Lower needs and higher ed

Acquiring a degree is commonly confused with getting an education.

We have created a situation in the U.S. in which employers often require college degrees because they don’t trust the public secondary education system to produce workplace-ready employees.  At the same time, a college degree is widely recognized to be a marker of social class, and this encourages people to use college for class mobility.

These two features of a college degree—that it is both a minimum job requirement and a ticket to the middle class—have undermined the quality of higher education by forcing it to accommodate students who have no interest in learning beyond what they need to earn a living.

I can’t fault them for wanting to earn a living.

Consider Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. (Wikipedia provides a reasonable overview.)  This hierarchy is represented by a pyramid whose base is Physiological Needs such as air, water, food, and sleep.  When those needs are met, an individual can move up to the next level and think about Safety Needs like living in a safe place and having job security. An individual who is safe and secure can begin to care about Social Needs such as friends, relationships, a sense of community.

Maslow posited that only when those needs are met does the individual care about Esteem Needs like status, recognition, achievement. At the top of the pyramid, Maslow placed Self-Actualization.  He argued that you can fulfill your highest potential only if your lower needs are met.

Not everyone agrees that this is a complete analysis of human needs or even that human needs can be placed in a hierarchy.  But it can be a useful tool nonetheless. I had some students in college humanities classes who were dealing with hunger, illness, or homelessness while going to college in the hopes of getting a decent job with decent health benefits.  It didn’t surprise me that they had a hard time caring about a task such as analyzing imagery in Faulkner’s “Dry September.”