A struggling economy has a way of making the shortsighted come out of the woodwork and panic about everything. One manifestation of this shortsighted panic is the anti-college movement, the people who have set about trying to make the case that you shouldn't go to college because it's not worth it.
The simplistic argument that the anti-college movement uses is exclusively about ROI, or return on investment. The core of this argument is that college is too expensive, and requires too many people to go into debt in order to pay for it; yet at the same time the jobs after college just aren't there. Too many college graduates aren't 'using their degrees,' working jobs in the service industry, etc. For the anti-college movement, this represents a poor ROI: you go into debt to get a college degree, then you come out with lots of debt and lousy job prospects.
A small part of this argument is true: college is too expensive, and it requires too much debt. We could say the same thing about every single other major investment we make, including buying houses, cars, and stocks: with the exception of the very rich, Americans achieve a high standard of living not on earnings (or any real growth in wages for the last few decades), but on debt.
Those who know something about trends in higher education will almost universally affirm that what's driving increases in college costs is everything but the EDUCATION part of college; but that's for another day. The substantive discussion to be had on the question of college costs and student debt is about how to reduce costs while improving education, two things that, actually, go hand-in-hand.
The anti-college movement is not interested in the substantive discussion, however. They catastrophize the problem of cost in order to suggest, without logical connection whatsoever, that education itself is overvalued. The only way they can make this otherwise inane connection between overspending on college gyms and football press boxes and 'educational' expenses is by reducing the value of a college education to ROI.
The counterargument here is a simple one, in two parts: 1) the value of a college education is not reducible to an equation of how much you paid for college and how much you make afterwards as a consequence of your degree; but 2) even if the value of college could be sensibly measured this way, COLLEGE IS THE BEST INVESTMENT YOU CAN MAKE. To summarize part 2:
1) The unemployment rate of the entire workforce in April was 7.5%. The unemployment rate for college graduates was 3.9%.
2) Not all college graduates currently have the jobs they want in this recession, but all net job gains have gone to college graduates.
3) Last year, a full-time worker with a college degree earned 79% more on average than one without.
4) Despite the high up-front costs of college, investing in a college degree returns better than the average stock market returns since 1950, and more than FIVE TIMES the returns on gold, long-term government bonds, and home ownership.
Of course, measuring the value of education this way is, commonsensically, historically, philosophically, and politically asinine.
For the past 2000 years the fundamental point of a higher education has never been to train people for jobs. Job skills have certainly been a positive externality of higher education; but let's not confuse that externality with the PURPOSE of higher education, which is to broadly enrich our lives and prepare us better for citizenship and social well being.
In light of all this, I'm comfortable suggesting that the ROI argument against going to college is dismissible. The question, then, is why the anti-college movement is so invested in telling you not to go to college. There are several reasons why, reasons that the anti-college movement doesn't articulate up-front. It's time, however, to stop letting the anti-college movement hide behind non-arguments about ROI, and to examine what really bothers them about college.
1) They don't understand the difference between higher eduction and job training, and they want you to be a good little cog. For the anti-college movement, the idea of earning a degree in philosophy and making 40K a year as a bartender is shockingly offensive. The idea of earning a college degree and not sliding into a typical white-collar job--the kind of job that the ROI folks could consider a 'success story' worthy of a college degree--is anathema (even though even most white-collar jobs out there don't require anything nearly as sophisticated as a college degree). If you're not 'using' your college education for you job, the anti-college crowd has absolutely no idea what to make of you. The idea that you might be enriched by that philosophy degree over and above what you do for a living does not register for these people.
2) They think college brainwashes you. The anti-college movement is largely a conservative movement, which means it's afraid that all the indoctrination your conservative parents inundated you with growing up could be countered by learning new things about the world. Large numbers of people who acquire a breadth of knowledge, and the tools to articulate what they know, is a problem for singularist conservatives who believe that American culture is a monolithic thing that should be dictated by one God, one language, one view of history, one view of capitalism, one view of gender roles, and, in too many cases, one race.
