Murray-AreTooManyPeopleGoingtoCollege.pdf

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Are Too Many People Going to College?

c h a r l e s m u r r a y

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To ask whether too many people are going to college requires
us to think about the importance and nature of a liberal edu-
cation. “Universities are not intended to teach the knowledge
required to fit men for some special mode of gaining their
livelihood,” John Stuart Mill told students at the University
of St. Andrews in 1867. “Their object is not to make skillful
lawyers, or physicians, or engineers, but capable and cultivated
human beings.” If this is true (and I agree that it is), why say that
too many people are going to college? Surely a mass democracy
should encourage as many people as possible to become “capable
and cultivated human beings” in Mill’s sense. We should not
restrict the availability of a liberal education to a rarefied intel-
lectual elite. More people should be going to college, not fewer.

Charles Murray is the W. H. Brady Scholar at the American
Enterprise Institute, a “public policy think tank dedicated to defending
human dignity, expanding human potential, and building a freer and
safer world.” He is the author, most recently, of By the People: Rebuilding
Liberty without Permission (2015). This essay, adapted from his book
Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America’s Schools Back to
Reality (2008) first appeared on September 8, 2008, in The American,
the journal of the American Enterprise Institute.

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Yes and no. More people should be getting the basics of a
liberal education. But for most students, the places to provide
those basics are elementary and middle school. E. D. Hirsch Jr.
is the indispensable thinker on this topic, beginning with his
1987 book Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs
to Know. Part of his argument involves the importance
of a body of core knowledge in fostering reading speed
and comprehension. With regard to a liberal education, Hirsch
makes three points that are germane here:

Full participation in any culture requires familiarity with a
body of core knowledge. To live in the United States and not
recognize Teddy Roosevelt, Prohibition, the Minutemen, Wall
Street, smoke-filled rooms, or Gettysburg is like trying to read
without knowing some of the ten thousand most commonly
used words in the language. It signifies a degree of cultural
illiteracy about America. But the core knowledge transcends
one’s own country. Not to recognize Falstaff, Apollo, the Sistine
Chapel, the Inquisition, the twenty-third Psalm, or Mozart sig-
nifies cultural illiteracy about the West. Not to recognize the
solar system, the Big Bang, natural selection, relativity, or the
periodic table is to be scientifically illiterate. Not to recognize
the Mediterranean, Vienna, the Yangtze River, Mount Everest,
or Mecca is to be geographically illiterate.

This core knowledge is an important part of the glue that
holds the culture together. All American children, of whatever
ethnic heritage, and whether their families came here 300 years
ago or three months ago, need to learn about the Pilgrims,
Valley Forge, Duke Ellington, Apollo 11, Susan B. Anthony,
George C. Marshall, and the Freedom Riders. All students need
to learn the iconic stories. For a society of immigrants such as

See Chapter 4
for ways to
agree, but with
a difference.

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5

ours, the core knowledge is our shared identity that makes us
Americans together rather than hyphenated Americans.

K–8 are the right years to teach the core knowledge, and the
effort should get off to a running start in elementary school.
Starting early is partly a matter of necessity: There’s a lot to
learn, and it takes time. But another reason is that small children
enjoy learning myths and fables, showing off names and dates
they have memorized, and hearing about great historical figures
and exciting deeds. The educational establishment sees this kind
of curriculum as one that forces children to memorize boring
facts. That conventional wisdom is wrong on every count. The
facts can be fascinating (if taught right); a lot more than memo-
rization is entailed; yet memorizing things is an indispensable
part of education, too; and memorizing is something that chil-
dren do much, much better than adults. The core knowledge
is suited to ways that young children naturally learn and enjoy
learning. Not all children will be able to do the reading with
the same level of comprehension, but the fact-based nature of
the core knowledge actually works to the benefit of low-ability
students—remembering facts is much easier than making infer-
ences and deductions. The core knowledge curriculum lends
itself to adaptation for students across a wide range of academic
ability.

In the 20 years since Cultural Literacy was published, Hirsch and
his colleagues have developed and refined his original formula-
tion into an inventory of more than 6,000 items that approxi-
mate the core knowledge broadly shared by literate Americans.
Hirsch’s Core Knowledge Foundation has also developed a
detailed, grade-by-grade curriculum for K–8, complete with
lists of books and other teaching materials.

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The Core Knowledge approach need not stop with eighth
grade. High school is a good place for survey courses in the
humanities, social sciences, and sciences taught at a level below
the demands of a college course and accessible to most students
in the upper two-thirds of the distribution of academic ability.
Some students will not want to take these courses, and it can
be counterproductive to require them to do so, but high school
can put considerable flesh on the liberal education skeleton for
students who are still interested.

