As I begin this series on college guidance, my aim is to take seriously our mission to cultivate lifelong learning and flourishing. We must begin with the current state of affairs. We really cannot guide students into the higher education of today without taking stock of the long backstory of colleges and universities. Industrialization has had a massive impact on higher education, transforming these institutions into destinations for most high school graduates as a pipeline to the job market the industrialized economy created.
As we go into this historical review, we will keep in mind that much of what our educational renewal movement has been about stands against the erosion of values that came with industrialized education. I think there are great opportunities once this history is understood to guide students to colleges and universities that will be excellent destinations for students to build on their educational foundation at our schools and homeschools.
Universities Prior to Industrialization
Let us begin by considering how higher education became what it is today. We can go all the way back to the medieval universities. With the founding of the University of Bologna in 1088, numerous intellectual centers were established throughout Europe including Paris (1150), Oxford (1167), Cambridge (1209) and St Andrews (1413), among many others. These universities were representative of the Aristotelian scholasticism of high middle ages. Our understanding of the trivium and quadrivium within the modern classical education movement is significantly shaped by the medieval universities. Renaissance humanism, far from being a break from the universities, was an outgrowth of these universities which became centers of scientific and humanistic thought.
The word “university” is a composite of “unity” and “diversity.” The goal of the liberal arts curriculum was to find unifying principles across the diverse arts and sciences learned at these institutions. This unity of diversity was also seen at places like Oxford where multiple colleges were federated as a university, something that modeled the federation of states, such as the United States. Taking Oxford as an example, the career of a student began with oral examinations. All students entering Oxford were required to know both ancient Greek and Latin (this was true even into the early 1900s). The first year ended with an examination on the classics. Most students then went on to study degrees that would place them in law, politics or the church. In essence, they received the education of a gentleman as they were the sons of gentlemen who were to be placed in the positions of civil leadership.
The university model struggled to keep up with changing times, as advances in technology and medicine occurred largely outside these centers of learning. Thus Spencer Walpole took a dire view of the education on offer at Oxford, writing:
“‘The education imparted at Oxford,’ wrote the Oxford University Commissioners in 1852, was ‘not such as to conduce to the advancement in life of many persons except those intended for the ministry of the Established Church.’ Few medical men, few solicitors, few persons intended for commerce or trade, ever dreamed of passing through a university career.”
Spencer Walpole, History of Twenty-Five Years, Vol. 4: 1870-1875 (Longmans 1903), 136-137.
From Walpole’s perspective, the old medieval model was not suitable to meet the demands of a more technical age. In many ways he was correct that advances in scientific research were neglected in favor of the liberal arts, which had eroded into a status-confirming exercise for the aristocracy. Walpole was expressing the prevailing opinion in British society as educational reforms substantially overhauled the system from the 1870s to the 1940s.
As an aside, the widespread educational reforms in Britain set the backdrop for authors such as Dorothy Sayers, C. S. Lewis, G. K. Chesterton and others who lamented the loss of the liberal arts. Chesterton, for instance, lamented how modern reforms gutted education of any philosophical insight when he wrote, “But there is something to be said for teaching everything to somebody, as compared with the modern notion of teaching nothing, and the same sort of nothing, to everybody” (Chesterton, All I Survey, 50).
The same story as laid out here for the British educational system can be repeated as it regards American education. Harvard, Princeton, Yale and any number of schools underwent similar kinds of reforms, leading colleges to shift their emphasis from liberal arts education to technical job training and scientific research. To be fair, there is certainly a place for science and job training. However, as Chesterton astutely recognizes, the loss of the liberal arts was not simply about a change in the curriculum, but about sweeping social changes that emphasized secular atheism, gutting education of its life-giving ideas that empowered learners to consider what it means to live with meaning and purpose.
The Emergence of the Educational-industrial Complex
Already in the mid-1800s higher education saw significant reforms shifting colleges and universities towards research in medicine and technology. As mentioned above, this came at the expense of the liberal arts. Then in the first half of the 20th century, higher education exploded. According the census data, the number of college degrees awarded in 1950 (432,000) were over ten times the number in 1910 (37,200). There were several factors leading to this massive expansion.