3) They think college inhibits entrepreneurship. The anti-college crowd thinks that because people like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of college and became tech billionaires, avoiding college is the ticket to successful entrepreneurship. Stanford (philosophy major) and Stanford Law graduate and successful entrepreneur Peter Thiel is so convinced of this that, if you prove yourself entrepreneurial enough, he will pay you to not get the same world-class education he's received.
4) They believe in the imaginary wall that separates a college campus from 'the real world.' Failing to understand that the idea of 'the real world' is a metaphor and not a physical divide, the anti-college movement struggles to understand the ways in which being successful in college is like being successful in broader life. Things like meeting deadlines, being self-disciplined with your time, learning to adjust to new social settings, learning to get along with a diversity of people, learning to confront difficult truths, learning to speak confidently to a room full of strangers, being held accountable for your work, fitting in healthy eating and exercise habits on a busy schedule, etc. are cornerstones of college success that, for the anti-college movement, clearly have no analogues in the 'real world.'
5) They're white people with privileged upbringings. One thing you don't see very often is someone representing the African-American urban poor or a first-generation Cuban immigrant claiming that college is overrated. That's because people who aren't already plugged into networks of privilege simply by being born have a much more difficult time moving upward in society and getting good jobs and life opportunities. Sure, if your parents are senior partners at a New York City law firm, and you're an entrepreneurial teenager, you've already grown up with a top-tier vocabulary just from hearing your parents talk; you've already learned how to dress and socialize among the elite just by being around your own household; your parents friends and your own friends (who are the children of those living in your wealthy neighborhood) have access to plenty of capital, social and otherwise. You probably won't have a hard time getting seed investment for your idea, whether it's a lemonade stand or tech startup. But if you aren't born into privilege, going to college is likely the only opportunity you'll ever have to get plugged into a network of privilege, to know the sort of people who can get you your first internship leading to your first high-paying job, who can put you in touch with potential investors in you and your ideas, with advisors who can tell you what you need to do to be an engineer, a doctor, a lawyer, etc. So next time you hear someone telling you all about how college is overrated, a poor ROI, etc., ask yourself: is this person from a privileged background in which they already were given the tools, opportunities, and experiences that college provides for the majority of people who go to college?
Thursday, May 30, 2013
Monday, May 13, 2013
The Hidden Story in the Jason Richwine Race/IQ Controversy
Recently, an employee at The Heritage Foundation, Jason Richwine, fell under heavy media fire for his Harvard Kennedy School dissertation, completed several years ago. In the dissertation, Richwine investigated correlations between race and IQ scores, with the aim of demonstrating that immigration policy should factor in the IQ scores of potential immigrants. Richwine's findings unsurprisingly did more than raise eyebrows: the dissertation claims that, on average, latinos have lower IQ scores that white Americans, and in that touch-and-go style typical of when virtually anyone writes something taboo about race, suggests that race can be determinative of intelligence (even though he ultimately and toothlessly recommends we look at IQ in individual cases, a ridiculous idea when applied to policy, I'll add). Richwine has since resigned from his role at The Heritage Foundation, and Slate's David Weigel does a nice summary of the genesis of Richwine's dissertation here.
Of course this controversy has generated commentary on how far the conservative Heritage Foundation will go in its sponsored "scholarship," or how the "PC police" are shouting down legitimate science, or how such an illustrious institution as Harvard could have let slide such a dissertation, or how the swift movement from empirical findings about IQ to racist immigration policy that Richwine's dissertation appears to substantiate will have white supremacists salivating (and even The Heritage Foundation rapidly distancing itself from Richwine). But there's another side to this story that isn't getting any media attention, though I think it's one of the most important aspects of this controversy.