Liberal Education in College

Saying “too many people are going to college” is not the same
as saying that the average student does not need to know about
history, science, and great works of art, music, and literature.
They do need to know—and to know more than they are cur-
rently learning. So let’s teach it to them, but let’s not wait for
college to do it.
Liberal education in college means taking on the tough
stuff. A high-school graduate who has acquired Hirsch’s core
knowledge will know, for example, that John Stuart Mill was
an important 19th-century English philosopher who was associ-
ated with something called Utilitarianism and wrote a famous
book called On Liberty. But learning philosophy in college,
which is an essential component of a liberal education, means
that the student has to be able to read and understand the
actual text of On Liberty. That brings us to the limits set by
the nature of college-level material. Here is the first sentence
of On Liberty: “The subject of this essay is not the so-called
liberty of the will, so unfortunately opposed to the misnamed
doctrine of philosophical necessity; but civil, or social liberty:

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the nature and limits of the power which can be legitimately
exercised by society over the individual.” I will not burden you
with On Liberty’s last sentence. It is 126 words long. And Mill is
one of the more accessible philosophers, and On Liberty is one
of Mill’s more accessible works. It would be nice if everyone
could acquire a fully formed liberal education, but they cannot.
Specifically: When College Board researchers defined “col-
lege readiness” as the SAT score that is associated with a
65 percent chance of getting at least a 2.7 grade point average
in college during the freshman year, and then applied those
criteria (hardly demanding in an era of soft courses and grade
inflation) to the freshmen in a sample of 41 major colleges and
universities, the threshold “college readiness” score was found
to be 1180 on the combined SAT math and verbal tests. It is
a score that only about 10 percent of American 18-year-olds
would achieve if they all took the SAT, in an age when more
than 30 percent of 18-year-olds go to college.
Should all of those who do have the academic ability to absorb
a college-level liberal education get one? It depends. Suppose
we have before us a young woman who is in the 98th percentile
of academic ability and wants to become a lawyer and eventu-
ally run for political office. To me, it seems essential that she
spend her undergraduate years getting a rigorous liberal educa-
tion. Apart from a liberal education’s value to her, the nation
will benefit. Everything she does as an attorney or as an elected
official should be informed by the kind of wisdom that a rigorous
liberal education can encourage. It is appropriate to push her
into that kind of undergraduate program.
But the only reason we can get away with pushing her is
that the odds are high that she will enjoy it. The odds are high
because she is good at this sort of thing—it’s no problem for her
to read On Liberty or Paradise Lost. It’s no problem for her to

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come up with an interesting perspective on what she’s read and
weave it into a term paper. And because she’s good at it, she is
also likely to enjoy it. It is one of Aristotle’s central themes in
his discussion of human happiness, a theme that John Rawls later
distilled into what he called the Aristotelian Principle: “Other
things equal, human beings enjoy the exercise of the irrealized
capacities (their innate or trained abilities), and this enjoyment
increases the more the capacity is realized, or the greater its
complexity.” And so it comes to pass that those who take the
hardest majors and who enroll in courses that look most like an
old fashioned liberal education are concentrated among the stu-
dents in the top percentiles of academic ability. Getting a liberal
education consists of dealing with complex intellectual material
day after day, and dealing with complex intellectual material is
what students in the top few percentiles are really good at, in the
same way that other people are really good at cooking or making
pottery. For these students, doing it well is fun.
Every percentile down the ability ladder—and this applies
to all abilities, not just academic—the probability that a person
will enjoy the hardest aspects of an activity goes down as well.
Students at the 80th percentile of academic ability are still
smart kids, but the odds that they will respond to a course that
assigns Mill or Milton are considerably lower than the odds
that a student in the top few percentiles will respond. Virtue
has nothing to do with it. Maturity has nothing to do with it.
Appreciation of the value of a liberal education has nothing
to do with it. The probability that a student will enjoy Paradise
Lost goes down as his linguistic ability goes down, but so does
the probability that he works on double acrostic puzzles in his
spare time or regularly plays online Scrabble, and for the identi-
cal reason. The lower down the linguistic ladder he is, the less
fun such activities are.

