Draft, too long, still has notes in, more interviews coming will shape it more. Would love feedback!

Imagine being a graduate of a 4-year private liberal arts college. Last weekend you stepped across a stage heavily draped in white cloth, shook the president’s hand, and received your laminated and leather-bound diploma in front of family and friends.

Flash forward a few weeks. The horns playing your Alma matter still echo in your ears and the inspiring words of the $2,000/hour commencement speaker (“Go forth with this knowledge bestowed upon you and change the world…”) still mock you. Unemployed and uninsured, you sit down at your mom’s kitchen table and stare at the envelope in front of you. Your first loan repayment is due in 4 weeks.

The bright-eyes of college graduates are looking unusually dim and as the media consistently reports, for exceptionally good reason. Students don’t need someone reporting the really bad and even worse, as the Wall Street Journal did with its recent “The Curse of the Class of 2009.” Graduates are well aware that their money, their time, their education is being called, usually with little finesse, useless.

With the current economic hoo-hah, college, especially of the liberal arts variety, is quickly being discovered to have little to do with getting a job and making a living. Current liberal arts college students, the recently unemployed, and especially recent graduates and are rightly questioning the organization of our education system that led or is leading them down a road to NO JOB.

Evidence of this is in Kalamazoo, a city of about 250,000 in the great depressed state of Michigan. Kalamazoo has been in the news in the last few years for its luck in formally housing an exceptionally rich person interested in education. This anonymous person gave not only students but the entire city an enormous boost, and the Kalamazoo Promise has been heralded as remarkable and innovative by many.

Outwardly, it is not completely apparent that the city is feeling the strain; it’s not the picture of depression as is Detroit , two hours northeast . The roads are often in disrepair but a new skate park, tennis court, and basketball hoop sits next to the public pool. A new multi-million dollar condo complex and award-winning public library sits next to the abandoned Pfizer headquarter buildings. (the company still hasn’t taken down banners proclaiming “the science of being a good neighbor” and "we love where we live.” )

One of the most obviously surviving locals, appearance-wise, is Kalamazoo College, a 4-year private liberal arts college gaining notoriety among elite institutions for its first-year experience, study abroad, and service-learning curriculum. It is one of three main institutions of higher learning: a community college, a private liberal arts college, and a state university.

On the high hill that Kalamazoo College sits on, spacious emerald green lawns kiss red brick streets, flowers bloom, birds sing, young and optimistic intellectuals move on sidewalks sans a single weed in the cracks.

The panic comes from within. The college’s endowment has dropped over 30% and stress over the potential of lost income due to dropping enrollment numbers had the college’s administration putting admissions workers on attack.

Downtown, Kalamazoo Valley Community College is feeling good. They have had record numbers apply and enroll this year. INTERVIEW COMING
ENROLLMENT NUMBERS

What is going on here?

In an economy where getting and having a job is becoming more difficult than ever, critics of the humanities usefulness in preparing students for practical, useful work are getting our attention. It is easy to imagine that college education, both undergraduate and graduate is becoming, as Colombia professor BLANK wrote in the New York Times, is becoming “the Detroit of higher learning,” in the eyes of potential students, their parents, and even those already involved in academia.

Perhaps KVCC, which has majors like BLANK, offers an education that offers certainty that appeals to many in this uncertain time. A narrowly focused, carefully applied education seems to provide a solid anchor and security when things go sour. Perhaps it’s just that it’s cheaper. Maybe the unemployed are going back to school. Most likely it is all of the above.

Should those colleges on the green grassy hills be worried? Should education adapt to market forces? Is it right not to prepare students for obtaining an actual paying job?

Regardless, the liberal arts army is on the defense.

It’s bad though, quite a jungle out there. When graduates, professors, and even current students are questioning their choice of education not because of the lack of quality but because of a lack of practicality, a rumble’s a-coming. An argument for survival will beat an argument for lofty thought everytime. And right now it appears that it is about survival. If college education can’t translate into a better shot at a higher living, SOMETHING HAS TO CHANGE>

It’s a struggle of class and prestige. It’s almost impossible to defend liberal arts philosophy in this economy and this point IN EXISTANCE without sounding like ELITE/ catchy phrase.

It sounds as if those highly educated are freaked out that the educational hierarchy order is being disrupted.

Silently, they are asking questions that have everything to do with class hierarchies: Am I really less valuable/going to have less to show in this economy then people who can repair AC’s or cut hair? As a society we tend to associate prestige with wealth, while simultaneously skewing our definitions of worth away from manual labor.

Joellen Silberman, Vice President of Enrollment at the private liberal arts based Kalamazoo College, is nervous about anyone recommending that liberal arts colleges start “behaving” like community colleges and narrowing the focus of study.

“If you think first about the fact that the definition of liberal arts is, from way back when, what are the skills that a free person, at a time when there were free and non free people, need to live in the world? And then there was a set of manual skills that individuals who were not free needed to learn…so that is where the term first came from, what are those skills?”

This doesn’t help defend liberal arts as entirely mind-opening and open-minded.
From the nation's founding through at least the nineteenth century the liberal arts were reserved for the few who had the resources and leisure to pursue them. A liberal arts education groomed upper-class men to assume what were seen as their natural positions in society—almost all others were excluded by dint of sex, race, and class.

The system is failing. Our upper classes, our upper echelon of students, are being called “cursed.” The stack of rejection letters is growing as they lose their health insurance and write their first loan payment check. Even if their parents are writing the check, there is a lot of head-rubbing going on. (“Didn’t I put my kid on the right path? 1400 SAT score! Math and English honors all the way though high school?! They volunteered at the homeless shelter for God’s sake!”)

Economists now say they have told us for years that it was a fact that the bubble economy was unsustainable and the current young generation would be the first in history to not surpass the standard of living of their parents.

This told-you-so attitude and the very mention of an “economist” is enough by now to makes any college-aged person want to beat their head against a wall. The job market has reached mythical status for recent college graduates. It is a fairy tale, a imaginary place the old folks reminisce about, like drive-ins or the old south.