Hershey Friedman makes a case against higher education

In a new article published in the American Journal of Economics and Sociology (ungated earlier version here), Hershey Freidman (City University of New York) penned a very strong critique of higher education. The article is titled "Is Higher Education Making Students Dumb and Dumber?". Hershey writes:

What is truly amazing is that a four-year college degree can actually teach students to be stupid. At the very least, numerous students will lack many of the needed critical skills after they graduate. The reason for this is that professors and teaching assistants themselves lack some important skills, which include: 1) an appreciation of uncertainty, 2) respect for other disciplines, and 3) an understanding of what true diversity is all about.

Ouch. In relation to the first point (uncertainty), Hershey writes:

We are observing arrogant people ranging from academics to doctors to politicians who are certain of their facts. Unfortunately, not all the information available to the public is reliable. Many theories are flawed and are proven false once tested. Researchers speak of evidence-based medicine, evidence-based management, evidence-based practice; unfortunately, that “evidence” is often unreliable. Professors should be teaching students about the dangers of certainty. Instead, they are guilty of the same crime...

One of the most important things we can teach students is not to fall into the certainty trap. It is good to be unsure. There is nothing wrong with having doubts. We must teach students to understand that very little is known with certainty and there is nothing wrong with having some humility. Educators must stress that what they are teaching today might be refuted in a few years. The bottom line is that education is not about indoctrination, it is about critical thinking and attempting to minimize cognitive biases. 

I'll put my hand up and say that I teach economic theory with a good deal more certainty than it warrants. However, that's tempered by a good deal less certainty about the policy prescription, and having outlined from the beginning (especially in my ECONS102 class) that the assumptions of economic models matter, even if not all of the assumptions are laid out in complete detail. Hershey isn't just directing his comments at economics though, but all disciplines. A bit more humility about our disciplinary foundations and approaches is no doubt a good thing. Which brings us to Hershey's second point:

The academic department structure encourages a silo mentality and discourages interdisciplinary work and collaboration. Indeed, faculty are often encouraged to publish in a narrow area in order to receive tenure. Publishing outside one’s area is often a good way to be denied tenure. Most colleges are probably better known for turf battles than for communication and collaboration across disciplines and even sometimes across subareas in the same discipline...

Students majoring in one discipline are taught that it will provide the answers to all questions. Unsurprisingly, this kind of thinking is not encouraged in the corporate world. Collaboration, team work, learning organizations, and knowledge sharing are the mantras at most companies.

This is a fair criticism. Students have called me out for being unfair to marketing as a discipline in my lectures. I know I'm definitely not the only academic passing comment about other disciplines, and economics certainly comes in for a lot of criticism from other social sciences. The point about interdisciplinarity is important though. We want our students to be able to synthesise across multiple disciplinary traditions (which was part of the underlying premise of David Epstein's book, Range (which I reviewed a couple of weeks ago). If we want students to appreciate an interdisciplinary approach, we need to ensure that they are open to other disciplines, and that is something we as academics should model. Diversity is important, which is Hershey's third point:

Academe has been at the forefront of fighting for various kinds of diversity in higher education as well as the workplace and corporate boardroom. There is evidence that companies with more diverse workforces perform better financially than those with less diverse workforces... The kinds of diversity that academe has stressed include gender diversity and ethnic diversity; LGBTQ diversity is also being promoted by the academic world. There is one kind of diversity, however, that is virtually ignored by higher education: diversity of opinion...

Any organization that wants to flourish and be innovative has to create a climate where adversarial collaboration is encouraged. Unfortunately, we often see the opposite approach used in many organizations: executives prefer to surround themselves with sycophants. In academe, entire departments have the same opinions and approaches.

Again related to Epstein's book, diversity within teams is important, and teams do best when the members of the team bring different viewpoints. Again, this is something we could do a better job of modelling in higher education.

I do think that Hershey is overstating his argument though. The assertion in the title, that higher education actually makes students dumber, isn't really supported by evidence. However, that doesn't mean that we can't do things better. And the three areas that Hershey highlights (appreciating uncertainty, respect for other disciplines, and encouraging diversity of opinion) are definitely areas that we can work on.