Money Buys Experience, but does it also buy Education?

If I was to write an essay contesting or debunking the so-called value of an education in American colleges, I wouldn't expect many people to read it. Such articles are as common now as hipsters in independently owned coffee shops. Yet, such articles still continue to pour forth across the nation's top news outlets – as if there was something new to be said... something more than the silently affirming nod of empathy automatically elicited from reading something we know to be true. There isn't. Yet, perhaps there is something to be said about the frequency that such articles appear in print – namely, that nothing breakthrough has been done to combat the dismal state of public education in primary, secondary and post-secondary school. Visiting the Federal Dept. of Education's website drew my eyes to one link on their bulletin board from this past week entitled "Increasing Educational Productivity: Innovative Approaches & Best Practices". Upon scoping it out, I was disappointed to discover that it was about "doing more with less". In other words, given the recession and budget cuts, how can we strain our resources further? It doesn't take an economist to point out that along the indifference curve of educational output measured against resources allocated, one simply can't expect a comparable output with limited resources. Drawing from the well known maxim from Charles Swindoll that life is 10% what happens and 90% how you react to it, then an underfunded, under-qualified, test-driven and over-ambitous education curriculum is what happened; how are you supposed to react to it? Optimism doesn't educate; good educators do.

So why do we not have good educators? It's not that we don't, but that we don't have enough – an ongoing budget problem that The Onion alludes to in a cutting piece of satire. Of course there is Teach for America, the privately funded organization that recruits some of the top students from the best colleges to teach in the worst school districts in the country, but a study done a few years back proved that on average they were no more effective in the classroom than their peer, professionally certified teachers. Maybe it's not a fair comparison given the lack of thorough training with respect to going to school to be an educator, but we're after results here, and they speak for themselves.

It's a moot point by now to speculate as from which areas of spending the federal government could re-appropriate funds to education, so I won't mutilate that dead horse here. Instead, I'll talk about turning it into glue as many more affluent American families do. I'm talking of course about private schools. Privatized education allows for a curriculum to be independently created based on values of the investors and may actually be the saving grace of education in America. Of course, the problem is the cost, which many American families cannot afford. But what if, hypothetically, the entire budget of the department of education gradually went toward outsourcing the education of the American public to private schools with proven results in the form of heavy subsidization? In a globalized era in which greater specialization allows for more opportunity for outsourcing, it only seems logical to let the experts handle the education of our nation's youth. I don't have the figures to estimate the feasibility of the proposal and I'm sure it would be exorbitantly expensive, but it would be an investment in the America of tomorrow. If we can continue to go into bottomless debt to fund our security and military expenses around the world, then why not put a small dent in that debt and acquire enough funds to rectify the educational problems in this country? Or is the future less of a priority than the present – the immediate danger more pressing than the looming one? Life shouldn't be so black and white, especially when human lives are on the line.

As things stand right now though, at least at the collegiate level, the value of an education is dubitable. One glaring difference between most universities in America and those in Europe is that American universities collectively foster a nurturing value of the student experience. This has led to a whole field, Student Affairs, in which individuals can learn how to best meet the holistic needs of the student body – everything from activities to discipline. This includes a Dean of Students position – a specialized role under the Dean of the College. American collegiate culture also rather uniquely offers the opportunity for Greek life, which I am unabashedly a part of. While the value of fraternities and sororities has been hotly contested over the years, I won't go as far to say that it is without value – as it directly contributed to improving my college "experience" and introduced me to a number of opportunities to which I likely may not have been exposed. However, despite the alleged value of Greek organizations as purveyors of social opportunity, doers of community service, and conduits for leadership – all of which I can attest to from my own experience – Greek life has an unfortunate symptom that has pervaded American society. That symptom is the proverbial "it's not what you know, but who you know" culture endemic in the private sector. While it is also to some degree true in other sectors and also among non-Greeks – as well as in other nations – my point is that a society that values relationships more than objective qualifying knowledge (Note: not independent of, but more than) lends itself to a culture that places less value on erudition and individual achievement and more on political allegiances. I could segue here into tirade against the inefficiencies of our two-party system, but I'll save that for another time. The take away here, as we return to the point, is that perhaps it's time we re-evaluate what we would like our children to walk away from college with. Are we paying for them to have an experience that allows for them to take easy classes and still walk away with a degree, or are we paying for them to receive a scholastic education? Unfortunately parents cannot just decide what they would like for their children, as the institutions dictate the horizon of possible experiences.

If change is to happen – if change is indeed desired – it has to happen up top at the federal level, that it will a nation-wide effect. But first, the federal government must recognize the urgency and magnitude of the problem of the American education system and commit to actually doing something about it. Otherwise, we're destined to live in a bleak idiocracy.