska in their book Academically Adrift. Nevertheless, he insists:
The solution is not a return to educational hobo-phobia that would bar the doors of higher education to needy students. That would be a disaster. Instead, we need colleges and universities that are more focused on the needs of students and more accountable for the quality of the learning environment they provide. Better colleges for more students will provide a foundation of opportunity and prosperity for years to come.
Me, during my junior year.
I agree wholeheartedly with Carey’s call for reforming American higher education, but I am skeptical of his call for an end to hobo-phobia (unless it really is a mental disorder, as the medical terminology implies). Think about it: didn’t old president Hutchins–at least to an extent–have it right after all? I’ll grant that he was wrong about the soldiers, who were older than most college students today and very mature, made so by the war. But in terms of the results of the huge expansion of college enrollment, what phrase could better capture the contemporary college campus than “educational hobo jungle?”
Consider: what do you picture in your mind when you think of a “hobo”? Undoubtedly, someone who is shabbily dressed, doesn’t work hard, has loose morals, and is prone to drugs and alcohol. Having recently graduated from college, I can say this with confidence: Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the picture of the modern college student.
So should we have hobo-phobia? Lord help us, yes. We should fight hobo-ism wherever we find it. (I don’t mean actually fight hobos. That would be mean. I mean help those afflicted with hobo-ism by finding gainful employment.) This doesn’t mean, of course, that limiting college enrollment is the only solution. But it certainly seems to be part of the solution. Wood and Thorne make the point–much more eloquently, I might add–in a great concluding paragraph:
A society that recognizes the laws of human nature – that each person is unique and that a one-size-fits-all approach won’t work – can then begin to help its rising generations to choose their paths. Such a recognition can also save higher education from trivializing itself into irrelevance.
Or into the Grand Canyon, which would probably be equally tragic.