During the great depression, colleges and universities struggled with finances as did the rest of the economy. Roosevelt ignored the pleas of leaders in higher education to offer federal aid to colleges and universities, but he did create a New Deal program offering federal word-study grants to students. This opened the door for a new segment of society to enter higher education, bring greater economic diversity into American schools.
After World War 2, the G.I. Bill enabled millions of returning veterans to gain access to higher education. Just this influx of new students alone accounts for the massive expansion of colleges and universities in the mid-1900s. In addition, college campuses began to expand from small institutions to massive campuses with some state universities hosting tens of thousands of undergraduates.
Finally, the Great Society under Lyndon B. Johnson set the expectation that a college education was part of the American dream. Federal grants and loans subsidized this expectation in the Higher Education Act of 1965. From this point forward, higher education saw in influx of hundreds of thousands of new enrollment each decade.
The sheer size of higher education meant that it represented a significant sector of the economy with a huge federal budget allocated to support it. Combined with the reforms of the late 1800s, higher education was no longer about the lengthy process of forming students for leadership positions in society in the liberal arts tradition, but was now centered on technical job training. The industrial economy needed workers. It also needed consumers. Thus, going to college became a hallmark of American life where teenagers would expect to live in dorms, eat cafeteria food and tick the boxes of graduation credits. The combination of technical training and consumerist mentality. In his manifesto to change our conception of education, Seth Godin critiques what higher education had become by the latter part of the 1900s, “The mission used to be to create homogenized, obedient, satisfied workers and pliant, eager consumers” (Godin Stop Stealing Dreams).
It was Dwight D. Eisenhower who warned Americans of the “military-industrial complex” in his 1961 farewell address.
“This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. . . .Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. . . . In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Farewell address” (January 17, 1961).
The threat of an education-industrial complex mirrors Eisenhower’s warning. True, it doesn’t wield the same kind of destructive power, but an educational-industrial complex places its citizenry under the “unwarranted influence” of “misplaced power.” It raises the question as to whether it is worth placing our children in the institutions of higher education. What is the value of a college education? Have the rising costs of undergraduate education matched our perception of its value?
A New Post-industrial Economy
I have probably painted higher education in a rather poor light thus far. It is true that I have benefitted from my college education and regularly guide our high school graduates in the college selection process. I do not want to leave you without hope in what is becoming a rather bleak landscape when it comes to higher education broadly. There are two reasons that I am hopeful as it regards higher education for our students.
One, there remain numerous colleges and universities that offer excellent liberal arts programs. Students graduating from high school are not without great options whether they want to pursue specialized degrees or desire certain kinds of campus environments. It is actually an exciting time to be searching for colleges as classical school kids and their homeschooled compatriots are highly attractive to these colleges and universities. They know that generally speaking these are students who write well, think deeply and care about their learning.
Two, the demographic cliff colleges and universities are facing means that there is a simultaneous winnowing of small colleges and improvement of quite a number of collegiate programs. The recession in the early 2000s has meant that there are fewer students graduating in the 2020s. With lower enrollment, many colleges are needing to tighten their belts and make themselves more attractive to the smaller pool of applicants. While this might not mean savings for families paying for college, it can mean that tuition dollars are being invested in programs offering better value.
Conclusion
Having looked at the history of universities and capturing a sense of the current state of affairs, we are now better positioned to understand many of the mechanisms that exist in higher education today. In the next article we will delve into the way the game has been played for the past eighty years or so. Ultimately, we will promote a program of guidance that plays a different kind of game. Yet, understanding these rules will enable us as guides to understand the processes and procedures of higher education as it currently stands. We cannot go into college guidance naïve to the inner workings of topics such as federal funding, standardized tests and grade point averages.
For now, hopefully I have left you with a strong sense of how important the liberal arts tradition has been within the history of higher education since the middle ages. Figures at the start of the 20th century cried out against the erosion of the liberal arts, figures such as Dorothy Sayers and C.S. Lewis. Yet, situating the liberal arts within the broader framework of scientific research and technical training remains a significant question today. For instance, the debates between Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois addressed this very question. While this question may remain prominent in our minds today, new questions are emerging with the rising costs of a college education. Is it worth spending so much in tuition only to have significant loan debt for decades afterward? Is the value of a college education worth the cost? I think these are actually significant questions parents and students today are asking when they begin asking for college guidance. Hopefully with the perspectives gained in this historical overview, some answers have emerged that address all of these questions.
