William Deresiewicz has written a review essay on the crisis in higher education. At its heart, however, the essay isn’t primarily concerned with whether education dollars are being effectively deployed to achieve public ends. Rather, he seems to be primarily concerned with the death of teaching positions. He makes a number of reasonable points, e.g., that the “structure of academic work has come about in large measure to protect the senior professoriate,” which seems very true. Yet he is convinced that contingent labor, online instruction, and a more open and competitive marketplace are necessarily a bad thing, and he makes a number of assertions that don’t pass muster:

There is a large, public debate right now about primary and secondary education. There is a smaller, less public debate about higher education. What I fail to understand is why they aren’t the same debate. We all know that students in elementary and high school learn best in small classrooms with the individualized attention of motivated teachers. It is the same in college. Education, it is said, is lighting a fire, not filling a bucket. The word comes from the Latin for “educe,” lead forth. Learning isn’t about downloading a certain quantity of information into your brain, as the proponents of online instruction seem to think. It is about the kind of interchange and incitement—the leading forth of new ideas and powers—that can happen only in a seminar. (“Seminar” being a fancy name for what every class already is from K–12.) It is labor-intensive; it is face-to-face; it is one-at-a-time.

We actually don’t know that small classrooms are best. There is a great deal research suggesting that the quality of instruction and the number of disruptive students matters more than class size per se. And we have no reason to believe that motivated teachers who aren’t proficient will do much good. As for “lighting a fire,” the question is about bang for the buck: what is the most cost-effective way to help young people gain the cognitive and non-cognitive skills they need to climb the economic ladder? This isn’t the most profound question (“What is learning?”), but it is the question most salient to taxpayers. Seminars might in some cases be the best way to go. Must they be seminars led by tenure-track professors with doctorates, or might low-cost contingent labor suffice? Might online instruction be an adequate substitute at lower cost, if it allows us to scale up the ability of the most effective teachers to reach a wider audience?

Deresiewicz advances another proposition I found frustrating, relating to the hyperproduction of PhDs:

Well, but so what? A bunch of spoiled kids are having trouble finding jobs—so is everybody else. Here’s so what. First of all, they’re not spoiled. They’re doing exactly what we always complain our brightest students don’t do: eschewing the easy bucks of Wall Street, consulting or corporate law to pursue their ideals and be of service to society. Academia may once have been a cushy gig, but now we’re talking about highly talented young people who are willing to spend their 20s living on subsistence wages when they could be getting rich (and their friends are getting rich), simply because they believe in knowledge, ideas, inquiry; in teaching, in following their passion. To leave more than half of them holding the bag at the end of it all, over 30 and having to scrounge for a new career, is a human tragedy.

Does the kind of knowledge work Deresiewicz describes really offer “easy bucks”? Is Deresiewicz familiar with the world he’s describing, and does he believe that the modal PhD student in the United States could easily find a position in the upper echelons of an elite financial services or consulting firm? Is there no leisure-labor tradeoff involved — i.e., might some people take enough pleasure in academic work that subsistence wages are a fair trade? There are, of course, PhD students who could have chosen more lucrative work. I know many of them. But these PhD students tend to have a pretty clear sense of why they chose to pursue an academic career. And it’s not just because “they believe in knowledge, ideas, inquiry; in teaching, in following their passion.” It should go without saying that many people follow their passion by pursuing demanding, competitive work in knowledge-intensive services, etc. Many choose to pursue an academic career for lifestyle reasons or because the burden of teaching is a small price to pay to pursue research opportunities or some combination of both. Moreover, many accept that the academic job market is tough, and that the tournament-like competition for desirable jobs means that it helps to have a Plan B.

All in all, a disappointing essay on an important subject.