Let's consider what the academics said about Richwine's work. When The New Republic interviewed controversial scholar Charles Murray, who did groundbreaking (if problematic) work on intelligence and class in The Bell Curve (1994), Murray said that Richwine's work was not inaccurate nor intellectually suspect, but simply "taboo." One of Richwine's dissertation advisers at Harvard, Richard Zeckhauser, saw fit to note that "...none of his advisers would have accepted his thesis had he thought that his empirical work was tilted or in error. However, Richwine was too eager to extrapolate his empirical results to inferences for policy."
Zeckhauser goes on to note that in his opinion,
I want to point out something absolutely essential to understand about what these academics, particularly Zeckhauser, are doing with these comments. They're arguing that there are two extricable components to scholarly work on policy: one, the empirical data, two, the "values issues." And as Murray suggests, if your career is ruined because the empirical question you sought to answer verges into the "taboo" territory of the "values issues" sphere, what this amounts to is people putting their weird, idiosyncratic prejudices and preferences above the value of your empirical work because you've touched on something that people have strong personal response too, i.e. that which is taboo. Zeckhauser, too, wants us to understand that so long as Richwine's empirical work held up, we shouldn't be mad at Harvard for accepting his dissertation; and the real problem that Richwine ran into wasn't how he structured his study, nor how he approached the question, nor even how he answered the question, but rather how he moved so indelicately from that answer to a "values issues" policy recommendation.
For anyone familiar with the Kennedy School at Harvard, you'll know that the full name of the Kennedy School is the Kennedy School of Government, not the Kennedy School of Doing Statistics in a Vacuum. For people who place the entirety of their trust and support behind empirical studies and empirical studies only as ways of producing knowledge, this little shuffle that Zeckhauser is doing in the quotes above is a basic survival tactic. The same academics who win major grants and gain status in the policy world by claiming that empirical scholarship is so important because it's so useful in the policy realm will inevitably find themselves backpedaling from that position anytime an empirical study suggests something horrific that we don't want to see or talk about, or that's self-evidently without use-value because it's so ridiculous or untenable for reasons that go beyond methodology or empirical competence. Once that happened to Richwine's Harvard dissertation advisers, they turned about and said, effectively, whoa, look, our School of Government dissertations shouldn't make policy recommendations! Oh no no no. We should just let the FACTS speak for THEMSELVES!
The trouble, of course, is that facts don't speak for themselves. Facts have no value content, no moral position, and no sense of strategy when it comes to policymaking. And if the worth of empirical data in policy studies amounts to not bolstering policy decisions, but, as Zeckhauser puts it, making it "much harder for one's opponents to dismiss what you say," then something very sneaky, and very important to understand, is going on here:
Facts and empirical data are being marshaled as rhetorical devices to support preconceived, subjective values.
To someone like me, this is neither new nor especially problematic. But for someone like Zeckhauser, who appears to believe that facts can "speak for themselves" without containing or speaking with or from some subjective values position--in other words, that we can completely extricate the empirical from the "values issues"--this is just another way of doing bad science.
In the real world (as opposed to Empirical Study Vacuum Land), however, the answers we get depend largely on not just what questions we subjectively choose to ask (whether they're "taboo" or not), but also on how we ask those questions, and how we interpret the results. It's true that today we can (and too often do) hold up data as a rhetorical device; but we should all be savvy enough to call this out when it happens, and to recognize that data don't speak for themselves, but for the subjective position they're marshaled to speak for. Data should be part of many (though not all) arguments; but data are not an argument in and of themselves. Data cannot speak this way.
