Ajit Balakrishnan: The Ivory Tower

In this season in India when newspapers, bus panels and hoardings are crammed with advertisements from colleges and universities luring prospective students, I found myself in New York with a spare afternoon and decided to see a just-released documentary film, Ivory Tower, which has been creating a buzz ever since it was shown at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival.

Is going to college worth it, asks the director, Andrew Rossi. Out of 100 people who enter college in the United States, the film says, less than 40 graduate — that is, an astonishing 60 per cent drop out. What is worse is that by the time they drop out they have already accumulated a student loan debt of $30,000 or so. The student is then left with the prospect of repaying the loan with no college degree to arm him for his job hunt. Even the 40 per cent who manage to squeeze through with a degree, says the film, are faced with the prospect of either being unemployed or getting a job that barely pays enough to cover living expenses, let alone repay the student loan. The total amount outstanding in the US on such student debt is, hold your breath, $1 trillion! All of which, says the film, leads to the question: is college worth it, particularly for an undergraduate degree in the liberal arts?

If the worth of a college education is being questioned in the US in 2014, a country whose college education system is the envy of the world, it is worth listening to carefully.

As I sat there, absorbing all this, a thought struck me: is there another aspect to this debate — one that reflects the fact that what jobs pay what salaries is subject to fashion cycles not much different from those in clothes or hairstyles?

For instance, once upon a time, physics was the hot subject to graduate in; the golden age of physics ran from the 1920s through to the explosion of the atomic bomb in 1945. The sheer death and destruction that this event wrought made physics repugnant. Attempts by physicists to revive the fashion for nuclear energy as a power fizzled out after the accident at a nuclear power plant on the Three Mile Island in 1979 and the Jane Fonda film, The China Syndrome, based on it. All contracts for nuclear power plants were cancelled for the next decade. Bright and ambitious young men and women fled physics.

Some disciplines can flower in one era, decline in another and rise again — statistics is the poster child of this. Statisticians found ready jobs at excellent salaries during the 1950s and 1960s, when the whole world was enamoured of centralised economic planning. But economic planning fell out of fashion for the next few decades and statisticians took refuge where they could. Statistics is now red-hot and fashionable again this year with the rise of Big Data and analytics on the internet.

In recent times, the most fashionable and the best-paying degrees to have are the ones from business schools. What has driven this fashion is the post-1985 boom in the financial services industries: investment banks, insurance companies and management consulting companies can’t seem to get enough business analysts with a formal business school degree.

The term “Ivory Tower” originates from the Christian religious tradition, where it is used as a symbol for noble purity; the Song of Solomon refers to a woman’s neck as “like an ivory tower”. In contemporary usage it has a pejorative connotation — it speaks of a group of people, particularly in academia, who are disconnected from the practical world.

Golden ages in specialisations come with generous government funding to establish new departments or expand existing ones, more research funds, higher salaries and heroic portrayals in the media — all of which together draw to the specialisation the most ambitious and talented young men and women of that period. But when the golden age wanes, resources are withdrawn from the specialty, salaries stagnate or fall, and the brightest and the best migrate away. Is it those people who still stay back and practise their craft that we accuse of being in an Ivory Tower?

Andrew Rossi’s film, Ivory Tower, ends with an account of the Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCS) education experiments under way at Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford and leaves us with the tantalising thought that these experiments may ultimately make higher education more affordable and, thus, escape from its Ivory Tower.

Ajit Balakrishnan is the author of The Wave Rider, a Chronicle of the Information Age.
ajitb@rediffmail.com