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And so we return to the question: Should all of those who
have the academic ability to absorb a college-level liberal edu-
cation get one? If our young woman is at the 80th percentile
of linguistic ability, should she be pushed to do so? She has
enough intellectual capacity, if she puts her mind to it and
works exceptionally hard.
The answer is no. If she wants to, fine. But she probably
won’t, and there’s no way to force her. Try to force her (for
example, by setting up a demanding core curriculum), and she
will transfer to another school, because she is in college for
vocational training. She wants to write computer code. Start
a business. Get a job in television. She uses college to take
vocational courses that pertain to her career interests. A large
proportion of people who are theoretically able to absorb a
liberal education have no interest in doing so.
And reasonably so. Seen dispassionately, getting a tradi-
tional liberal education over four years is an odd way to enjoy
spending one’s time. Not many people enjoy reading for hour
after hour, day after day, no matter what the material may be.
To enjoy reading On Liberty and its ilk—and if you’re going
to absorb such material, you must in some sense enjoy the
process—is downright peculiar. To be willing to spend many
more hours writing papers and answers to exam questions about
that material approaches masochism.
We should look at the kind of work that goes into acquiring
a liberal education at the college level in the same way that
we look at the grueling apprenticeship that goes into becom-
ing a master chef: something that understandably attracts only
a few people. Most students at today’s colleges choose not to
take the courses that go into a liberal education because the
capabilities they want to develop lie elsewhere. These students
are not lazy, any more than students who don’t want to spend

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hours learning how to chop carrots into a perfect eighth-inch
dice are lazy. A liberal education just doesn’t make sense for
them.

For Learning How to Make a Living,
the Four-Year Brick-and-Mortar Residential College
Is Increasingly Obsolete

We now go from one extreme to the other, from the ideal
of liberal education to the utilitarian process of acquiring
the knowledge that most students go to college to acquire—
practical and vocational. The question here is not whether
the traditional four-year residential college is fun or valuable
as a place to grow up, but when it makes sense as a place
to learn how to make a living. The answer is: in a sensible
world, hardly ever.
Start with the time it takes—four years. Assuming a semes-
ter system with four courses per semester, four years of class
work means 32 semester-long courses. The occupations for
which “knowing enough” requires 32 courses are exceedingly
rare. For some professions—medicine and law are the obvious
examples—a rationale for four years of course work can be con-
cocted (combining pre-med and pre-law undergraduate courses
with three years of medical school and law school), but for every
other occupation, the body of knowledge taught in classrooms
can be learned more quickly. Even Ph.D.s don’t require four
years of course work. The Ph.D. is supposed to signify expertise,
but that expertise comes from burrowing deep in to a specialty,
not from dozens of courses.
Those are the jobs with the most stringent academic require-
ments. For the student who wants to become a good hotel
manager, software designer, accountant, hospital administrator,

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farmer, high-school teacher, social worker, journalist, optome-
trist, interior designer, or football coach, four years of class work
is ridiculous. Actually becoming good in those occupations
will take longer than four years, but most of the competence
is acquired on the job. The two-year community college and
online courses offer more flexible options for tailoring course
work to the real needs of the job.
A brick-and-mortar campus is increasingly obsolete. The
physical infrastructure of the college used to make sense for
three reasons. First, a good library was essential to higher learn-
ing, and only a college faculty and student body provided the
economies of scale that made good libraries affordable. Second,
scholarship flourishes through colleagueships, and the college
campus made it possible to put scholars in physical proximity
to each other. Third, the best teaching requires interaction
between teachers and students, and physical proximity was
the only way to get it. All three rationales for the brick-and-
mortar campus are fading fast.
The rationale for a physical library is within a few years of
extinction. Even now, the Internet provides access, for a price,
to all the world’s significant technical journals. The books are
about to follow. Google is scanning the entire text of every
book in the libraries of Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Oxford,
the New York Public Library, the Bavarian State Library,
Ghent University Library, Keio Library (Tokyo), the National
Library of Catalonia, University of Lausanne, and an expand-
ing list of others. Collectively, this project will encompass close
to the sum total of human knowledge. It will be completely
searchable. Everything out of copyright will be free. Everything
still under copyright will be accessible for a fee. Libraries will
still be a selling point for colleges, but as a place for students
to study in pleasant surroundings—an amenity in the same

