Rick Santorum jumped the shark and sank his Presidential hopes recently by condemning college education.
(The original of this picture is at FiscalTimes.) What he said, specifically, is dead-wrong. The idea that you're “a snob” if you support higher education is beyond stupid. He deserved what he got for it – Romney as the GOP nominee.
But beyond that, there is some truth hidden away inside his statement. Sometimes the squirrel does indeed find a nut.
We've become credential-mad in this country. What the President said, and quite rightly, is that trade schools and similar training programs, as well as college, are essential to the maintenance of a highly skilled workforce.
But should cooks really have to attend a college in order to cook? Should people running radiology machines need a degree in order to point it at people?
I don't think so. I think many programs for what are basically trades are misguided and wasteful. After due consideration, I'd add journalism to that list.
Start the argument this way. Mario Batali started his career by washing dishes in good restaurants. Anthony Bourdain started it by going to the Culinary Institute of America, the nation's top trade school for chefs. Who would you rather have cooking your meal? Even Bourdain would admit, it's Batali.
Bourdain has admitted that his CIA degree made him lazy. He was able to get jobs as a “chef” for years just on the basis of his degree, and he wasted those years on drugs and alcohol. It wasn't until he became a writer – self-taught by the way – that his life really started.
A “New Yorker” profile of Batali a few years ago has the author working at peeling vegetables in one of his restaurants, and Batali going off on the crew that's tossing the peelings. “Our job is to sell food for more than we pay for it,” he said, and proceeded to prove his point by turning what they were throwing away into gourmet chow.
Real cooking involves taking the worst possible ingredients and wringing the very best flavor possible from them. It's not about getting steaks trimmed from the truck and throwing them on the grill, then tossing off a parsley sprig or putting the result on a square or slate plate. Real cooking starts with the dishwashers, it starts with the people peeling the vegetables, doing the prep work, trial by fire. This is why so many of the people cooking our best meals are Mexican immigrants, most here illegally. It's not just that they'll take any job, at any rate of pay. It's that they'll work like stink to make good.
“College” graduates often act like the degree means the world owes them something.
And there are tons of thieves out there, running for-profit academies that are really little more than glorified training schools, who take advantage of this. Our degree madness has caused us to think that doing nearly anything requires a degree, and these shysters are ready to create them. They sell them on the trains and buses around Atlanta.
College education needs some serious reform. We need to automate more of it. We need to separate the education of people from the real work of universities – research that advances the frontiers of knowledge. Only the latter is of real economic benefit. The former is just glorified high school.
I got mad recently at TCU because they have confused the “show” of high school with the essentials of what a great university is and should be. But my criticism is more general than that.
Great research institutions like Emory University here in Atlanta and my alma-mater, Rice University in Houston, are the engines of future economic growth. TCU isn't. And “schools” that advertise on buses that they'll turn you into a radiologist or a medical clerk for $40,000 in debt you'll never repay are bottom-feeders.
Next time the issue of college education comes up in the political discourse, I hope we have a real discussion about it, something like the one I've just begun. Not the santorum of Rick Santorum.
