THE CORE CURRICULUM AS INTELLECTUAL MOTIVATION
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education good enough that its graduates would have a fair chance at the
high lifetime earnings now associated exclusively with a college degree?
The savings in costs, and more importantly, in wasted time and effort,
would be enormous.
This argument is often entangled with an appeal for government poli–
cies that favor sending as many students as possible to college-that equity
requires members of social groups who were once excluded from the ben–
efits of higher education to have access. The principle sounds worthy but
it may be impossible to apply in any other than a self-defeating universal–
ization. Virtually the whole population of the United States could
plausibly claim to belong to social groups who were once excluded from
higher education.
These four points-the need for educated workers, for an informed
citizenry, for education aimed at economic betterment, and for equity in
admissions-offer potent political oratory. In the United States, no major
elected official of either party stands against the conclusion that admission
to college and assistance in meeting its expenses should be extended to the
broadest possible public.
To find serious political debate on higher education requires that we
look to a level of nuance. What American politicians debate is the per–
centage of aid to students that should be distributed as grants as opposed
to loans; whether the loans should be distributed exclusively through
banks, or through banks and universities, how much a higher default rate
on student loans can be accepted from tribal colleges and historically black
colleges than from other colleges and universities; and so on.
Last year, when I published an article in the
Chronicle of Higher
Education
criticizing the foolishness of U.S. federal policies that provide
financial incentives to encourage ever larger percentages of American
youth to pursue college programs, I was criticized, as I fully expected, for
wishing to deny opportunities to the deserving many. But my favorite
among the criticisms was that, "Wood does not understand that higher
education is a battleship that cannot be turned around." Ah, but Wood
does understand, and he sends his congratulations to those clever battleship
designers who created the rudderless modern university.
It
was of course a collaborative design. The basic model was the land
grant university that was ushered into existence by the famous Civil War
legislation, the Morrill Act, which called for the creation of" . ..at least one
college in each state where the leading object shall be, without excluding
other scientific or classical studies, to teach such branches of learning as are
related to agriculture and the mechanical arts...." The Morrill Act began
the transformation of American higher education into a system that was
more vocational as well as, we would now say, more accessible.
