Charles Murray, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), published the subject article: “Should the Obama Generation Drop Out?” (December 2008). He postulates that the current concept of a degree being a necessary qualification to get many jobs is misguided. Murray’s premise is that many jobs do not actually need a person with a degree. He cites what he suggests Obama should include in his every speech; what Murray refers to as “a battle cry”: “It’s what you can do that should count when you apply for a job, not where you learned to do it.” Using pathos to persuade his readers, Murray also states: “But most 18-year-olds are not from families with plenty of money, not top students, and not drawn toward academics. They want to learn how to get a satisfying job that also pays well.” He continues by conceding that a high school diploma alone is not sufficient and that further education is needed, but that it need not cost the earth, nor involve four years at college to get a Bachelor’s degree.
Murray attempts to clarify his arguments when he says that he approves of a liberal education and that students of all levels should study a wide range of subjects. He insists he’s not opposed to a liberal education but objects to the degree being the essential path to getting a job. So he’s not against degrees per se, but against them being the main criterion for employment.
Having first proposed that President Obama “undermine the bachelor’s degree as a job qualification” Murray then gives reasons why he believes young people – or any people for that matter – should not have to first acquire a degree to get a decent wage. He ends the piece with recommendations about how businesses could go about substituting certification tests for the degree requirement, and use those to prove that the applicants have the necessary skills to do the job. While the article may not necessarily change minds, it may give people food for thought.
The intended audience for this article are the readers of The New York Times. Murray is essentially a libertarian conservative, but the NY Times readers tend to be even more liberal. This is important to note, because his sense of his audience influences the way he makes his appeal (for example, mentioning Obama). Murray assumes that those who read his article have completed their college degree or at least are familiar with what is required to obtain one. He aimed this article at readers who have some knowledge and understanding of the state of higher education and the abilities of the high school graduates who are feeding those institutions of higher learning. It seems he does not hold the schools in high regard, because he says that the young people graduating from them are intellectually ill-equipped to be successful in a college with a rigorous curriculum. He goes on to explain that he’s not just considering those students who lack the intelligence to cope with a college-level syllabus. In Murray’s opinion m Many of the young people who are intellectually equipped to succeed in liberal arts courses actually don’t want to. For those students, Murray claims that they do not benefit by being offered new opportunities and wider horizons. He considers them “bothersome time-wasters.” This quotation by Murray is in contrast with his preceding sentence – here he’s talking about the students that DO have the intellectual ability but not the interest or enthusiasm. Murray even urges his readers to dig out their own old textbooks and compare what is in them to what young people are learning nowadays. Although he claimed that only between 10 and 20 percent of present18-year-olds could absorb the material in those old liberal arts textbooks, he didn’t cite the source of those numbers. That lack of source verification – in my view – weakens his argument.
As mentioned earlier, Murray is a scholar at the AEI, which, as it claims on its website: “is a community of scholars and supporters committed to expanding liberty, increasing individual opportunity and strengthening free enterprise. AEI pursues these unchanging ideals through independent thinking, open debate, reasoned argument, facts and the highest standards of research and exposition”. Murray seems to exemplify the purpose of AEI in his article because it is generally well-reasoned. It seems ironic then that he is sceptical about the ability of public high schools to prepare students for a college career.
Yet Murray is a respected and established author who wrote “Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America’s Schools Back to Reality (2008), so he has previously researched the issues of America’s schools. His knowledge of the American education system is sufficient to give him the authority to support the issues he covers in this article. Most interesting of all is that he is a scholar apparently opposing scholarship. His solution to the status of America’s educational institutions appears to be to lower the formal standards by not requiring job applicants to have completed a four-year degree. It seems he would rather job applicants demonstrate their skills, than prove their comprehensive intelligence by obtaining the degree qualification. In the article he suggests that discrediting the Bachelor’s degree as a necessary entry to jobs is easy because employers already regard it as outmoded. He thinks that it just needs someone to make that a formal change. He then states that Barack Obama should be that agent for change.
Under the system as it presently stands, employers assume that if a job applicant can demonstrate the fortitude and dedication it took to complete a Bachelor’s degree, that applicant could easily acquire the additional skills it might take to fill a position with their company. But Murray objects to companies use the degree as a screening method. He thinks it inappropriate to retain the bachelor’s degree as the basic requirement to even be considered for many, many jobs that don’t actually require such a degree.
Murray claims that screening job applicants by degree / no degree status has flaws, and I think he has a point, especially – as he rightly says – that degrees in vocational subjects such as Renaissance History are known to be easier to obtain than degrees in (say) physics. In addition, he suggests changing the hiring system to do away with the degree requirement and replace it with screening by targeted tests, where the applicant demonstrates his/her relevant skills. He also refers to former times when skilled craftsmen used samples of their work to prove their abilities, and that the same happens today, when (for example) computer programmers – without college degrees (!) – secure employment by showing projects they have completed. Murray claims that, using some imagination, any company can devise requirements for such work samples. I can see that system could work. However, there may be instances where the degree course that the student has completed becomes an important component of their overall fitness for the position.
While Murray’s point about discarding a Bachelor’s degree as an indicator of a job applicant’s ability to do a job has legitimacy to some extent, what I think he forgets is that a Bachelor’s degree also demonstrates a graduate’s well-roundedness. To earn a four-year degree from an accredited college, (i.e. not a vocational college), usually a student must include classes outside of his/her major, (which Murray does seem to support as he has said in his article that he supports students exploring other subjects). The breadth of the usual degree course curriculum provides a broader view of the world for the student and perhaps also provides them with an interest they can pursue outside of their chosen future career. To put it bluntly, it makes the student acquire a greater breadth of knowledge, and opens the mind. So, where Murray suggests replacing a degree with appropriate certification tests, such tests would – in my view – need to cover a wider scope than simply those skills that focus on the requirements of the job. Unless they do that, the companies might get skilled workers, but they may not get the really smart people they need. Those who have not completed a degree course may not have any intellectual interests outside of the job, because they may not have had opportunities to explore other intellectual pursuits that they would have been aware of had they gone to college. In my opinion, when Murray appears to want to discard the bachelor's degree, I think he may also have overlooked problems that candidates taking the certification tests might encounter if they have a limited educational background. Bachelor’s degrees involve significant investments of time and money, but are not simply geared toward obtaining that all-important future job. They are more about providing a basis for a fulfilling life. They are about looking ahead to what a person might become later on.
Having reviewed the article and considered it as a whole, I think Murray’s stated thesis is maybe not his real thesis. After all, in most fields companies can hire anyone they want to. There’s no law, for example, to say that if you want to work in customer service at a bank you need a degree, but when they’re hiring they might well specify: “B.A. preferred.” And in many fields a degree is not sufficient. For example, to practice law you also need to pass a State exam. And why would employers necessarily listen to Obama’s opinion? So maybe it’s really not a serious argument to begin with. Perhaps what he’s really doing is trying to convince his liberal readers that the government is spending too much money (e.g. in guaranteed loans and financial aid) trying to send everyone to college, when in reality some students are either not genetically equipped or are simply not interested in being “well-rounded.”
Works Cited
American Enterprise Institute. AEI’s Organization and Purposes. Web. 7 June 2012.
Murray, Charles. Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing American Schools Back to Reality. (August 2008). Crown Forum. Web. 7 June 2012.
Murray, Charles. Should the Obama Generation Drop Out? (December 2008). New York Times. Web. 7 June 2012.
