We Have The World's Finest Universities, Why Then Is America Such A Mess?

Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.

~ HENRY ADAMS

In his masterful The Education of Henry Adams, the grandson of President John Quincy Adams and great-grandson of President and Founding Father John Adams concludes that college educations in general and his in particular were next to worthless.

As biographies go, Henry Adams is as introspective as they come, less a record of Adams' considerable accomplishments as a journalist, historian, academic and novelist than a brutally frank admission that his traditional education (at Harvard, no less) failed to help him come to terms with the rapid changes that America was undergoing during the Second Industrial Revolution, the period from roughly 1814 to the outbreak of World War I.

Adams calls his schooling "time wasted" and concludes that self-education through life experiences, friendships and reading were ultimately more important.

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Adams' harsh criticism of higher education is as applicable in 2010 as it was in his time, if not more so, and it again came to mind as the 263-year-old university that I attended and many years later went to work for welcomes another freshman class this week.

This, I suppose, is an exemplary case of biting the hand that fees me. My university is a damned fine one and has come far since I was a member of the Class of 1969 and went out into a world in tumult because of war -- Cold and Vietnam -- as well as sweeping and barely comprehensible societal and technological changes.

The students with whom I interact at my university are top rate and earnest about their studies in a dizzying array of academic majors ranging from art to chemical engineering to marine science to my favorite, material culture.

But I cannot help but conclude that the members of the Class of 2014, like my own, also are ill prepared for the world that they will encounter beyond these ivied walls, nor are they any more prepared to make that world less tumultuous -- kinder, gentler, and more equitable and prosperous -- than I and my classmates were.

This long-running crisis in higher education is simply not on our societal radar, although another crisis is: That the cost of a college education is increasingly out of the reach of a disappearing middle class at a time when the global environment has become so competitive. If fact, the College Board says that the U.S., once the world leader in the percentage of people with college degrees, has fallen to 12th.

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An obvious rejoinder to my harsh conclusion is that it is not the job of universities to prepare students to make the world a better place. It is their job to educate them, whether in the Impressionists, physical sciences, oceanography or the archaeology of past and present.

I agree, but only to a point. A classical education still has an important place in liberal arts curricula, as do the laboratory and theory in science curricula. Universities are nothing if not tradition bound, and that too has its place. But isn't it ironic that the U.S. justifiably boasts the best college and university system in the world but the country itself is such a mess?

Can there really be no connection?