Surprising Agreement: Santorum & Academics

Although Republicans even excoriated him for saying so, when former U. S. Senator Rick Santorum, R-PA, claimed that college is not for everyone, he was echoing sentiments expressed even by veteran academics. Ironically, both Santorum and the scholars would probably be loath to admit that they are anywhere near the same page.

What made the candidate’s otherwise banal assertion politically charged was mostly the way it was phrased. “President Obama once said he wants everybody in America to go to college,” Santorum said at an Americans for Prosperity event in Michigan. “What a snob!”

“And when Mr. Santorum should have been talking about how the grandson of a coal miner graduated college with two advanced degrees,” former Republican congressman Joe Scarborough wrote on Politico, “he instead mocked the aspirational idea that we should send more of our kids to college.”

Actually, minus the political invective, some academics are even beginning to question this aspiration. “In 2009 the United States graduated 89,140 students in the visual and performing arts, more than in computer science, math, and chemical engineering combined and more than double the number of visual-and-performing-arts graduates in 1985,” Alex Tababrok of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University writes. “There is nothing wrong with the arts, psychology, and journalism, but graduates in these fields have lower wages and are less likely to find work in their fields than graduates in science and math.”

“Moreover, more than half of all humanities graduates end up in jobs that don’t require college degrees, and those graduates don’t get a big income boost from having gone to college.”

“My ex-husband is an arborist, with no college degree, and charges $80 an hour for his services caring for trees,” Kelly Simmons wrote in a letter to the editor of The Chronicle Review. “I have a master’s degree, work in a university, and get paid less than half of that.”

“Whose career path was smarter?”

Writing under a pseudonym, another letter to the editor noted, “I grew up in an academic family and community and got a B. A. in history, but wound up a self-employed craftsman pursuing the work I took up as an afternoon school job in high school. I love my work, and if I have any regret, it’s that I suffer from survivor’s guilt when I talk to people who bought the arrogant attitude sold to them by the humanist, enlightenment tradition.”

“According to one university handbook, the average English major takes between 5 and 10 years to find a stable career after completion of their degree (you can read about that here),” another graduate wrote on his blog at Sell Out Your Soul.com. ‘But now it is winter. I’m tempted to just wait a few more months before doing anything drastic in my career search.”

“In winter, it’s hard to try new things.  With summer you consider moving to a different city, quitting your job, and taking a risk.  But winter seems to encourage you to stick to what you got, and so you settle into your living room, pay your rent, and wait for better weather.”

Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.

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