Should You Be a College Professor?

On November 7, Arnold Kling, formerly a co-blogger at this site, wrote:

I can pinpoint the exact moment when I started to lose sleep over higher education in America. This was in the Spring of 2012, at my daughter’s graduation ceremony at Brandeis University. The main graduation speaker was in the midst of a not-memorable talk when she said “and I read this morning in the New York Times that America will be more than 50 percent non-white by 2050.”

To me, this would have been a straightforward observation, neither good news nor bad news. But the students greeted it as if they had just heard that their favorite sports team had won a championship or their favorite political party had won an election. They whooped and hollered and cheered for several minutes. It was by far the biggest applause line of her entire speech.

I get it. This is troublesome. If you read the whole of Arnold’s post–and I recommend that you do–you probably won’t find yourself less troubled.

Arnold concludes:

I take the view that the colleges and universities are beyond salvation.

But what if you are someone who, say, loves economics and loves the idea of teaching economics to young minds? If you said that colleges are beyond salvation, you would probably conclude that you should choose to be an economist in a think tank or a consulting economist or something else.

Even if the vast majority of colleges and universities are beyond salvation, that doesn’t mean all colleges are. And it doesn’t mean that even those beyond salvation can’t have nice niches.

One of my benefits from being on Facebook is that a lot of young graduate economics students and assistant professors of economics have heard of me and try to friend me. Unless I see some big negative–and I rarely do–I accept. As a result, I follow what they’re doing in their careers: what they teach, how they teach, and how students respond to their teaching. I read a lot of positive stories. I think of Art Carden at Samford University (who is now, actually, a full professor–how time flies), Jonathan Murphy at Nicholls State University, and Michael Makovi at Northwood University, to name three off the top of my head. I could easily name five or six others.

So even if you are pessimistic, as Arnold is and I am, about the future of universities, it’s important to know how badly you want to teach people. If it’s an incredible itch, as it was with me, remember that all you need to do is find one good job and do it well. There are niches out there.