Beware the Free Degree

T he American consciousness can’t seem to shake its preoccupation with college. This year alone, the admissions policies of the Ivy League, and President Biden’s efforts to cancel student-loan debt, have taken over the public discourse. We use adolescence to prepare for college, push young adults to take out massive loans to attend it, and treat it as a core marker of identity well into adulthood.

As such, the progressive demand that college be free for all should come as no surprise. The economic case against this idea has already been ably made. But the very demand for free college has baked into it a false assumption that is worth refuting: that a college education plays an irreplaceable role in intellectual development.

Rather than reinforcing the credentialist arms race that makes a bachelor’s degree seem necessary for success in the 21st century, we should break the collegiate monopoly over the life of the mind. That starts by recovering a genuine, self-driven love for education.

The immediate impact of making college free would, of course, be more people pursuing a bachelor’s degree. But will that improve the lot of the great many men and women who are not particularly interested in formal education? A master’s degree will simply be the new prerequisite for joining the laptop class. We will have delayed their entrance into the workforce, and therefore their accumulation of wealth and experience, by four to six years.

We will have pushed them through something for which they may care little and, therefore, from which they gain little. They will be even less likely to pursue further study on their own accord, having been burnt out by extra years of undesired lectures.

This does not seem an improvement over a career in the trades, the military, or any number of professions in which on-the-job training is far more valuable than time in the classroom.

Offering a free degree does not preclude people from doing any of those things, of course. But many people already feel pressured to pursue a degree they do not intrinsically want because it has become an artificial barrier to career advancement or simply because it has become the thing to do. We would be naïve to pretend that incentives do not matter. In attempting to democratize higher education, we will have reaffirmed its centrality to American life.

The consequences of this exercise were summed up by William James in his 1903 essay “The Ph.D. Octopus”:

America is thus a nation rapidly drifting towards a state of things in which no man of science or letters will be accounted respectable unless some kind of badge or diploma is stamped upon him, and in which bare personality will be a mark of outcast estate. It seems to me high time to rouse ourselves to consciousness, and to cast a critical eye upon this decidedly grotesque tendency. . . .

It is indeed odd to see this love of titles — and such titles — growing up in a country of which the recognition of individuality and bare manhood have so long been supposed to be the very soul. The independence of the State, in which most of our colleges stand, relieves us of those more odious forms of academic politics which continental European countries present.

James’s essay shows that involving the state further in higher education — and allowing our institutions of higher education such a central role in our culture — is dangerous even for would-be intellectuals. We risk making the external markers of a cultivated mind seem more important than knowledge itself, even though such a mind will make itself known with or without a formal credential.

Instead, we should revive America’s extensive history of autodidacticism. The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass describes its eponymous author’s tireless efforts to learn to read and orate, a desire inextricably linked with his longing for freedom. Abraham Lincoln famously had only a few months of organized schooling, but in his youth, he read nearly every book he could get his hands on. Benjamin Franklin, who was perhaps the truest polymath of the Founding period, founded his own public library to ensure himself access to all manner of knowledge.

This project was not limited to a few men of extraordinary natural gifts, nor to those in what we would today see as white-collar jobs. One study in 1800, long before most people had access to substantial public education, found that almost all Americans were literate. The Pilgrim’s Progress, the McGuffey readers, various works of Shakespeare, and, of course, the Bible were shared cultural touchpoints for the nascent American republic. Lyceums and philosophical societies developed quickly in cities, and the Chautauqua movement of the late 1800s brought traveling lecturers to the countryside.

More recently, great-books programs such as Hutchins’s and Adler’s curriculum for Encyclopedia Britannica and the Penguin Classics collection have made the Western tradition accessible to the average American household. Today, the internet gives us unparalleled access to the writings of great thinkers and the academics that have commented on them, largely for free.

College can help provide structure to intellectual exploration, of course, and I don’t mean to deny the value of having a mentor to help you grasp a difficult idea. But the man who is reliant on that assistance for his own development is likely to stop developing his mind the second he grasps his diploma.

While we may find it prudent to ensure that all Americans share certain basic skills, we must not rely on government — or even colleges themselves — to complete our educations. Perhaps they can force-feed you your times tables and make you repeat ad nauseam that the mitochondria are the powerhouses of the cell. But education isn’t something a man gets, it’s something he does. Let’s relearn the great American virtue of doing for ourselves.