Looking back at some old posts, I really started to think about the conflict of market forces and education. I was reading an old post that cited Tony Kushner’s proposal to eliminate the BFA in favor of a liberal arts education because the BFA gives students too narrow an education. In the same post I cited a professor at Julliard who wrote, “The longer students stay in a conservatory the narrower their definition of life in the arts becomes.”
My thought was to write a post warning that if we are going to claim that an education in the arts bestows a wide ranging creative world view being sought by business today, we had better make sure that was what students were getting.
But then I got to the end of the entry where I wrote,
“Students are looking for the minimum training they will need to get a job… If you tell a student that if they want to be an actor, they need to spend four years pondering philosophy, history, literature and all the rest and then they can go on to get a masters in acting and then go get a job, the student is going to take their tuition money to your competitors, independent acting classes, or use it to move to NYC to try their luck.”
Which reminded me that this is the exact problem the acting program at my college is facing. There is some resistance to hiring a full time replacement for a professor who recently retired because while the classes are always pretty well enrolled, few of them go on to earn a degree. Some of this is certainly a result of students who are having a hard time with classes, but it is also because a lot of them are taking what they know and are going out and working.
We recently sat down to make a “Grads Made Good” list. It wasn’t difficult to think of people who were out there actively performing or doing production work. Some of them were even making a decent living at it. The problem was, few of them actually graduated. These people don’t count even though they are regularly engaged with the school either as part of the college’s productions or as members of groups who rent the facilities.
While this problem can be chalked up to counting and valuing the wrong things, the bigger question is what we should be expecting of students. Should we accept and accommodate the fact that they will only remain enrolled long enough to pick up the skills they see as marketable to them? Do we insist that this short term solution will prove insufficient to support their careers over the long term? (If that is indeed the case.)