Training vs. a Liberal Education

RWL 336

Greetings from the University of New Hampshire! First, I want to say a huge THANK YOU to all of you who donated to our annual fundraiser for my department. I was touched by how many of you gave. Not only did we exceed our number of donations, but we raised more than $12,000 which we will be able to use to promote student learning. You are all fellow rocket launchers! 

My sister and her family are up visiting for Easter weekend. Happy Easter, belated happy Passover, happy on-going Ramadan. Happy whateverotherspringreligiousobservance I might have missed! Pic above is of my nephew on the jetty at Odiorne State Park. 

Last week my juniors were giving me a hard time about something during our finance class, and one of them announced that they “all read my newsletter”. And I was like, no you don’t. And they were like, yes we do. Okay, kids. Game on. 

One of the things I worry about as a professor in a business program in a health professions college in a liberal arts university is that my students have too much of a training mindset and not enough of an education mindset. I worry about this generally in universities, and not just state universities, but even so-called elite universities. I’ve written before about the making of elites. As a society, we treat college education as a means to an end, rather than an end in itself. It is no wonder that the majority of Americans no longer see a college education as worth the cost. According to a Wall Street Journal poll, 56% of Americans surveyed believe an undergraduate degree is “Not worth the cost because people often graduate without specific job skills and with a large amount of debt to pay off”. That is because a (liberal arts) college education is not meant to give you a specific job skill. It is meant to prepare you for life as a free (libertas = freedom) citizen in a society of free citizens. What people appear to want from college is not a(n) (liberal arts) education, but training. And that is where the disconnect is. Too many people come to college looking for training, and colleges are transforming themselves too much to give the people what they want. 

When I was on faculty at the Army-Baylor Graduate Programs in Health and Business Administration before I retired from the Army, I remember many of my colleagues discussing the difference between training and education. They were engaged in the politics of our parent organization, what was then called the US Army Medical Department Center & School (AMEDDC&S), now known as the US Army Medical Center of Excellence (MEDCOE). MEDCOE has a remarkable range of training programs under one umbrella. When I was there, it had almost every medical specialty in the military. All enlisted medical training was done there, with just a few exceptions. Enlisted medical training included everything from combat medics to laboratory technicians, to respiratory therapists. The teachers at the MEDCOE covered a dizzying array of skill sets. Basically every skill set you could need to run a medical system, including public health functions (the Army has its own entomology technicians and food inspectors). The combat medic, MOS 68W, is a 12-week training program. In the 68W course, you learn the basic skills necessary to evaluate and care for casualties on the battlefield. But around the corner from you might be soldiers learning to be a 68A, medical equipment repairer. This is a 41-week course that teaches a wide range of skills including diagnostics of electronics. The list goes on from there. (Here’s a partial list of medical MOSs if you are interested.)

The vast majority of the training at the MEDCOE was enlisted training, focused on teaching practical skills that new soldiers coming through these programs would put to work as soon as they graduated. But alongside these skills-focused programs was the MEDCOE’s Graduate School, which included masters and doctoral education programs. Mine was the MHA and MBA programs, but there was also a masters in Physician Assistant studies, Social Work, and Nutrition, and doctoral programs in Nursing Anaesthesia and Physical Therapy. These programs lasted two or three years, depending on their level. Graduate education is different from skills-based training. Skills-based training is meant to give a person job-specific skills that they can employ immediately. The military is incredibly adept at stripping away all of the non-essential philosophizing and posing to boil down skills training to the least amount of information and drill a person needs in order to perform a set of tasks, such as being a combat medic. Combat medics do not need a deep knowledge of metabolic pathways and the Krebs cycle to do their job. They need to know how to stop wounds from bleeding and keep airways open. The Army is only going to teach a combat medic what they need to know in their training, and nothing more. The medic will then learn on the job how to do her/his role, and through experience will grow in depth of knowledge. The goal of military skill training is efficiency - speed and volume. The MEDCOE cycles tens of thousands of young recruits through training each year to fill the three services’ insatiable needs for skilled medical technicians. 

Graduate education is a slower process because it has a different end goal. I will speak to graduate business education because I know it best. Graduate business education (business or health administration) does have a technical skill base, but it is not just learning how to do a particular type of analysis or produce a set of financial statements. It is focused on a deeper understanding of how people and organizations operate in the world. A good MBA program forces a student to engage with a broad range of loosely interrelated disciplines: accounting, finance, economics, psychology, sociology, law, statistics, and more. It is by its nature an interdisciplinary program of study meant to prepare an individual to help lead people and organizations through the complexity and messiness of real life. In my opinion, proper business education captures the original intent of the liberal arts, and extends it. As physics was an extension of mathematics to the ancients, business should be seen as an extension of the humanities as a whole. Studying business, particularly as presented in MBAs, and even some undergraduate programs (like mine - HMP), creates well-rounded individuals who are better prepared to be free citizens in a free society. 