The real problem with Richwine's study, then, is that he used, as adviser George Borjas noted, a proxy for "intelligence" or "efficacy" or "success"--IQ--that is only weakly predictive of any of these things. The very basic language problem--that IQ doesn't really mean any of these other descriptors--is by itself enough to demonstrate that there's a subjective slippage from data (IQ) to subjective meaning (whatever it is that you want IQ to stand in as a predictor of). If every study that uses something like IQ--easy to measure, as so many easy-to-measure things are, precisely because of how meaningless it is in the real world--simply explained that IQ is a self-sealing proxy for things that IQ doesn't really mean (only more elegantly)--then these studies would be more intellectually honest and more worthy of passing at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. But the combination of the ongoing obsession with finding simple, authoritative, empirical answers to messy, non-empirical questions (like policy and race), along with the deep-seated fear of confronting and admitting this reality for those who make a living by passing off "data rhetoric" for truth or even meaningful information, mean that the Richwine controversy will continue to develop as just another instance of "underlying values" corrupting what might have been meaningful empirical work.
More importantly, however: knowledge is always already "corrupted" by subjectivity. That's part of the definition of knowledge, which takes on meaning in human vessels, and nowhere else. The facts can "speak for themselves" no more than can a rock or a piece of petrified dung. "The facts" are born into a preexisting discourse, after which point someone will always be speaking for them. In the case of Richwine, the person speaking for the facts had a clear, partisan agenda (one likely doesn't take a Harvard PhD to The Heritage Foundation without at least sympathy for that agenda), a clear interest in quantifying and giving empirical authority to characteristics of racial difference, and a clear interest, as one should have in policy work, in applying his research findings to policy. Rather than fretting over how the data might have been "corrupted" by subjective values, we should be looking at the bigger picture: people who do studies, interpret studies, and apply studies have personal values; and the studies themselves are a rhetorical mode.
Of course this controversy has generated commentary on how far the conservative Heritage Foundation will go in its sponsored "scholarship," or how the "PC police" are shouting down legitimate science, or how such an illustrious institution as Harvard could have let slide such a dissertation, or how the swift movement from empirical findings about IQ to racist immigration policy that Richwine's dissertation appears to substantiate will have white supremacists salivating (and even The Heritage Foundation rapidly distancing itself from Richwine). But there's another side to this story that isn't getting any media attention, though I think it's one of the most important aspects of this controversy.
Let's consider what the academics said about Richwine's work. When The New Republic interviewed controversial scholar Charles Murray, who did groundbreaking (if problematic) work on intelligence and class in The Bell Curve (1994), Murray said that Richwine's work was not inaccurate nor intellectually suspect, but simply "taboo." One of Richwine's dissertation advisers at Harvard, Richard Zeckhauser, saw fit to note that "...none of his advisers would have accepted his thesis had he thought that his empirical work was tilted or in error. However, Richwine was too eager to extrapolate his empirical results to inferences for policy."
Zeckhauser goes on to note that in his opinion,
...our School gives too much emphasis on moving from findings to policy implications in scholarly work...in many cases, merely presenting the facts would be a preferable way to go. That makes it much harder for one's opponents to dismiss what you say, or to accuse you of manipulating facts to reach policy conclusions. Moreover, I believe that policy conclusions usually rest on one's underlying values. If one complements one's empirical assessments with values issues, those assessments get questioned, particularly if one addresses a controversial realm of policy...In many contexts, one's work will have a long run greater influence on policy if the facts are left to speak for themselves.
I want to point out something absolutely essential to understand about what these academics, particularly Zeckhauser, are doing with these comments. They're arguing that there are two extricable components to scholarly work on policy: one, the empirical data, two, the "values issues." And as Murray suggests, if your career is ruined because the empirical question you sought to answer verges into the "taboo" territory of the "values issues" sphere, what this amounts to is people putting their weird, idiosyncratic prejudices and preferences above the value of your empirical work because you've touched on something that people have strong personal response too, i.e. that which is taboo. Zeckhauser, too, wants us to understand that so long as Richwine's empirical work held up, we shouldn't be mad at Harvard for accepting his dissertation; and the real problem that Richwine ran into wasn't how he structured his study, nor how he approached the question, nor even how he answered the question, but rather how he moved so indelicately from that answer to a "values issues" policy recommendation.
