Professional vs Liberal Education

In yesterday’s post, I mused about several aspects of David Labaree’s book, A Perfect Mess, on the unique features of the U.S. higher education system. Today’s post focuses on Chapter 4 (“Mutual Subversion”) discussing the interesting tension and dance between the liberal and the professional aspects. Before getting into the weeds, here’s Labaree’s summary of these two motifs:

 

“The dominant motif is that over the years professional education has become dominant in colleges and universities, in the process subverting the earlier function of providing liberal education. The more muted motif is that… liberal education has gradually pushed back against professional education, in the process quietly subverting it… these two motifs weave together into… mutual subversion, in which the professional has come to dominate the goals of higher education while the liberal has come to dominate its content.” [italics are mine]

 

There’s a tension between public good and private good. As discussed in yesterday’s post, if one subscribes to the “belief that education exists in order to provide society with the job skills it needs and to provide individual with the job opportunities they want”, then it is no surprise that professional concerns have become the dominant goal. The road to upward mobility was to professionalize. The new gatekeeper to the guild of the professionals is a university-level credential. As employers increasingly demand a university degree to get one’s foot in the door, whether or not the training or content of that degree is relevant, it seems that almost everyone (except perhaps some of the academics themselves) – students, parents, employers, politicians, university leaders, journalists – are banging on the drum that colleges need to do a better job preparing students to be such professionals.

 

In the age of the Internet, with science and technology continuing to dominate industry (or at least that’s the widespread view of most folks), the professional becomes associated with subject matter that, at first glance, seems easier to connect to a job. For professional degrees (medicine, law, engineering, accounting, computer science, and many others), this link seems clear. For the natural sciences (biology, chemistry, physics) and some of the social sciences (psychology, economics) the link is reasonably easy to make. For others, and especially the humanities, the link seems less obvious in both the political and public eye. Since the humanities are most often associated with a liberal arts education, we in the university have a front row seat to witnessing the many and varied attempts by academics in the humanities to make the liberal arts ‘relevant’ to professional concerns and success in life. (Here are some book examples.)

  

Historically, the addition of land-grant colleges by the states, originally emphasizing “vocational education and providing practical solutions to public problems” into the messy system highlights this slant towards the professional over the liberal. Community colleges, formerly ‘junior’ colleges were founded for similar reasons – to provide the manpower for blue-collar ‘semi-professional’ careers (the semi distinction being a way to stratify and protect one’s turf).

 

But when you turn your gaze on how the curriculum has evolved at community colleges and land-grant colleges (now full-fledged universities with a broader array of programs), interesting you see a shift away from the professional and towards the liberal or ‘academic’. For example, ‘normal’ schools were first set up to train elementary school teachers; soon these became teachers’ colleges, and then full-service colleges. The course content has veered away from the practical to the theoretical. Many of the oldest and most prestigious private universities today started out to train clergy. Many of them still have divinity schools which now focus primarily on theology in an academic sense; the ‘practical skills’ training of pastoral care has been relegated to newer and less prestigious entrants into the higher education scene. Similar narratives can be drawn for law schools and business schools.

 

Labaree intriguingly suggests that “the shift toward the professional and the vocational… has been more rhetorical than substantive. Maybe it is best understood as largely a marketing tool, which makes a university education seem more useful and relevant than it really is… liberal arts colleges after World War I started marketing their traditional liberal programs as places to the learn the practical skills needed for success in the white-collar workplace. We see colleges and universities doing the same today. They emphasize the usefulness of liberal learning – as training in business-relevant skills in communications, problem-solving, critical thinking, and entrepreneurship.”

 

These ‘skills’ are what liberal arts colleges (mine included) are heavily selling as to the value of their education. Schools at the top of the pinnacle do not need to beat on this drum, where it’s obvious that social advance by associating with the elite strata is a clear path to opening doors. But since all institutions are trying to move up (see my previous post highlighting Labaree’s four rules), the drum beats loud in most institutions. Here’s another intriguing suggestion from Labaree: “From this perspective, the aim of education is to prepare students to compete effectively in the contest for social positions, and that means a system that maintains maximum flexibility for students by providing an education that allows access to the broadest array of occupational possibilities.”

 

Good to keep one’s options open. Just in case. Especially when everything in life seems to be accelerating.

 

Why has liberal content continued to subvert the professional goal? Labaree thinks it’s because of the tension between a private good and a public good, and in particular that social mobility trumps social efficiency: “Lawmakers kept trying to push students into vocational colleges and students kept demanding and getting access to the liberal education and university structure they wanted, since these offered them the widest array of social opportunities [i.e., advancement].” Students (and their parents) think that the lower-prestige vocational programs are less likely to help them move up. So what if these entry-level vocational programs provide broad access to the clamoring masses? You might not get very far, at least if your goal is social mobility.

 

Credentialism is not a new thing. But it has risen acutely, and possibly for the worse, over the last few decades. So what if the content of professional education more and more resembles the modern liberal arts? If credentialism is the driving force, the content might not matter. Labaree emphasizes that this has “dramatically distorted the teaching and learning process, by focusing students’ attention on the extrinsic rewards that come from acquiring an academic credential and thus undermining the incentive to learn… What we end up with… is an increasingly liberal form of education… drained of liberal content by the same vocational purposes that brought about this expansion in the first place.” [author’s italics] Mutual subversion indeed. And it's no wonder that students freak out even more than usual if they think their credential might not look so good.

 

The chapter concludes with a depressing note quoting historian Laurence Veysey: “It would only slightly caricature the situation to conclude that the most important function of the American professor lay in posing requirements sufficiently difficult to give college graduates a sense of pride, yet not so demanding as to deny the degree to anyone who pledged four years of his parent’s resources and his own time in residence at an academic institution.” Ugh. We’re stuck in a system. And if there’s one thing systems are good at, it is entrenching themselves.