This Week's "The Calling"

Steven Horwitz

My Freeman Online column this week is about college shopping for high school seniors who are already interested in classical liberal ideas.

Colleges, and especially college professors, take a beating from freedom lovers these days.  And it isn’t without some desert. Organizations like the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education have documented all kinds of abuses of students’ rights by institutions and individuals in higher education.  It is also clearly true that college faculty, at least at the major universities, are significantly to the political left of the American public and certainly no friends of the really free markets that The Freeman Online readers are likely to support.  So what to do if you have a college-bound junior or senior in your house as the season of college visits marches on?   Are there ways to try to make sure he or she has the best experience possible?

Comments

[Peter Boettke]

Steve,

You make a lot of excellent points.

My general advice to parents and students is to go to a small liberal arts college for undergraduate school and then go to the best school you can get into that will pay your full way for graduate school. The problem with most undergraduates is that they have no clue how competitive it is to get into a top research school for your PhD, and since they tend to overestimate how smart they are and underestimate how smart everyone else is, they make proclamations when they are in undergraduate school about how they will go to Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, Chicago or MIT. I hope they do.

But when they don't, and instead they go to Illinois or UNC or Maryland, they then like to insist that they are really going to one of those first 5 schools, but just slightly less. This just isn't true. But that issue we can debate another day.

The real point of your post is whether students should go to liberty oriented schools or not. I think that is a function of the maturity of the student. Lets use an analogy with woman students. I haven't read the latest, but at one point Carol Gilligan did studies and pointed out that even feminist teachers in HS science classes called on male students more than females. Females outperform males in science and mathematics up to middle school, when the social pressures kick in. But females who do not go to mixed sex schools, but all girl schools never run into this problem. Females that go to all girl colleges, such as Bryn Mawr College, do extremely well in the sciences, etc. They then go to graduate school at top ranked programs and compete very well.

Some students are more mature at 18, others take until 22, and still others until their late to mid 20s to get going and compete in non-nurturing environments.

The other issue is that for advanced study, there is absolutely nothing like having classmates who share your intellectual passions --- whether they be in technical issues in economics (theory or empirical) or philosophical (either methodological or social/political). So you should pick a school where you are not a lone wolf I would argue. A question was raised in the comments over at FEE about influence --- I think the author should read Gary Becker's speech at the AEA meetings the year he won the Nobel. He talks about the important influence of Milton Friedman and in particular George Stigler. He says at one point that he has no doubt that he would have become a good economist had he not had George Stigler to mentor and provide the right environment for him at Columbia (his first job). But he doubts he would have become "Gary Becker". Stigler provided that environment for him.

Influence is about talent and opportunity. And opportunity is about the environment one finds themselves in (or which they create for themselves).

BTW, just to make a slightly jerk point -- 60 books (the number listed by the commentator at FEE) is not an exhaustive list of books in the fields of philosophy, politics and economics, let alone history. I think the commentator -- obviously a student of great interest in these ideas -- should poll the economists he admires and ask them how many books they own in their own personal libraries, or how many books they have read in those fields (say prior to graduate school). I think he might be shocked at the replies, and begin to grasp the basic idea that captures the mind when you decide you want to do research and teaching for a living --- the more I know, the more I know I don't know! -- it sends you on a quest to constantly learn from others in their spoken and written words.