George Will continues his crusade against progressivism in academia in The Washington Post by pointing out how the college degree is worth less, because 38% of recent college graduates hold jobs that “do not require a college degree.” That statement does not reflect whether college graduates are preferred by employers or whether there are attributes of college graduates that make them more desirable as employees.

You have to acquire a college degree to teach in a public school, but you may not need one to work as an administrative assistant in a company with gross revenues of $1 million/ year.  However, businesses may prefer college graduates because of their communication skills, including the ability to understand a novel audience. College graduates understand the significance of their audience in ways that those who have only communicated with their family and friends may not.

Another skill that comes from a general college education is the detection and correction of bias or prejudice in written or spoken speech.  This is more than asserting “political correctness,” as right wing commentators call it, but understanding how language reveals an individual’s opinions of other races, religions, genders, or social classes.  Some people rightly take offense to being called “girl” or “boy,” because it shows disrespect. College graduates understand that language matters, and not only for the thin-skinned who take offense at everything.

Mr. Will objects to how history is taught in universities: “a prolonged indictment–ax-grinding about the past’s failure to be as progressive as today’s professors.”   This complaint suggests that our present condition is not influenced, for example, by the original slavery of, and economic prejudice toward, the Negro race.  Past indictments may illuminate present conditions. I’m sure Will would agree with the much quoted warning of Santayana, Those who forget their history are condemned to repeat it. Otherwise why do we study history at all?

Mr. Will objects to a study of literature “that is mostly about abstruse literary theories–‘deconstruction,’ etc.?”  Actually deconstructing language is a very modern skill necessary for studying social media. Deconstruction is a way of understanding how something was created, usually things like art, books, poems and other writing. Many readers of Facebook and Twitter posts take language at face value, and that is a problem, because they should understand how writers make use of words like “woke” or “globalism” or “diversity” rather than how the dictionary defines them.

Will’s problem is his higher education is private school-centered, where the most expensive, exclusive, politically-correct, and arcane literacy originates. In fact, students attending publicly-funded universities outnumber those attending privately funded universities 3 to 1. [https://educationdata.org/college-enrollment statistics#:~:text=73.0%25%20of%20college%20students%20at, graduate%20students%20attend%20public%20institutions]. Students at publicly-funded universities are more likely to get a workplace-oriented education, because employment is more often the goal rather than graduate school admission.  The academic setting imagined by Will is a private university where the majority of graduates go to graduate school. Yet private school enrollees represent only 25% of the university population.

But whether you go to graduate school or right into the workforce, as a c0llege graduate you have received training in that elusive notion “critical literacy.” College educators characterize it in various ways, but here is one:

When students examine the writer’s message for bias, they are practicing critical literacy.^[3] This skill of actively engaging with the text can be used to help students become more perceptive and socially aware people who do not receive the messages around them from media, books, and images without first taking apart the text and relating its messages back to their own personal life experiences.^[2][3]

It is not a course in literacy, but an attitude toward literacy that is lacking in many of those who missed college. It is both a skeptical and constructive stance toward reading and viewing that makes college graduates less subject to indoctrination.  Although critical literacy is taught in secondary school, not everyone gets it, because students are often co-dependent on their teachers.  Independent thinking is not always advocated in high school and even when it is, students are too grade-driven to take the risk of disagreeing with the teacher. That sophistication often develops in college, and critical literacy is the best reason for going to college, as a culmination of education.

George Will’s concept of a college education is too much driven by economic goals and political correctness. He needs to get out more and meet some graduates of our public post-secondary institutions, instead of following the headlines.  The reputable state universities (and some private colleges) are focused on the thinking that matters in the workplace, in the community, and on social media. The rest of the academic uproar over political correctness is only a distraction for the 75% who attend public universities.