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CMC? Or Wikipedia University?
What exactly does CMC give you that the University of Phoenix can’t for much cheaper? Even Wikipedia is a viable option these days.Let’s put aside the fact that college is awesome: that for our tuition we get access to lovely people our own age, free booze, served meals, a fitness facility, notable speakers at the Ath, a swimming pool, any book you could possibly want from the library, fast Internet and computer labs with two screens, room cleaning once every two weeks, hot showers, late night snacks, and easy jobs. These luxuries are all nice but they’re only tangentially related to increasing our earnings potential.
(Unless we get used to a life of luxury at CMC, and enter high-paying professions to maintain a high standard of living. But that’s another question.)
The typical explanation is that we go to a good college to “learn things,” fill our heads with calculus and chemistry and the canon, and then we’ll be more prepared for jobs because we know more things than a high school graduate. This might have been true back in the day when information was more limited and you had to physically go to 
the places where people knew calculus and chemistry to get a better education than a G.E. Doctors, nurses, engineers, accountants, future professors, and maybe actuaries learn useful information as an undergraduate that they will need for their careers. Besides a specious argument that college teaches you “how to think,” it’s not obvious that the things we learn in other departments are useful for post-graduate life, or true that we need to pay $50,000 to learn about them.
I can think of four better reasons that justify the amount of money you’re spending to come here.
There’s a positive peer group effect. Your work rate depends very much on how hard your friends are working. Want to become a good student? Become friends with good students. If you want an explanation for your success while you’re in school, look no further than your roommate, who has a significant influence on your GPA. The long-term evidence is more murky, but when you surround yourself with other successful students, they rub their smarts on you, your skills rub off on them and everyone benefits.
There’s a networking effect. According to the Internet, over seventy percent of jobs are found through networking. CMC’s connections in finance and government in particular run deep. As I heard one RDS scholar say, “If we didn’t have alums at that company no one would have even read my application.” It’s not quite nepotism, but alums in the field will help CMC seniors get a leg up. Although this is less true nowadays, because rich people are delaying marriage, CMC is also a great place to meet a potential spouse from your socioeconomic class. Marriage has a big positive effect on income and productivity.
Doing hard work can help “override the governor.” The most interesting article I’ve read recently was a profile of Jure Robic, a Slovenian biker who competes in weeklong, 24-hour bike races. Robic will literally go crazy around day three of the race; he starts hallucinating, jumping off his bike to engage in combat with mailboxes and shouting nonsense at his race team. His team discovered that when Robic feels ready to drop dead from exhaustion, he’s still got about 50% of his energy to give. At that point, fatigue is more or less a brain feature than an accurate assessment of your ability to keep pumping your muscles. By completing a steady diet of papers, exams, and research assignments, students are doing things that they would discard as being too difficult if they weren’t in school. This tolerance for work builds up over four years; doing large amounts of work also forces students to manage their time and focus. Getting good marks from professors and managing the workload can give students more confidence in their abilities, which has positive effects on their success in the workplace. This helps explain why athletes have more post-grad success than non-athletes; they have more practice in persistence and training their brain to fight through procrastination and fatigue.
Your degree and GPA differentiate you from other job-seekers. Yes, you are paying $200k for a piece of paper, but what a piece of paper! Your CMC degree tells employers that you’re trustworthy, and, if you have a good GPA, that you’re probably a better candidate than most of your peers. A signal’s value correlates with how hard it is to acquire; a degree represents four years of hard work. Additionally, a degree from this prestigious college signals that you’re smart, and got good high school grades. Other job applicants need to work much harder to show off their smartness.
While school is nominally about learning new things, the smart student will realize she can do that anywhere, like Wikipedia. The parts of a CMC education that actually help you earn more money later in life don’t match up well with academic subjects. Just try telling your parents that when you get a disappointing report card.
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Kevin Burke
Kevin is a junior economics major from Alamo, CA. The Forum's only foreign correspondent, Kevin is working for Seva Mandir, an NGO in India focusing on rural development.
7 Comments
2009-10-28
11:04:36
Additionally, I think schools like CMC allow you to find out what you need to learn. Certainly, we could all learn a lot from a free public library but honing in on what aspects of subjects we should learn is harder.
