Decay and Reform in Christian Higher Education

What strikes me as most relevant here is that the implicit assumption here is Keynes' misformulation of Say's Law, "Supply creates its own demand." Lost in the question is the motivation of students and the broader demand for the liberal arts and classical learning. But just as a lot of now former Tesla employees know, having a lot of product to sell is not equivalent to having demand for that, and in our churches, there has been a pattern of resistance to academic style learning for about a century.

In a way, it makes sense, since it was prestigious universities that led the church into liberalism. A bit of suspicion is entirely appropriate. But it's probably a second factor, the 1960s and forward thought that we are building a man for a trade, and not building a man to....be a man.

As a huge fan of the liberal arts (despite my engineering degrees and career in tech), it almost seems as if a lot of those former liberal arts professors need to get out there into churches and day schools and help people understand the joys and significance of things like classic literature. The trouble is....doing so generally doesn't pay. So the business model is, IMO, horrible.

I went to BJU for undergrad, which, at least in the early 1980’s, required liberal arts no matter the major. I didn’t appreciate it at the time, as I thought it took away time from my major (which in some sense, I guess it did), but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to appreciate the liberal arts influence on my education.

Of course, that’s not the same as majoring in the liberal arts. Except for a very few who have the drive and excellence to become liberal arts professors (and ability to live on low pay before tenure, and maybe afterwards), in most cases, liberal arts degrees won’t pay the person to live, let alone pay back the cost of the degree at today’s college prices. This is true even at a place like BJU, which, while not cheap, is still quite a bargain compared to Duke or even USC in Columbia.

Every recent liberal arts major I know now either does something else, or their spouse also works to make their liberal arts career possible. One that married one of my daughter’s friends was a history major. Afterwards, he went to trade school and now works as a welder, at a pretty good salary. I’m sure he appreciates his history degree, but outside of teaching, there’s no use for it in the real world, where he has to earn to support his family. My kids’ piano teacher was great, but the only way he could afford to have that as a career was because his wife had a corporate career, and he could do a lot of his teaching from home.

I’m certainly not against people studying the liberal arts (and, in a very few cases, even majoring in it). My professors in those specialties have certainly enriched my education and my life. But even if liberal arts were required of students at every college and trade school, there’s still a very limited market for those who specialize in them, and those who want to go that direction need to understand what they are up against. Bert is right about the demand.

If liberal arts were taught properly at the secondary school level, many of these problems would be solved. Students would pick up the skills to learn and study independently in the humanities they love while going on to major in other, perhaps more lucrative or needed areas. And no, this isn't pie-in-the-sky type thinking. It's been done before, and it's what I try to do as a teacher, even if poorly at times.

I met this older guy working for a moving company once who was a product of a local Catholic school back when Catholic education was truly superb--instead of what it's become now.

He was just a blue collar worker, but we had this fantastic discussion about the local history and religious movements of the area, Shakespeare, etc. Impressed, I asked him where and if he went to college and he said with evident pride, "No, I just went to a good Catholic school."