Why Education Is Important

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Higher education is a public good beset by contentious debates.

Students wish to reduce work and so do professors.

The tactics used to reduce work lie on a spectrum.

You are in the hands of the Philistines, and, dammit, I sent you there. I am sorry. –Ed Turner in a letter to his son Ted, after learning that Ted had chosen to study the classics (Muson, undated)

The disputed value of higher education

The national culture of the United States of America has long comprised ambivalent feelings about higher education. Higher education, and the sophistication that comes with it, is a system of ideas and practices inherited from British, French, and German traditions. The provision of higher education, no one denies this, is one mechanism to breed and reproduce élites, that is, individuals who might, for instance, add an accent aigu to French loan words. The current system of the mass university was preceded by a system of tutors educating young aristocrats. This is a cultural history interesting to contemplate.

The American ambivalence toward higher education comprises a tension between admiration for scholarly work, theoretical knowledge, scientific advances, and rhetorical skill on the one hand and can-do, practical, enterprising creativity and chutzpe on the other. Many admire the self-made businessperson more than the public intellectual, even if the latter is also self-made and not a child of privilege. The learned intelligentsia bemoan the deep well of anti-intellectualism in the wider population, while the practically-minded scorn intellectual hubris. The epigraph, found in a father’s letter to his liberally educated son, is a poignant expression of this attitude.

Surveys tracking trust in higher education and its representatives paint a sobering picture (e.g., Gallup, 2025; 2026). The data not so much suggest ambivalence but polarization. The numbers are discouraging to those who believe that higher education is a public good, not merely a path for individuals to gather credit and accumulate prestige. Interestingly, one’s own educational achievement is not a good predictor of one’s attitude toward higher education. Other, more........

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