How much education do you need?

Is 3 years enough to be “college educated”? Is 3 years enough to be “high school educated”? Everyone’s broke and so the new plan floating around is to roll the toilet paper around the tube a bit looser and play up the fact that it’s fluffier and softer. Instead of having a 3 act musical, just cut out all of that back and forth in the second act and go right to the big finale.

Richard Vedder notes that this lets students get into the job market a bit sooner, a good idea if there really is a job market for them. Certainly entering this market with less debt is better for the former student. They’ll have more flexibility.

We should recognize that everyone will be getting less not more for the same amount of money. For some kids that all of that yakking is just something that goes in one ear and out the other. For them, the Bauhaus ideal applies: less is more. Fewer classes and a smaller debt helps them get on with their life and still be able to hold their head up high and consider themselves part of the middle class. They’ll have a diploma, just like the Tin Man in the Wizard of Oz.

Ah, but there’s always an equal an opposite force. Robert Venturi came along and said “Less is a bore.” The kids on the new 3 year program will get fewer classes, write fewer papers, do fewer problem sets, and spend fewer hours in the seminar room splitting hairs. If we believe that all of this college stuff is really worth something, then the 3 year plan will produce less of it.

I like the idea for many kids, but I know it doesn’t attack the biggest problem: the obsession with research and luxury items over developing skills. The college presidents choosing the 3 year model recognize that students are can only afford to pay $n for the degree and they know that they can’t build a fancy campus with globe-trotting profs at $n/4 per year. Maybe they can get by at $n/3 and have enough cash left over for a few new latte bars. The other solution is to squeeze the faculty into teaching more and no one at the university seems to want to do that.

The danger in going down this road is that philosophically we’re agreeing with the idea that it’s all just a bunch of yakking and so it doesn’t matter much if you get 3 chunks of education stuff or 4 chunks. If that’s the case, we might as well follow the Tin Man and dial back to zero chunks and a nice piece of paper.