As with combat medics (68W), the Army also trains its people for business roles. The Army trains financial technicians (36B) in eight weeks. A financial technician is not the same thing as a person with an MBA. While they may come out of their training able to do and understand certain things, their training lacks the breadth and depth of a business education. For the Army’s purposes, this narrowness is fine. These soldiers will grow through experience and more education (perhaps even eventually earning an MBA), but upon graduation they are prepared to take on an important but narrow role in supporting the Army’s mission. 

The conflict we often ran into when I worked at the MEDCOE was that because the vast majority of the mission of the MEDCOE was training and not education, the bureaucracy that ran the MEDCOE often looked at graduate education as inefficient. When we were evaluated for manpower needs, the technicians in the bureaucracy couldn’t understand why the professors in each program couldn’t teach five or six classes per day. After all, that was what the technical trainers did. The final manpower model that I saw (and fought against) as I was preparing to retire suggested that we should be able to run a joint MBA and MHA program with three faculty. It didn’t ultimately take hold, but the absurdity of it showed the lack of understanding of education from the training side. Education is about going below the application level and deep into the underlying understanding of why the application works. Whereas the combat medic does not need to understand the Krebs cycle, a doctor of physical therapy absolutely does. An MBA does not need to be a lawyer, but someone who is teaching business law needs to be a lawyer, preferably with some practical experience. With a degree that integrates a dozen different disciplines, you can’t have three people who have the depth of knowledge necessary to teach all of the classes properly at the graduate level. You could, I suppose, but it’s highly unlikely that any one university is going to be able to attract one of those people, let alone three. 

I have two concerns for my students, and for education in general at liberal arts universities. The first is that students come to higher education looking to be trained for a job, not to be prepared for life as a free citizen. This is why business schools have exploded over the last 50 years. But it is also why professional degrees like nursing and occupational therapy continue to do well, while the humanities wane. Professional and pre-professional education promises a gateway to a good job and a good salary. But I get frustrated with my students when they only want to know what is going to be on the test. I give them access to all of my old exams so that they can study them. However, I can tell when I start to go off on a tangent explaining how some concept has a bigger picture impact on the world, that their attention wanders. Not on the test? Don’t care. But that is the education component of what they are doing. You can memorize how to calculate the NPV of a project, but if you don’t understand why you are doing an NPV, you are just a technician. You are treating your education like training.  

The second is related, and applies not just to those seeking professional education, but all college/university education. A degree from a liberal arts university should prepare individuals for life as a free individual in a free society, as I said. That means it should be a broad education that incorporates the humanities, the sciences, and business. We need all of those lenses to fully participate in our polity. Business education helps us understand the day-to-day that all of us are engaged in. If you cannot understand business, you cannot understand the social world, no matter how many novels and poems you read. The sciences help us understand the reality that surrounds us - the physical world that is indifferent to the social world. And the humanities - the humanities are what makes life worth living. When they are not corrupted by political ideology, the humanities help us see the stunning beauty of the world. They are what makes us human. But the humanities without business and science are like eating dessert without eating your vegetables. (I say this as someone who, as an undergraduate, focused only on the Humanities, minimized his exposure to science, and despised business.) Each approach is valuable and should be respected. A liberal arts education allows us to be in the world in a more meaningful and deeper way. But no one should be able to graduate from a liberal arts university without having eaten their vegetables and their dessert.

I worry my students don’t embrace their education as the transformative experience it should be. The jobs will always be there. Training is easy to come by, especially in a world dominated by the internet. And for some people, training is the way to go when they are young. But if you are going to spend the money and time, these four undergraduate years should be a mind-exploding romp where they gather all of the different lenses from all the different disciplines so that they can go out into the world and see its manifold beauty. So, young scholars, if you are actually reading this, take advantage of your remaining time and be sure that you take a poetry class before you graduate. And stop treating your education like training and read the damn text book when I assign it. While training is about doing in the world, an education is about being in the world. 

And for the rest of you dear readers, if you did not embrace all three spheres when you were pursuing your education, it is never too late to start. If you went the training route instead of the education route when you were young, an education is not limited to a university’s walls, especially in a world dominated by the internet. We need to both do and be in the world.

(note: C.S. Lewis never said this, but it sounds good.)