George Leef recently used National Review to highlight Adam Ellwanger’s Martin Center essay on students who treat education as an afterthought. They are describing a real problem. I share their frustration.
But frustration is not the same as explanation.
Ellwanger asks: “If you’re a serious student, it ought to be a priority. And if it isn’t a priority (or if you’re not a serious student), then why do it?”
They do it because they have to. Many students are not seeking intellectual transformation. They are seeking a credential because the labor market told them they need one—told them brutally.
That is not merely anecdotal: Strada and Gallup found that many Americans pursue higher education chiefly for work-related reasons, and Harvard Business School’s research on degree inflation shows that employers often require bachelor’s degrees for jobs that previously did not require them.
For such students, college is less a calling than a requirement: a way to keep a promotion path open, qualify for higher pay, survive HR filters where a real person may never see their résumé, or be considered for jobs that should not even require advanced academic preparation.
To tell such students that they should not be in college unless they can put education first is not rigor. It is tone-deafness dressed up as seriousness. It asks ordinary people to honor an idealized vision of college while living inside an economy that has turned college into a practical necessity.
If a working adult needs a degree to move into a better job, what exactly are we asking when we say education must come first? Is he, in effect, supposed to tell his spouse or children, “Sorry, I cannot pursue the credential this economy requires because I cannot put college ahead of work, rent, caregiving, and family obligations”?