When I talk to academics about the value of doing a degree or the purpose of the higher education system in general, they mostly don't talk about the financial and career benefits for students. In fact, such talk makes them uncomfortable. Instead they talk about the importance of education for making good citizens and whole people. They pay lip service to vocation training but there is a certain distain behind their support. Training is the mere imparting of skills. Education is all about personal improvement and making better people.
As someone with two degrees who is also a part-time university educator, it would be nice to believe this is true. I am a better person who makes better people. I just don't believe it. It is mostly a fairy story. Let me state upfront that it isn't the case that educators have no impact on their students. We can and do. I just believe that at any impact we have is at the margin. Nor I believe that education is a waste of time. I do believe that it can have an impact. But I suspect that its benefits are not primarily moral. I want to spend a little time working through what I think higher education can and cannot do.
Lets start with something relatively tractable. It is true that people with degrees commit fewer crimes than those without. But we are not randomly sampling the population. The degree process directly filters for conformity, contentiousness, intelligence; and indirectly filters for family stability, wealth and mental health. If you track crime and education levels in society over time, then you don't find a simple correlation.
Not being caught for a crime is a low bar for goodness but then defining "goodness" is a tricky task. Social and religious conservatives would see the changing attitudes towards sexuality, gender, agnosticism, and drugs as proof that society is getting worse. Generally, they choose to blame academics (esp. "postmodern" "marxists" in the humanities and social sciences) for this state of affairs. For these groups, university does change people - and it does so for the worse. I think this gives academics too much credit and misses the broader material shifts in our society that have generated these changing attitudes*. And it is true, people who have been to university tend towards a particular set of social attitudes and this has an impact on the political structures of developed countries.
However, while populists and "the white working class" are blamed for much of the political instability that we see in Western countries, the worst things are done by highly educated people. The 2008 financial crisis was the product of bankers - many of whom had maths PhDs. The complex, interlocking debt structures that turned this from being a localised problem in the US housing market to a global catastrophe were created by very smart people. Likewise, the chaos in the UK around Brexit was the product of the Oxford and Cambridge-educated elite. David Cameron's First in PPE did not stop a gamble that cost him his career and plunged the UK into political and economic mayhem. The leading voices of global warming denial all have degrees of one kind or another (though rarely ones in climate science or meteorology). If a degree is supposed to make you a better person then why are so many graduates so terrible?
The situation becomes clearer if we consider the before, during, and after of a degree. By the time people start a degree, they have been shaped by their families and communities for 18 years at least. We are way too late, trying to open the door of the mind after the horse has kicked it shut. The Jesuits (who know a thing or two about making and unmaking people) claim: "Give me the child for the first seven years and I will give you the man". They did not say: "give me the young adult for three or maybe four years and I will give you much the same as I started with".
Then there is the matter of after. We teach ethics to business students and then send them out into environments where ethics are considered a joke at best and the mark of a loser at worst. Even the most clueless corporate trainer knows that if learning is not reinforced, it is lost. In many professions, we talk about "continuing professional development" but, again, this tends to mean seminars and online text books, not lived practice. The vanity of the educator is to think that our words are granite rather than snow in the spring sun.
Next, the during part. What many students want from our courses is not a changed mind but a permanent piece of paper. Some students do genuinely want to be educated. And we sometimes succeed in educating them. But if we only allowed in students who truly wanted to be there then the university sector would be a lot smaller than it is. And I am not sure that anyone is ready for that. At best, we can offer training. Which is actually not so bad (except to our egos).
Let me end with two anecdotes. Firstly, my own experiences as a student. Yes, I was educated as an undergraduate. Although this was as much a product of spending three years surrounded by people with different backgrounds to the one (but perhaps not different enough) I had grown up in, as it was a product of fine educating. My tutors were very smart people but mostly they had not risen to their positions by their teaching skills. I was exposed to new ideas, new mental tools, new ways of thinking. But I was not made more or less moral by that process.
Secondly, I recently surprised a postgraduate class I was teaching. I said something (I cannot recall what) and one of them responded: "That sounds a bit lefty. We thought you were very conservative!" The others nodded in agreement. The reason they thought I was a conservative is that I had told them repeatedly that most organisations revolve around money. This was not a state of affairs that I delighted in but one that it would have been negligent to avoid. When we discussed strategy, I had to tell them that most organisational strategies are at best exercises in wish fulfilment rather than solid statements of intent. I had to tell them that most managers are overworked and undermotivated and have the attention spans to match. In short, I had to tell them that what is and what should be are two different things.
Finally, teachers should be careful what we wish for. If we as educators want to claim the good stuff them we must also bear the bad. If our students do good things, if they contact us to tell of our inspiring teaching then we must also recognise that when their actions kill, maim, and impoverish others (as they will) then that is also on us. Are we ready to bear that weight of consequence?
*In statement that I know will alienate everyone, I think ideas are less powerful than people think. I do not believe that "Nothing is stronger than an idea whose time has come", which LinkedIn tells me is a quote from Gary Vaynerchuk.