A persistent sore point within higher education is the complaint that politicians want higher education to be, “more geared to the needs of the economy” – the implication of this being that higher education is a public good in and of itself, which should hold itself above mere utilitarian concerns.
This is a puzzling argument. The arrival of state funding in the early nineteenth century was explicitly predicated on higher education being used as a tool to help strengthen the economy of the state. This fact was as true in Europe (e.g. the rise of chemistry in German universities to assist the rise of the German chemical industry) as it was in North America (the Morrill Acts, the rise of A&M universities, etc).
Critics of this notion point to a period from the late 1950s through to the early 1970s, when a different logic seemed to apply. Higher education was expanding very quickly then, and so too did the humanities and social sciences. Lots of new public money went into these disciplines with nary a word about the “needs of the economy”. From this, some conclude that this was a more enlightened era to which we should return.
Unfortunately, this argument is perfectly wrong. The reason that the “needs of the economy” argument wasn’t used against social sciences and the humanities back then wasn’t because the rules of the game changed; it was because, for a brief moment, degrees in social sciences and humanities were actually in high demand.
Think about it: what was the #1 growth industry in the 60s and 70s? Government. And which field of study did civil servants traditionally have? Humanities and (to a lesser extent) social sciences. Partly that was for class reasons (Sir Humphrey’s degree was in classics, for instance), but partly it’s because broad training in human understanding and critical thinking actually does matter in at least some parts of government. But notions of society are less class-ridden today, government is no longer growing, and even within government the increasing complexities of modern regulation has led them to prefer specialists over generalists. As a result, these fields of study don’t have the same labour market cachet that they used to.
It’s not that students in these subjects don’t go on to good things – they do (albeit, increasingly, a dose of grad or professional school is necessary to get them there). But other areas of study seem to get graduates established in the labour market more quickly, and hence get the glory in a Humboldtian system.
Throughout the last 200 years, publicly funded universities have always had to deliver economically-relevant goods to their paymasters. The rules never changed; only the labour market did.
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It’s an interesting take on the history of education (appreciated considering the ahistorical view of education most people), but I feel like it leaves out some historical pressures. The prevailing argument about educational history today is that it derives from an industrial model developed by the Prussians (see Sal Khan, Sebastian Thrun, Ken Robinson, Thomas Friedman for more). This argument is popular today because we view education as a systems-based enterprise; read the history of distance education and it breaks down history by the advent of transmission technologies. Education did not evolve in such a compact fashion. At the same time as the industrial revolution, enlightenment thinkers such as John Locke and politicians such as Thomas Jefferson envisioned a society of citizen education in the liberal arts and sciences, not as an economic driver but as a catalyst for an engaged citizenry. And while the Morrill Land Act made specific mention of agriculture and engineering, it also made specific mention of strong liberal arts and sciences. The idea of citizen education was echoed in the work of John Dewey, and those overturns can be seen in the GI Bill and the Higher Education Act.
The rise of social sciences (psychology, sociology, political science, education) in the middle part of the 20th Century has as much to do with the establishment of these disciplines several generations prior as it does in a need for government-based jobs (moreso, in my opinion). Look at the movement today in education — the movers and shakers in education are computer scientists working with artificial intelligence and machine learning, a field borne of the late 70s and early 80s, yet only now seeing widespread recognition. Academic fields take time to establish, gain a research foundation, and grow into acceptance. The 1950s was the dawn of social science in a widespread setting, and academics flocked to a field heretofore reserved for philosophy or theory.
Education for a long time has maintained a component of economic outcome, but it has always had a foothold in the community. The first universities, established in Europe at the dawn of the last millennium, noted the importance of creating a stronger community through the education of citizens. Just because our idea of citizens has expanded does not mean we should lose the “education as a public good” notion.