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Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life by William Deresiewicz. New York: Free Press, 2014, 256pp.
College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be by Andrew Delbanco. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012, 248 pp.
One of the side effects of the financial implosion of 2008 has been an explosion of books bemoaning the demise of the American model of liberal arts education. Given that a college degree is the sine qua non for membership in the national "elite," it should not surprise us that the economic shock has provoked a reexamination of the institution that seems to provide the most reliable intellectual and social capital for succeeding in tumultuous times. Previous surges of concern about the mission and structure of undergraduate education have tracked with similar periods of disruption and fluidity: rapid industrialization and immigration after the Civil War, the Great Depression of the 1930s, and the vast expansion of the middle class after the Second World War segueing into the schisms of the 1960s. Analysis of the critical gateway to the leadership class- who attends, who teaches, who pays-is a way of charting the winners and losers in the scrum for wealth and influence.
Large economic and demographic shifts not only disrupt the distribution of wealth and power, they also force a recalibration of social values pertaining to things like mobility versus stability, material acquisition versus frugality, even grace and humility versus striving and self-promotion. Most writers on higher education believe that college is the proper moment to push youth towards a consideration of such big questions of value, meaning, and purpose; they further view the curriculum as providing the tools for meaningful contemplation of a life well lived. High enrollments in economics classes, but low in literature, lots of computer science but no anthropology: in uncertain times, books on higher education scrutinize these trends like tea leaves in the hopes of understanding the kind of society we are becoming.
Our twenty-first century institutions of higher education must contend with spiraling costs, increasing class size, competition from massive open online courses (MOOCs), and the desertion of humanities majors in favor of "pragmatic" subjects such as business, statistics, or economics. Those are simply the intra muros problems;...