$273,520 can buy a lot: you could purchase homes in at least 12 states, provide 2,735,200 meals to starving children by giving the money to charity or buy a piece of paper with the Cornell logo — also known as a degree.
But what does this fancy piece of paper worth over a quarter of a million dollars actually mean? Does it signify that you lived through 4 Ithaca winters, like you completed the game show Survivor? In that case, you would get the money and certainly not pay for the experience. Does it mean you fell victim to a grand scam, convinced that you needed a degree to enter certain fields, only to find that your job still requires extensive training and has nothing to do with your degree? Hopefully not, because if it is a scam, the whole nation has been duped. Perhaps a degree represents more than just institutional affiliation or job preparation — maybe a degree represents education itself.
What does this education mean? Surely it must be more than just learning equations and other people’s ideas to justify a price tag of more than 3 times the yearly median income. A university education must be more than that and it is. Universities do not claim to teach just any type of education but a liberal arts education, which emphasizes not just knowledge but how to think. Though this mission is noble, a question still arises: What does it mean practically? Even more importantly, what metrics exist to assess these institutions?
One of the most recognized organizations for ranking universities is U.S. World News, which ranked Cornell as the No. 1 school in NY — take that Columbia! — and No. 11 overall. Yet, of the 17 factors used in the national university rankings, only four seem to tangentially evaluate thinking. These metrics evaluate institutional research output but fail to assess whether students, the ones paying exorbitant sums to learn how to think, actually develop that skill. There seem to be no factors that evaluate whether a university is fulfilling the promises it made to students: a liberal arts education.
While U.S. News does include many factors that evaluate how much money students make, is the true measure of a university how much money their graduates make? If so, this seems to imply the idea that degrees are scams. Many degree-required jobs could be done with on-the-job training, as companies still need to teach new hires the practical skills their degrees failed to provide, and many jobs do not even specify a specific degree. All signs of a scam that would make Crypto influencers blush.
Putting aside the fact that the university system may be a pyramid scheme, placing large swaths of the population in debt, 40.2 million in public debt to be exact. It also takes the prime years of a person’s life, years that could be spent with your loved ones or starting a family. But there exist more pernicious problems with the university being mainly a vehicle for financial gain, as can be seen currently.
Now that universities are under attack, they want to rally around their principles — but what principles? For decades, they have operated under a singular, unspoken doctrine: the supremacy of the almighty dollar. For the last half-century, universities have been teaching their students that there is no objective right and wrong — the only things you should be accountable to are your own desires. Desires that like food, sex and comfort, which can all be met with enough money. For all their grand ideas, little did they know that the holes they were digging to undermine the foundations of society would be their graves, too.
The University’s lack of principles is evident. As soon as funding was threatened, it acted like a corporation. It followed whatever orders President Donald Trump gave on things like eradicating DEI, because, like corporations, it was the money that mattered. The lawsuits came about after they learned the money would be taken anyway.
Universities may claim to teach their students how to think but they have failed to teach the guardrails that make thinking admirable. Instead, universities explicitly dismantled those guardrails, insisting that everything is relative. But nature abhors a vacuum, and in the absence of moral structures, a new governing principle emerged: money. It was the only thing that made the students and the university move and therefore became the new governing body. But now, when it would be useful for universities to lean on overarching principles to fend off the chainsaw of the world’s richest man, they have found that those principles no longer exist. Universities are now being put to the test and this is no droppable prelim but a final, one which they have failed to prepare for, and we will soon find out the measure of a university.
Armand Chancellor is a fourth year student in the Brooks School of Public Policy. His fortnightly column The Rostrum focuses on the interaction of politics and culture at Cornell. He can be reached at achancellor@cornellsun.com.