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way that an attractive student union is an amenity. Colleges
and universities will not need to exist because they provide
libraries.
The rationale for colleges based on colleagueships has
eroded. Until a few decades ago, physical proximity was impor-
tant because correspondence and phone calls just weren’t as
good. As email began to spread during the 1980s, physical prox-
imity became less important. As the capacity of the Internet
expanded in the 1990s, other mechanisms made those inter-
actions richer. Now, regular emails from professional groups
inform scholars of the latest publications in their field of inter-
est. Specialized chat groups enable scholars to bounce new ideas
off other people working on the same problems. Drafts are
exchanged effortlessly and comments attached electronically.
Whether physical proximity still has any advantages depends
mostly on the personality of the scholar. Some people like being
around other people during the workday and prefer face-to-face
conversations to emails. For those who don’t, the value of being
on a college campus instead of on a mountaintop in Montana
is nil. Their electronic access to other scholars is incompara-
bly greater than any scholar enjoyed even within the world’s
premier universities before the advent of the Internet. Like
the library, face-to-face colleagueships will be an amenity that
colleges continue to provide. But colleges and universities will
not need to exist because they provide a community of scholars.
The third rationale for the brick-and-mortar college is that
it brings teachers together with students. Working against that
rationale is the explosion in the breadth and realism of what
is known as distance learning. The idea of distance learning
is surprisingly old—Isaac Pitman was teaching his shorthand
system to British students through the postal service in the
1840s, and the University of London began offering degrees for

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correspondence students in 1858—but the technology of dis-
tance learning changed little for the next century. The advent
of inexpensive videocassettes in the 1980s opened up a way for
students to hear and see lectures without being in the class-
room. By the early 1990s, it was possible to buy college-level
courses on audio or videotape, taught by first-rate teaching
professors, on a wide range of topics, for a few hundred dollars.
But without easy interaction between teacher and student,
distance learning remained a poor second-best to a good col-
lege seminar.
Once again, the Internet is revolutionizing everything. As
personal computers acquired the processing power to show
high-definition video and the storage capacity to handle big
video files, the possibilities for distance learning expanded by
s of magnitude. We are now watching the early expres-
sion of those possibilities: podcasts and streaming videos in real
time of professors’ lectures, online discussions among students
scattered around the country, online interaction between stu-
dents and professors, online exams, and tutorials augmented by
computer-aided instruction software.
Even today, the quality of student-teacher interactions in a
virtual classroom competes with the interactions in a brick-and-
mortar classroom. But the technology is still in its early stages
of development and the rate of improvement is breathtaking.
Compare video games such as Myst and SimCity in the 1990s to
their descendants today; the Walkman you used in the 1990s to
the iPod you use today; the cell phone you used in the 1990s
to the BlackBerry or iPhone you use today. Whatever technical
limitations might lead you to say, “Yes, but it’s still not the
same as being there in the classroom,” are probably within a
few years of being outdated.

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College Isn’t All It’s Cracked Up to Be

College looms so large in the thinking of both parents and
students because it is seen as the open sesame to a good job.
Reaping the economic payoff for college that shows up in econo-
metric analyses is a long shot for large numbers of young people.
When high-school graduates think that obtaining a B.A.
will help them get a higher-paying job, they are only narrowly
correct. Economists have established beyond doubt that people
with B.A.s earn more on average than people without them.
But why does the B.A. produce that result? For whom does the
B.A. produce that result? For some jobs, the economic premium
for a degree is produced by the actual education that has gone
into getting the degree. Lawyers, physicians, and engineers can
earn their high incomes only by deploying knowledge and skills
that take years to acquire, and degrees in law, medicine, and
engineering still signify competence in those knowledges and
skills. But for many other jobs, the economic premium for the
B.A. is created by a brutal fact of life about the American job
market: Employers do not even interview applicants who do
not hold a B.A. Even more brutal, the advantage conferred
by the B.A. often has nothing to do with the content of the
education. Employers do not value what the student learned,
just that the student has a degree.
Employers value the B.A. because it is a no-cost (for them)
screening device for academic ability and perseverance. The
more people who go to college, the more sense it makes for
employers to require a B.A. When only a small percentage
of people got college degrees, employers who required a B.A.
would have been shutting themselves off from access to most
of the talent. With more than a third of 23-year-olds now get-
ting a B.A., many employers can reasonably limit their hiring