Great article!
2009-10-28
12:04:32
Good writing Burke, sorry I had to dominate you in tennis this morning.
2009-10-28
19:15:39
Let me preface this by saying that this is an interesting, thoughtful approach to an old question. But I think you're just wrong. As cute as it may sound, a liberal arts education is about teaching you how to think.
You're right that the price of information is rapidly approaching its marginal cost--free. But in such a world is it not the quality analysis that matters? You point to work ethic and networking, which clearly are important, but doesn't quality matter as well as quantity? You say "its not obvious that the things we learn in other classes are useful for later life." I take it you mean non-preprofessional classes. So when you're working as at some sick VC group don't you need to evaluate whether the people pitching you are full of shit? That is say you need to evaluate suspect narratives, something you'd learn in say a lit class. Or when you're brushing up on wikipedia knowledge, isn't it useful to be able to see the normative presuppositions underlying some information? More broadly, isn't the best way to see the structures underneath our discourse to analyze them rigorously in a variety of environments? Doesn't that then necessitate breadth as opposed to depth?
Anyway, personally, I'm not smart to learn things like abstract algerbra from wikipedia. Maybe you are, and that's the difference.
2009-10-29
01:47:21
Perhaps the goal of a liberal arts education is to teach students how to think, but if one is only interested in learning how to think, it's possible to do that for much cheaper than $50,000. For the cost of an Internet connection I can read the opinions, arguments and counter-arguments of hundreds of economists, policy makers, and writers. I can dive into the comments section and learn to argue well, because sloppy arguing gets corrected very quickly in the blogosphere. I can start my own blog and post my opinions there. I can go down to the public library and read a lot of new books. Heck, I can navigate to any professors page, download the course material and go through it myself. Most of the stuff we do in class can be replicated for much cheaper on the Internet. Life has never been better for an autodidact.
Because we're in school nine months of the year, it's difficult to separate the things we learn from a classroom from the things we learn from just growing older, and gaining more life experience. Maybe if I didn't go to college, I would still be able to call bullshit on a VC at 22 but not able to do it at 18, because I would have had four more years of experience reading people's faces and body language to figure out when I'm being lied to. Unfortunately, we only get to live once - it's impossible to live one life in school and one life out of school and then compare the cognitive abilities of your two selves. Along the same lines I cringe a little when someone says "Going to CMC was the best decision of my life" - how could you know? They'd have to go to every college on their list in turn and figure out where they'd be the happiest. There haven't been any good studies in this area yet.
Frank Schmidt and Bob Sutton did a seminal study on the best ways to hire new employers. Out of nineteen possible explanatory variables, years of education ranked 16th, just ahead of handwriting analysis. Work samples and general intelligence tests ranked first and second.
2009-10-29
09:08:31
Having an experience at a top liberal arts college and a top research university has made me see the benefits of my undergraduate experience in all of the stated areas, including "learning how to think." These benefits maybe be watered down at large universities or professional programs, although not entirely erased, by a large, often disconnected and segregated student body, low accountability, and a wider distribution of academic backgrounds and abilities. However, liberal arts colleges are at disadvantage in terms of academic and cultural diversity and the advantages to working in the "real world" as opposed to the sheltered homogenous world of living on campus. Then again, higher levels of homogeneity may contribute to the high levels of academic competition, as the urge to differentiate fosters student ingenuity and increases overall achievement across the student body.
2009-10-29
13:49:50
Going to a four year university, and a highly ranked one at that, shows initiative, motivation, and the ability to finish what you started. College today is a signal of all these things to potential employers. Going to CMC is a sign of money, prestige, and your willingness to pay i.e. the value, you as an individual place on a good college education. Not just any college gets the job recruiters we get here. It's a perk, and they keep coming because as I said, graduating from college, especially CMC, is a signal to employers of your personal goals and acheivements, and your desire to learn and be successful.
2010-02-16
20:24:51
[...] out that you don’t learn much in a liberal arts college except “how to think.” I would not even argue that much. Robert was, however, the social chair at CMC. Being a social chair is excellent preparation for a [...]