The Oxford curriculum that American universities need

Of all the hallowed American institutions that have experienced a loss in public esteem over the last few years, perhaps none has suffered a bigger drop than higher education. Whether the explanation is sky-high tuition, grade inflation, moral confusion or, lately, the milk and cookies for students anxious about the election, the most egregious examples always seem to be from the most elite institutions.

There is a way to restore trust, but it will require buy-in from both universities and employers: Focus more on what people study rather than where they study. And one of the most valuable courses of study is a curriculum developed a century ago, commonly known as Philosophy, Politics and Economics, or PPE.

A college degree is supposed to signal qualities employers value, such as intelligence, judgment and an ability to work with others. A degree from an elite university is supposed to signal these qualities in abundance. It was never an accurate signal — lots of people who don’t go to college possess these qualities, and lots of people who do go don’t — but in a noisy labor market, employers need some sort of screening mechanism, and for a century or more, higher education provided it.

Over the past few decades, however, elite schools have undermined the value of their signal. At first, going to such a school just meant you were from an elite family; it said little about your ability. Then elite universities decided that they should curate the nations’ elite and began selecting on the basis of ability. Employers collaborated by paying a premium for an elite degree.

As the value of an elite degree increased, so did demand for it — and that, in turn, increased the power of admissions committees. They saw themselves as engaged in a kind of social engineering project, filtering out the best and the brightest for the nation. The problem was that, because they began to filter not just for ability but for all sorts of other qualities, admissions committees undermined both the principle of meritocracy and the definition of elite.

Admissions criteria have always been subjective and idiosyncratic, of course, and should stay that way. The solution to the plight of U.S. universities is for employers (and Americans in general) to put less of an emphasis on elite schools and judge students on their actual achievements. To some extent, this is already happening. But the diffusion of talent provides an opportunity for colleges and employers to build a new system for identifying intellect and ability.

The PPE program is a course of study — in American terms, a major — that has been offered at Oxford since the 1920s. Several U.K. prime ministers, many world leaders and at least one Bloomberg Opinion colleague have PPE degrees. Over the last few decades it has caught on at other universities, including dozens in the U.S.; Yale and Harvard have their own versions, as do upstarts such as the University of Florida’s Hamilton Center.

A PPE degree can be the new signal, no matter which school it comes from, that a graduate has all the skills an employer might need. If taught well, a PPE degree indicates that a person knows how to think critically, is well-read and understands how power and economics work in the modern world.

This is exactly the kind of perspective that will be valuable in an increasingly AI-dominated world. No one knows what the jobs of the future will be. (Or won’t be: Computer programming once seemed like a safe bet, for example.) If the future is anything like the past, then the ability to rethink, retrain and re-invent will become only more critical.

PPE is not for everyone, nor is it ideal for every kind of job. Many people may well be better off studying accounting or engineering. A STEM degree also offers a powerful signal, as does a vocational degree. But for students more interested in the liberal arts, a PPE degree can be what an Ivy League degree used to be: a signal that gives prospective employers confidence.

It is not perfect, but it is more meritocratic and egalitarian than the current system. Instead of leaving power in the hands of admissions offices at a few elite schools, it gives applicants and students greater agency.

And if U.S. universities appreciate the value of a PPE degree, then they should also strongly consider another well-established British educational practice: double-blind marking. In the U.K. — where, by the way, I got my undergraduate degree(1) — exams are graded twice, once by the professor teaching the class (or their teaching assistant), and again by a professor at another university. Adopting this practice among PPE programs in the U.S. would ensure consistent standards across universities. Adopting it even more broadly would give employers more confidence about grades and curricula in U.S. higher education overall.

Despite everything, the best universities in the world are still in America. They engage in more groundbreaking research, have the most talented professors and attract the best students. But they’ve lost sight of their original mission, which is to train America’s best minds to thrive in a changing world. To regain their sense of purpose — and some of the public trust they’ve lost — they need only look to an ancient university abroad.

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(1) I got one-third of a PPE degree, majoring in economics at the University of Edinburgh.

(COMMENT, BELOW)

Allison Schrager, a Bloomberg columnist, is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal.

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