The Education Conflation

TRANSACTION. Supplier. Consumer. Product. Price.

It all seems so simple. Someone makes something, someone buys it from them, everyone goes home happy. Sure, market terminology can't cover all human interaction, and shouldn't be asked to--but where there's a money purchase involved, there's bound to be a product. And usually everybody involved knows what the heck it is.

I spent $6,011 last year on a product I can't describe. I don't mean that in a surly, "I'm not learning anything" kind of way (I am) and I don't even mean it in a pontificating, "What is the value to society" kind of way (who cares)--but in a purely descriptive, non-pejorative sense, I have no idea what I'm supposed to be getting for that money.

Let me explain.

There are really two traditional schools of thought as to what a university should offer to society: the "knowledge transmission" version and the "knowledge factory". In other words, a university will supply pedagogy or research, and often it dabbles in both. So far as the undergraduate is concerned--with the exception of the occasional lab assistant and so on--the research is moot, simply because we don't carry it out, profs usually don't tell us about it, and we don't benefit from the growth in human knowledge very much more than the average person outside the university does. What does that leave for us? Pedagogy.

But we all sort of know that that's not the only thing we're getting out here. So what does the university sell to an undergraduate, really? There are two answers, one cynical and one idealistic, perhaps, and both are correct: it sells teaching, and it sells a diploma. We can call these two products education and accreditation, the separate tasks of cause people to know things and to know how to do things on the one hand and collect information about people's skills and provide that information to employers on the other. I think both are important--you couldn't very well have a complex, globalized, knowledge-based, 21st-century-Web-2.0-blah-de-blah-blah-bloo economy if people didn't keep learning after high school--and as much as we may hate the notion, the diploma/GPA/honour roll/whatever acts as a valuable lubricant in the economy by helping employers find the best of the best without having to spent that much time or money trying to evaluate them. It lowers, in other words, the transaction cost of finding the best man (woman) for the job. What's more, it's worthwhile for a bright young student to be able to pay to get "certified" in order to differentiate himself from his dumber/less educated/less talented peers. So both these products are socially valuable, and it may be that to get both at once is a bargain.

But I begin to think they entail fundamentally divergent production processes--in other words, the task of educating and the task of evaluating have different and contradictory requirements--and that they should perhaps be carried out separately. It seems to me they have been conflated mostly in order to solve a problem of motivation, and their conflation obscures that problem and its obvious, though perhaps unpalatable, solution.