For anyone familiar with the Kennedy School at Harvard, you'll know that the full name of the Kennedy School is the Kennedy School of Government, not the Kennedy School of Doing Statistics in a Vacuum. For people who place the entirety of their trust and support behind empirical studies and empirical studies only as ways of producing knowledge, this little shuffle that Zeckhauser is doing in the quotes above is a basic survival tactic. The same academics who win major grants and gain status in the policy world by claiming that empirical scholarship is so important because it's so useful in the policy realm will inevitably find themselves backpedaling from that position anytime an empirical study suggests something horrific that we don't want to see or talk about, or that's self-evidently without use-value because it's so ridiculous or untenable for reasons that go beyond methodology or empirical competence. Once that happened to Richwine's Harvard dissertation advisers, they turned about and said, effectively, whoa, look, our School of Government dissertations shouldn't make policy recommendations! Oh no no no. We should just let the FACTS speak for THEMSELVES!
The trouble, of course, is that facts don't speak for themselves. Facts have no value content, no moral position, and no sense of strategy when it comes to policymaking. And if the worth of empirical data in policy studies amounts to not bolstering policy decisions, but, as Zeckhauser puts it, making it "much harder for one's opponents to dismiss what you say," then something very sneaky, and very important to understand, is going on here:
Facts and empirical data are being marshaled as rhetorical devices to support preconceived, subjective values.
To someone like me, this is neither new nor especially problematic. But for someone like Zeckhauser, who appears to believe that facts can "speak for themselves" without containing or speaking with or from some subjective values position--in other words, that we can completely extricate the empirical from the "values issues"--this is just another way of doing bad science.
In the real world (as opposed to Empirical Study Vacuum Land), however, the answers we get depend largely on not just what questions we subjectively choose to ask (whether they're "taboo" or not), but also on how we ask those questions, and how we interpret the results. It's true that today we can (and too often do) hold up data as a rhetorical device; but we should all be savvy enough to call this out when it happens, and to recognize that data don't speak for themselves, but for the subjective position they're marshaled to speak for. Data should be part of many (though not all) arguments; but data are not an argument in and of themselves. Data cannot speak this way.
The real problem with Richwine's study, then, is that he used, as adviser George Borjas noted, a proxy for "intelligence" or "efficacy" or "success"--IQ--that is only weakly predictive of any of these things. The very basic language problem--that IQ doesn't really mean any of these other descriptors--is by itself enough to demonstrate that there's a subjective slippage from data (IQ) to subjective meaning (whatever it is that you want IQ to stand in as a predictor of). If every study that uses something like IQ--easy to measure, as so many easy-to-measure things are, precisely because of how meaningless it is in the real world--simply explained that IQ is a self-sealing proxy for things that IQ doesn't really mean (only more elegantly)--then these studies would be more intellectually honest and more worthy of passing at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. But the combination of the ongoing obsession with finding simple, authoritative, empirical answers to messy, non-empirical questions (like policy and race), along with the deep-seated fear of confronting and admitting this reality for those who make a living by passing off "data rhetoric" for truth or even meaningful information, mean that the Richwine controversy will continue to develop as just another instance of "underlying values" corrupting what might have been meaningful empirical work.
More importantly, however: knowledge is always already "corrupted" by subjectivity. That's part of the definition of knowledge, which takes on meaning in human vessels, and nowhere else. The facts can "speak for themselves" no more than can a rock or a piece of petrified dung. "The facts" are born into a preexisting discourse, after which point someone will always be speaking for them. In the case of Richwine, the person speaking for the facts had a clear, partisan agenda (one likely doesn't take a Harvard PhD to The Heritage Foundation without at least sympathy for that agenda), a clear interest in quantifying and giving empirical authority to characteristics of racial difference, and a clear interest, as one should have in policy work, in applying his research findings to policy. Rather than fretting over how the data might have been "corrupted" by subjective values, we should be looking at the bigger picture: people who do studies, interpret studies, and apply studies have personal values; and the studies themselves are a rhetorical mode.
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