This trend emerged before public education was a widely-embraced concept. When most schools were local and parochial, the society and its institutions felt responsible to provide assistance to whichever students might not readily be able to afford education.
The distinction between ‘public school’ and ‘private school,’ as we’ve conceptualized it in the early twenty-first century, was not an articulated categorization earlier in our nation’s history. From today’s perspective, many of those early schools were neither strictly public nor strictly private; they were hybrids of the two.
In any case, the urge to expand universal education eventually grew to include post-secondary. The debatable and debated desire appeared, sometimes explicit and sometimes implicit, to see every student attend college.
As noble as the intentions behind this desire may have been, it led to the dilution of the university’s purpose, as scholar Tom Nichols writes:
Part of the problem is that there are too many students, a fair number of whom simply don’t belong in college. The new culture of education in the United States is that everyone should, and must, go to college. This cultural change is important to the death of expertise, because as programs proliferate to meet demand, schools become diploma mills whose actual degrees are indicative less of education than of training, two distinctly different concepts that are increasingly conflated in the public mind. In the worst cases, degrees affirm neither education nor training, but attendance. At the barest minimum, they certify only the timely payment of tuition.
As increasing percentages of each year’s high school graduates matriculated, the impact on the university became noticeable. The desire to have ‘everyone’ attend college has changed college.
When comparing the university of the past with the university of the present, there are two errors which threaten: either to see the past as superior in all ways to the present, or to see the present as in all ways superior to the past. We can achieve a sober analysis by steering between the two.
The features of the university which have largely disappeared are catalogued by scholar Robert Bork:
The difference between education today or education in the last sixty or seventy years and what it was before that is to be measured in light years. The future novelist Willa Cather’s studies at the University of Nebraska in 1891 included three years of Greek, two years of Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Shakespeare and the Elizabethans, Robert Browning and the nineteenth century authors (Tennyson, Emerson, Hawthorne, and Ruskin), French literary classics, one year of German, history, philosophy, rhetoric, journalism, chemistry, and mathematics.
It’s worth noting that chemistry and mathematics were included in the education of a student who would make her career in literature. This reflects the university’s goal of imparting both thinking skills and the mastery of bodies of knowledge.
It was not unusual for a student working toward a doctorate in British Literature to be required to do a semester of calculus, or a student studying theology to complete courses in physics. Such was the university’s understanding of itself and its mission.