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pool to college graduates because bright and ambitious high-
school graduates who can go to college usually do go to college.
An employer can believe that exceptions exist but rationally
choose not to expend time and money to identify them. Know-
ing this, large numbers of students are in college to buy their
admission ticket—the B.A.
But while it is true that the average person with a B.A.
makes more than the average person without a B.A., getting
a B.A. is still going to be the wrong economic decision for
many high-school graduates. Wages within occupations form
a distribution. Young people with okay-but-not-great academic
ability who are thinking about whether to go after a B.A. need
to consider the competition they will face after they graduate.
Let me put these calculations in terms of a specific example,
a young man who has just graduated from high school and is
trying to decide whether to become an electrician or go to
college and major in business, hoping to become a white-collar
manager. He is at the 70th percentile in linguistic ability and
logical mathematical ability—someone who shouldn’t go to
college by my standards, but who can, in today’s world, easily
find a college that will give him a degree. He is exactly average
in interpersonal and intrapersonal ability. He is at the 95th
percentile in the small-motor skills and spatial abilities that
are helpful in being a good electrician.
He begins by looking up the average income of electricians
and managers on the Bureau of Labor Statistics website, and
finds that the mean annual income for electricians in 2005 was
$45,630, only about half of the $88,450 mean for management
occupations. It looks as if getting a B.A. will buy him a huge wage
premium. Should he try to get the B.A. on economic grounds?
To make his decision correctly, our young man must start
by throwing out the averages. He has the ability to become

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an excellent electrician and can reasonably expect to be near
the top of the electricians’ income distribution. He does not
have it in him to be an excellent manager, because he is
only average in interpersonal and intrapersonal ability and
only modestly above average in academic ability, all of which
are important for becoming a good manager, while his com-
petitors for those slots will include many who are high in
all of those abilities. Realistically, he should be looking at
the incomes toward the bottom of the distribution of man-
agers. With that in mind, he goes back to the Bureau of
Labor Statistics website and discovers that an electrician at
the 90th percentile of electricians’ incomes made $70,480
in 2005, almost twice the income of a manager at the 10th
percentile of managers’ incomes ($37,800). Even if our young
man successfully completes college and gets a B.A. (which is
far from certain), he is likely to make less money than if he
becomes an electrician.
Then there is job security to consider. A good way to make
sure you always can find work is to be among the best at what
you do. It also helps to have a job that does not require you
to compete with people around the globe. When corporations
downsize, they lay off mediocre managers before they lay off
top electricians. When the economy gets soft, top electricians
can find work when mediocre managers cannot. Low-level
management jobs can often be outsourced to India, whereas
electricians’ jobs cannot.
What I have said of electricians is true throughout the
American job market. The income for the top people in a
wide variety of occupations that do not require a college degree
is higher than the average income for many occupations that
require a B.A. Furthermore, the range and number of such jobs
are expanding rapidly. The need for assembly-line workers in

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35

factories (one of the most boring jobs ever invented) is fall-
ing, but the demand for skilled technicians of every kind—in
healthcare, information technology, transportation networks,
and every other industry that relies on high-tech equipment—
is expanding. The service sector includes many low-skill, low-
paying jobs, but it also includes growing numbers of specialized
jobs that pay well (for example, in healthcare and the enter-
tainment and leisure industries). Construction offers an array
of high-paying jobs for people who are good at what they do.
It’s not just skilled labor in the standard construction trades
that is in high demand. The increase in wealth in American
society has increased the demand for all sorts of craftsman-
ship. Today’s high-end homes and office buildings may entail
the work of specialized skills in stonework, masonry, glazing,
painting, cabinetmaking, machining, landscaping, and a dozen
other crafts. The increase in wealth is also driving an increased
demand for the custom-made and the exquisitely wrought,
meaning demand for artisans in everything from pottery to
jewelry to metalworking. There has never been a time in his-
tory when people with skills not taught in college have been
in so much demand at such high pay as today, nor a time when
the range of such jobs has been so wide. In today’s America,
finding a first-rate lawyer or physician is easy. Finding first-rate
skilled labor is hard.

Intrinsic Rewards

The topic is no longer money but job satisfaction—intrinsic
rewards. We return to our high-school graduate trying to decide
between going to college and becoming an electrician. He knows
that he enjoys working with his hands and likes the idea of not
being stuck in the same place all day, but he also likes the idea

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of being a manager sitting behind a desk in a big office, telling
people what to do and getting the status that goes with it.
However, he should face facts that he is unlikely to know
on his own, but that a guidance counselor could help him face.
His chances of getting the big office and the status are slim.
He is more likely to remain in a cubicle, under the thumb of
the boss in the big office. He is unlikely to have a job in which
he produces something tangible during the course of the day.
If he becomes a top electrician instead, he will have an
expertise that he exercises at a high level. At the end of a
workday, he will often be able to see that his work made a dif-
ference in the lives of people whose problems he has solved. He
will not be confined to a cubicle and, after his apprenticeship,
will be his own supervisor in the field. Top electricians often
become independent contractors who have no boss at …

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